"But that night I wasn't very sleepy, and the porter had got the place so piping hot with the big stoves, one at each end of the car, to keep the good, old-fashioned Christmas cold out, that I thought I should be more comfortable with a smoke before I went to bed; and, anyhow, I could get away from the heat better in the smoking-room. I hated to be leaving home on Christmas Eve, for I never had done that before, and I hated to be leaving my wife alone with the children and the two girls in our little house in Cambridge. Before I started in on the old horse-car for Boston, I had helped her to tuck the young ones in and to fill the stockings hung along the wall over the register--the nearest we could come to a fireplace--and I thought those stockings looked very weird, five of them, dangling lumpily down, and I kept seeing them, and her sitting up sewing in front of them, and afraid to go to bed on account of burglars. I suppose she was shyer of burglars than any woman ever was that had never seen a sign of them. She was always calling me up, to go down-stairs and put them out, and I used to wander all over the house, from attic to cellar, in my nighty, with a lamp in one hand and a poker in the other, so that no burglar could have missed me if he had wanted an easy mark. I always kept a lamp and a poker handy." The stranger heaved a sigh as of fond reminiscence, and looked round for the sympathy which in our company of bachelors he failed of; even the sympathetic Rulledge failed of the necessary experience to move him in compassionate response. "Well," the stranger went on, a little damped perhaps by his failure, but supported apparently by the interest of the fact in hand, "I had the smoking-room to myself for a while, and then a fellow put his head in that I thought I knew after I had thought I didn't know him. He dawned on me more and more, and I had to acknowledge to myself, by and by, that it was a man named Melford, whom I used to room with in Holworthy at Harvard; that is, we had an apartment of two bedrooms and a study; and I suppose there were never two fellows knew less of each other than we did at the end of our four years together. I can't say what Melford knew of me, but the most I knew of Melford was his particular brand of nightmare." Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter. He took his cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an "Ah!" Rulledge went further and interrogatively repeated the word "Nightmare?"