Of course this was none other than Big Bob Jeffries, who had kept aloof from all his customary associates ever since arriving, and had never once taken his eyes off the street along which he knew Jack must come. He seized hold of the other eagerly. Jack needed no second look to convince him that poor Bob had passed a wretched night. His eyes were red, and there was an expression of mute misery on his usually merry face, that doubtless had induced more than one fellow to ask if he felt ill. No doubt Bob had a stereotyped answer to this sympathetic question, which was to the effect that he was "not feeling himself." "Oh! I thought you'd never come along, Jack!" he exclaimed, in a voice that quivered with eagerness and anxiety; "though of course I understood that you must be waiting for Mr. Dickerson to be free to talk with you. Tell me what you did, please, Jack?" "I'm sorry to say I couldn't learn much at the post-office," the other hastened to say, determined not to keep Bob in suspense any longer than could be helped. "But you did ask about the foreign letters, didn't you, Jack?" "Yes, I worked that part of it pretty well, and managed to get into a talk about the great difficulty which most foreigners here in this country found in communicating with their old folks abroad. Mr. Dickerson said there was a time when every day he had quite a batch of letters going out to different countries; because you know there are many foreign workers in our mills here, and they were constantly sending money home to their poor folks. But as the war went on, he said, they began to write less and less, because they feared the letters were being held up by the British, or the vessels being sunk with all the mail aboard by the German subs. So he said it was a rare event nowadays for him to cancel the stamps on a foreign letter, though he had one yesterday, he remembered." "Yesterday, Jack? Oh! what do you mean?" "But it was to Italy the letter was going," Jack hastened to explain. "Mr. Dickerson said he took particular pains to notice it, because the stamp was put on the wrong end of the envelope. He remembered that Luigi, the bootblack at the railroad station, always insisted on doing this. He also read the address, which was to Luigi's parents in Genoa." Big Bob's face darkened again. "Too bad!" he muttered, disconsolately; "why couldn't that letter he chanced to notice have been my lost one? Hard luck, I must say, all around." "Then you didn't meet with anything this morning, I take it, Bob?" continued Jack, hardly knowing what to say in order to raise the drooping spirits of his friend. Big Bob shook his head in the negative.