_The Storm swoops down, and he blows—and blows,—_ _While I drum on his swollen cheek,_ _And croak in his angered eye that glows_ _With the lurid lightning’s streak;_ _While the rushes drown in the watery frown_ _That his bursting passions leak._ _And I can see through the sky—the sky—_ _As clear as a piece of glass;_ _And I can tell you the how and why_ _Of the things that come to pass—_ _And whether the dead are there instead,_ _Or under the graveyard grass._ _To your Sovereign lord all hail—all hail!—_ _To your Prince on his throne so grim!_ _Let the moon swing low, and the high stars trail_ _Their heads in the dust to him;_ _And the wide world sing: Long live the King,_ _And grace to his royal whim!_ “TWIGGS AND TUDENS” If my old school-chum and room-mate John Skinner is alive to-day—and no doubt he _is_ alive, and quite so, being, when last heard from, the very alert and effective Train Dispatcher at Butler, Indiana,—he will not have forgotten a certain night in early June (the 8th) of 1870, in “Old Number ’Leven” of the Dunbar House, Greenfield, when he and I sat the long night through, getting ready a famous issue of our old school-paper, “The Criterion.” And he will remember, too, the queer old man who occupied, but that one night, the room just opposite our own, Number 13. For reasons wholly aside from any superstitious dread connected with the numerals, 13 was not a desirable room; its locality was alien to all accommodations, and its comforts, like its furnishings, were extremely meagre. In fact, it was the room usually assigned to the tramp-printer, who, in those days, was an institution; or again, it was the local habitation of the oft-recurring transient customer who was too incapacitated to select a room himself when he retired—or rather, when he was personally retired by “the hostler,” as the gentlemanly night-clerk of that era was habitually designated. As both Skinner and myself—between fitful terms of school—had respectively served as “printer’s devil” in the two rival newspaper offices of the town, it was natural for us to find a ready interest in anything pertaining to the newspaper business; and so it was, perhaps, that we had been selected, by our own approval and that of our fellow-students of The Graded Schools, to fill the rather exalted office of editing “The Criterion.” Certain it is that the rather abrupt rise from the lowly duties of the “roller” to the editorial management of a paper of our own (even if issued in handwriting) we accepted as a natural right; and, vested in our new power of office, we were largely “shaping the whisper of the throne” about our way. And upon this particular evening it was, as John and I had fairly squared ourselves for the work of the night, that we heard the clatter and shuffle of feet on the side-stairs, and, an instant later, the hostler establishing some poor unfortunate in 13, just across the hall.