He hummed a cheerful little tune as he undressed himself and got into bed. There he slept like a dead man until the long hand of the clock had circled the clock face a good many times. It was getting along toward eleven o'clock in the forenoon and the summer sunlight, slipping through chinks in the curtains at the windows of his bedroom, had patterned the bed covers with yellow stencillings when Mr. Foxman awoke. For a spell he yawned and stretched. Then, in his slippers and his dressing gown, he went through the hall to the dining room to tell the maid out in the kitchen she might serve him his breakfast. According to the rule of the household copies of all the morning papers were lying at his place on the dining table. There was quite a sizable heap of them. _The Clarion_, folded across, made the topmost layer of the pile. Governed more by a habit of long standing than by any active desire to see what it contained, he picked it up and opened it out. * * * * * Out in the kitchen the maid heard some one in the dining room give a queer strangled cry. She came running. Her master stood in the middle of the floor with an opened newspaper in his two shaking hands. He didn't seem to see her, didn't seem to hear the astonished bleat which promptly she uttered; but above the rim of the printed sheet she saw his face. She saw it in the first instant of entering, and for sundry succeeding seconds saw nothing else. It was a face as white as so much chalk, and set in it a pair of eyes that popped from their sockets and glared like two shiny, white-ringed, agate marbles, and at its lower end a jaw that lolled down until it threatened self-dislocation. The maid figured Mr. Foxman had been rendered suddenly and seriously unwell by something shocking he had found in the paper. Therein she was right; it was a true diagnosis if ever there was one. Mr. Foxman had been suddenly and sorely stricken in the midst of health and contentment; Mr. Foxman was now seriously unwell, both physically and as to the state of his nervous system. Indeed the gentleman was in even more deplorable case than the foregoing words would indicate. Mr. Foxman was the engineer who is hoisted by his own petard. He was the hunter who falls into the pitfall he himself has digged, who is impaled on the stake he himself has planted. He was the hangman who chokes in the noose he wove for other victims. In short, Mr. Foxman was whatever best describes, by simile and comparison, the creature which unexpectedly is wrecked and ruined by contrivances of its own devisement.