It was at half-past seven, when he was beginning to feel that he had not tasted food since boyhood, that there sounded from somewhere below on his right a shrill whistling. II He looked cautiously down. It gave him acute vertigo to do so, but he braved this in his desire to see. Since his vigil began, he had heard much whistling. In addition to the _Garrulus Glandarius Rufitergum_ and the _Corvus Monedula Spermologus_, he had been privileged for the last hour or so to listen to a concert featuring such artists as the _Dryobates Major Anglicus_, the _Sturnus Vulgaris_, the _Emberiza Curlus_, and the _Muscicapa Striata_, or Spotted Flycatcher: and, a moment before, he would have said that in the matter of whistling he had had all he wanted. But this latest outburst sounded human. It stirred in his bosom something approaching hope. So Mr. Carmody, craning his neck, waited: and presently round the corner of the house, a towel about his shoulders, suggesting that he was on his way to take an early morning dip in the moat, came his nephew Hugo. Mr. Carmody, as this chronicle has shown, had never entertained for Hugo quite that warmth of affection which one likes to see in an uncle toward his nearest of kin, but at the present moment he could not have appreciated him more if he had been a millionaire anxious to put up capital for a new golf course in the park. "Hoy!" he cried, much as the beleaguered garrison of Lucknow must have done to the advance guard of the relieving Highlanders. "Hoy!" Hugo stopped. He looked to his right, then to his left, then in front of him, and then, turning, behind him. It was a spectacle that chilled in an instant the new sensation of kindness which his uncle had been feeling toward him. "Hoy!" cried Mr. Carmody. "Hugo! Confound the boy! Hugo!" For the first time the other looked up. Perceiving Mr. Carmody in his eyrie, he stood rigid, gazing with opened mouth. He might have been posing for a statue of Young Man Startled By Snake in Path While About to Bathe. "Great Scot!" said Hugo, looking to his uncle's prejudiced eye exactly like the Dartford Warbler. "What on earth are you doing up there?" Mr. Carmody would have writhed in irritation, had not prudence reminded him that he was thirty feet too high in the air to do that sort of thing. "Never mind what I'm doing up here! Help me down." "How did you get there?" "Never mind how I got here!" "But what," persisted Hugo insatiably, "is the big--or general--idea?" Withheld from the relief of writhing, Mr. Carmody gritted his teeth. "Put that ladder up," he said in a strained voice. "Ladder?" "Yes, ladder." "What ladder?" "There is a ladder on the ground." "Where?" "There. No, not there. There. There. Not there, I tell you. There. There." Hugo, following these directions, concluded a successful search. "Right," he said. "Ladder, long, wooden, for purposes of climbing, one. Correct as per memo. Now what?"