With one disheartened cry, I grabbed my property, and started whither I neither knew nor cared, the children pursuing like a pack of misbehaved young wolves. I crossed a crowded thoroughfare, doubled on my tracks, overturned a push-cart full of oranges, threw a matinee audience into wild alarm, and everywhere I seemed to hear two fatal words. And when at last I threw myself upon a trolley-car the stupid vulgarism still rang in my ears. I am sure the conductor eyed me with suspicion; but I did not care; for I was moving every moment farther from the scenes of my discomfiture, my curio out of sight beneath the seat, and my letter safely in my inside pocket. I picked up an abandoned paper, and read it, or appeared to do so, with composure, though all the while the fingers of my left hand never ceased to pinch the blue envelope, making fresh discoveries. Within the sheet of folded note-paper there was unquestionably an inclosure of a smaller size and softer texture, perhaps a bank-note, perhaps a draft. Of course I held my imagination well in check, and tried to think of nothing more important than a newspaper cutting; but even this allowed a certain scope for fancy. Advertisements for missing heirs are not uncommon, and even poems when embalmed in orris may have deep significance. Ah! What if I were rich? What if I were loved? What if both at once? The thing is not impossible. Soon I should know all, beneath my haystack, in my barn, or, bird-like, swinging in my tree. I was so certain now that what had cost so much inconvenience must be all my own, that I would have parted from the blue envelope only with my life. It was a shock to have my dreaming interrupted by the conductor's cheerful call, "All out!" and to find that the thrice accursed trolley had all the while been flying, not toward the country, but into the depths of darkest Selbyville, where gasworks, rolling-mills, and docks compete for grimy precedence. But if by that time I had not grown used to disappointment, the opportunity to abandon my curio beneath the seat would have made up for much. I have often wondered since my afternoon in Selbyville where the man who wrote in praise of solitude obtained his information. I feel convinced that Crusoe never sat down for a quiet pipe without black Friday butting in to ask what time it was. But this is idle speculation.