nd of cant," said Benjamin, sternly. "I am
going into the library."

"What are you going to read?"

"I am going to read--Puss in Boots, and Jack and the Bean-stalk, and
anything else I can find that doesn't march with the age we live in."

With that parting shot at the new ideas, my old friend left me for a
time.

Having dispatched my note, I found myself beginning to revert, with
a certain feeling of anxiety, to the subject of Miserrimus Dexter's
health. How had he passed through the interval of my absence from
England? Could anybody, within my reach, tell me news of him? To inquire
of Benjamin would only be to provoke a new outbreak. While I was still
considering, the housekeeper entered the room on some domestic errand.
I asked, at a venture, if she had heard anything more, while I had been
away of the extraordinary person who had so seriously alarmed her on a
former occasion.

The housekeeper shook her head, and looked as if she thought it in bad
taste to mention the subject at all.

"About a week after you had gone away ma'am," she said, with extreme
severity of manner, and with excessive carefulness in her choice of
words, "the Person you mention had the impudence to send a letter to
you. The messenger was informed, by my master's orders, that you had
gone abroad, and he and his letter were both sent about their business
together. Not long afterward, ma'am, I happened, while drinking tea with
Mrs. Macallan's housekeeper, to hear of the Person again. He himself
called in his chaise, at Mrs. Macallan's, to inquire about you there.
How he can contrive to sit, without legs to balance him, is beyond my
understanding--but that is neither here nor there. Legs or no legs, the
housekeeper saw him, and she says, as I say, she will never forget him
to her dying day. She told him (as soon as she recovered herself) of Mr.
Eustace's illness, and of you and Mrs. Macallan being in foreign parts
nursing him. He went away, so the housekeeper told me, with tears in his
eyes, and oaths and curses on his lips--a sight shocking to see. That's
all I know about the Person, ma'am, and I hope to be excused if
I venture to say that the subject is (for good reasons) extremely
disagreeable to me."

She made a formal courtesy, and quitted the room.

Left by myself, I felt more anxious and more uncertain than ever when I
thought of the experiment that was to be tried on the next day. Making
due allowance for exaggeration, the descript