“There’s not much to tell. I marched in and stated my case. He’s between seven and eight feet high, I believe, and he stood up all the time--felt as though I were talking to scaffold poles. He listened in the calmest way till I’d finished, and then took up a letter from his desk and handed it to me to read and to see whether I thought it would do. I asked what it meant, and he said he’d just written it at the request of Mrs. Ralston, who had left him a quarter of an hour ago, and that if I would take it to the proper quarter--as he expressed it--he should be much obliged. He’s a brick--a tower of strength--a tower of bricks--a perfect Babel of a man. You’ll see, when the evening papers come out--” “Did you take it down town?” “Of course. And I got hold of one of the big editors. I sent in word that I had a letter from Doctor Routh which must be published in the front page this evening unless the paper wanted Mr. Robert Lauderdale to bring an action against them for libel to-morrow morning. You should have seen things move. What a power cousin Robert is! I suppose I took his name in vain--but I don’t care. Old Routh is not to be sneezed at, either. You’ll see the letter. There’s some good old English in it. Oh, it’s just prickly with epithets--‘unwarrantable liberty,’ ‘impertinent scurrility’--I don’t know what the old doctor had for breakfast. It’s not like him to come out like that, not a bit. He’s a cautious old bird, as a rule, and not given to slinging English all over the ten-acre lot, like that. You see, he takes the ground that you’re his patient, that you had some sort of confustication of the back of your head, and that to say that you were screwed when you were ill was a libel, that the terms in which the editor had allowed the thing to appear proved that it was malicious, and that as the editor was supposed to exercise some control, and to use his own will in the matter of what he published and circulated, it was wilfully published, since the city paid for places in which people who had no control over their wills were kept for the public safety, and that therefore the paragraph in question was a wilfully malicious libel evidently published with the intention of doing harm--and much more of the same kind of thing--all of which the editor would have put into the waste paper basket if it had not been signed, Martin Routh, M.D., with the old gentleman’s address. Moreover, the editor asked me why, in sending in a message, I had made use of threatening language purporting to come from Mr. Robert Lauderdale. But as you had told me the whole story, I knew what to say. I just told him that you had left the house of your uncle, Mr. Robert Lauderdale, after spending some time with him, when you met with the accident in the street which led to all your subsequent adventures. That seemed to settle him. He said the whole thing had been a mistake, and that he should be very sorry to have given Mr. Lauderdale any annoyance,