not astonishing, supposing her to be a
girl of imagination. Though I supposed curiosity was the chief motive
of her interest, it could but affect me as it would not have done had
she been less beautiful.

Dr. Leete, as well as the ladies, seemed greatly interested in my
account of the circumstances under which I had gone to sleep in the
underground chamber. All had suggestions to offer to account for my
having been forgotten there, and the theory which we finally agreed on
offers at least a plausible explanation, although whether it be in its
details the true one, nobody, of course, will ever know. The layer of
ashes found above the chamber indicated that the house had been burned
down. Let it be supposed that the conflagration had taken place the
night I fell asleep. It only remains to assume that Sawyer lost his
life in the fire or by some accident connected with it, and the rest
follows naturally enough. No one but he and Dr. Pillsbury either knew
of the existence of the chamber or that I was in it, and Dr. Pillsbury,
who had gone that night to New Orleans, had probably never heard of the
fire at all. The conclusion of my friends, and of the public, must have
been that I had perished in the flames. An excavation of the ruins,
unless thorough, would not have disclosed the recess in the foundation
walls connecting with my chamber. To be sure, if the site had been
again built upon, at least immediately, such an excavation would have
been necessary, but the troublous times and the undesirable character
of the locality might well have prevented rebuilding. The size of the
trees in the garden now occupying the site indicated, Dr. Leete said,
that for more than half a century at least it had been open ground.

[1] In accounting for this state of mind it must be remembered that,
except for the topic of our conversations, there was in my surroundings
next to nothing to suggest what had befallen me. Within a block of my
home in the old Boston I could have found social circles vastly more
foreign to me. The speech of the Bostonians of the twentieth century
differs even less from that of their cultured ancestors of the
nineteenth than did that of the latter from the language of Washington
and Franklin, while the differences between the style of dress and
furniture of the two epochs are not more marked than I have known
fashion to make in the time of one generation.

Chapter 5

When, in the course of the evening the la