"My dear Roddy,--The hunt is up. I took some time getting a move on it: but to-night Farrell has the real spirit of the chase upon him, and is in his room at this moment, packing surreptitiously with intent to give me the slip. "You will have gathered from a glance at the above address that Farrell is with me; or rather, that I am with Farrell. I give him full scope with his tastes. It is part of the Plan. But to-night--knowing that he had gone to his room to pack surreptitiously, and that his berth in the _Wagon-lit_ is booked for to-morrow night at the Gare d'Orleans--I gave myself what the housemaids call an evening-out. This is Paris, Roddy, in the time of the chestnut bloom. A full moon has been performing above the chestnuts. Beneath their boughs the municipality had hung a thousand reflections of it in the form of Chinese lanterns shaped and coloured like great oranges. The band at the _Ambassadeurs_--a band of artists and, as I should judge, conducted by somebody who couldn't forget that he had once been a gentleman--saw the moon rise and at once were stricken with Midsummer madness. It had been recklessly, defiantly, blatantly exploiting its collective shame on two-steps and coon song,--shouting its _de profundis_, each degenerate soul bucking up its lost fellow with a challenge to go one better and mock at its hell--when of a sudden, as I say, the moon rose, and the conductor caught up his stick, and the whole damned crew floated off on _The Magic Flute_. . . . It wasn't on the programme. It just happened, and no one paid them the smallest attention. . . . But there it was: ten minutes of ecstasy. "They ceased upon the night: and the next news was that after five minutes' interval they were chained again and conscientiously throwing vim into _Boum-Poump_ with the standardised five thumps of jollity on the kettledrum. "So the champak odours failed--What is champak? Have the Germans synthetised it yet?--and I awoke from dreams of thee. I walked back by way of the Quais--by the river:" Dissolute man! Lave in it, drink of it Then, if you can. "But I have played for safety and am writing this with the aid of a whisky-and-Perrier to hope that it finds you well as it leaves me at present.