"Dalton's got the fever again, bad," he comments to the little woman upon his own domain, whom he calls "Polly," or "Mrs. Sandford," as occasion dictates. She has been watching the preceding incident with inscrutable eyes. "Yes?" Polly acknowledges, with the air of harkening to a familiar harangue while casting ahead, in anticipation of what was to come next. "Curious about Dalton; peculiar twist to his mental machinery somewhere." Sandford blows a cloud of smoke and eyes it meditatively. "Leaving business that way, chopping it all to pieces in fact; and just for a fish! Curious!" "Harry's got something back there that'll probably interest you," he calls out to me as I chug by in my last year's motor; "better stop and see." "Yes," I acknowledge simply; and though Polly's eyes and mine meet we never smile, or twitch an eyelid, or turn a hair; for Sandford is observing--and this is only June. So much for Dr. Jekyll Sandford, the Sandford of fifty-one weeks in the year. Then, as inevitably as time rolls by, comes that final week; period of mania, of abandon; and in the mere sorcerous passage of a pair of whirring wings, Dr. Jekyll, the exemplary, is no more. In his place, wearing his shoes, audaciously signing his name even to checks, is that other being, Hyde: one absolutely the reverse of the reputable Jekyll; repudiating with scorn that gentleman's engagements; with brazen effrontery denying him utterly, and all the sane conventionality for which the name has become a synonyme. Worst of all, rank blasphemy, he not only refuses to set foot in that modern sanitary office of enamel and tiling, at the corner of Thirteenth and Main, below which, by day and by night, the "L" trains go thundering, but deliberately holds it up to ridicule and derision and insult. CHAPTER II--THE PRESAGE OF THE WINGS And I, the observer--worse, the accessory--know, in advance, when the metamorphosis will transpire. When, on my desk-pad calendar the month recorded is October, and the day begins with a twenty, there comes the first premonition of winter; not the reality, but a premonition; when, at noon the sun is burning hot, and, in the morning, frost glistens on the pavements; when the leaves are falling steadily in the parks, and not a bird save the ubiquitous sparrow is seen, I begin to suspect. But when at last, of an afternoon, the wind switches with a great flurry from south to dead north, and on the flag-pole atop of the government building there goes up this signal: [Transcriber's Note: signal flag image here]; and when later, just before retiring, I surreptitiously slip out of doors, and, listening breathlessly, hear after a moment despite the clatter of the wind, high up in the darkness overhead that muffled _honk!_ _honk!_ _honk!_ of the Canada-goose winging on its southern journey in advance of the coming storm--then I _know_.