sleep."

"It is so good of you to confess that," his friend answered, laughing;
"although the length of time you kept me waiting and ringing might have
led me to suspect it. No, you are not late and it is not dinner-time.
I've come around to have another little chat with you before dinner,
that's all."

"Take this chair, old man," said Cosmo, as he threw another
hickory-stick on the fire. Then he lighted the gas and sat down by the
side of his friend.

"This chair is comfortable, for a fact," Stuyvesant declared,
stretching himself out luxuriously. "No wonder you went to sleep. What
did you dream of?--strange places you had seen in your travels or the
homely scenes of your native land."

Waynflete looked at his friend for a moment without answering the
question. He was startled as he recalled the extraordinary series of
adventures which had fallen to his lot since he had fixed his gaze on
the crystal ball. It seemed to him as though he had been whirled
through space and through time.

"I suppose every man is always the hero of his own dreams," he began,
doubtfully.

"Of course," his friend returned; "in sleep our natural and healthy
egotism is absolutely unrestrained. It doesn't make any matter where
the scene is laid or whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy, the
dreamer has always the centre of the stage, with the calcium light
turned full on him."

"That's just it," Waynflete went on; "this dream of mine makes me feel
as if I were an actor, and as if I had been playing many parts, one
after the other, in the swiftest succession. They are not familiar to
me, and yet I confess to a vague feeling of unoriginality. It is as
though I were a plagiarist of adventure--if that be a possible
supposition. I have just gone through these startling situations
myself, and yet I'm sure that they have all of them happened
before--although, perhaps, not to any one man. Indeed, no one man could
have had all these adventures of mine, because I see now that I have
been whisked through the centuries and across the hemispheres with a
suddenness possible only in dreams. Yet all my experiences seem somehow
second-hand, and not really my own."

"Picked up here and there--like your bric-a-brac?" suggested
Stuyvesant. "But what are these alluring adventures of yours that
stretched through the ages and across the continents?"

Then, knowing how fond his friend was of solving mysteries and how
proud he was of his skill in this art