There was but one thing to do: I must wire our Secretary of State, apprising him of the exact situation in Abbevilliers with particular reference to my own plight, and strongly urging on him the advisability of instantly ordering a fleet of American battleships to the coast of France, there to make a demonstration in force. With me, to think has ever been to act. I begged the landlord for pen and ink and cable blanks and, sitting down at a convenient table, I began. However, I cannot ask that Mr. Bryan be called to account for his failure to respond to this particular recommendation from me, inasmuch as the cablegram was never despatched; in fact, it was never completed, owing to a succession of circumstances I shall next describe. Because of an agitation that I ascribe to the intense earnestness now dominating me I encountered some slight difficulty in framing the message in intelligible language and a legible chirography. I had torn up the first half-completed draft and was engaged on the opening paragraph of the second when the clamour of a fresh altercation fell on my ear, causing me to glance up from my task. The porter, it appeared, had laid hands on Zeno the Great's black box, possibly with a view to shifting it from where it lay on the floor directly in the doorway; whereupon its owner became seized with a veritable berserk rage. Uttering loud cries and denunciations he fell on the porter and wrested the box from his grasp; following which the porter fled into the street, being immediately lost from view in the distance. Turning to me, Zeno the Great was in the midst of saying that, though bereft of his scrapbook of clippings and his set of photographs, he hoped to be eternally consigned to perdition--his meaning if not his exact phraseology--if anybody got away with the even more precious belongings yet remaining to him, when nearing sounds of hurrying feet and many shrill voices from without caused him to break off. In apprehension, more or less successfully concealed from casual scrutiny, I rose to my feet. At the same instant the porter precipitately re-entered, closely followed by six gendarmes, eight foot soldiers, a personage in a high hat, whom I afterward ascertained to be the mayor, and a mixed assemblage of citizens of both sexes and all ages, amounting in the aggregate to a multitude of not inconsiderable proportions. Agitating his arms with inconceivable activity and crying out words of unknown purport at the top of his lungs, the porter pointed accusingly at Zeno, at the locked box, at me!