Early next morning John dreamed that he was buying calico in an immense shop and that in a dreamlike inconsequence the people there, customers and shopmen alike, were abruptly seized with a frenzy of destruction so violent that they began to tear up all the material upon which they could lay their hands; indeed, so loud was the noise of rent cloth that John woke up with the sound of it still in his ears. Gradually it was borne in upon a brain wrestling with actuality that the noise might have emanated from the direction of a small casement in his bedroom looking eastward into the garden across a steep penthouse which ran down to within two feet of the ground. Although the noise had stopped some time before John had precisely located its whereabouts and really before he was perfectly convinced that he was awake, he jumped out of bed and hurried across the chilly boards to ascertain if after all it had only been a relic of his dream. No active cause was visible; but the moss, the stonecrop and the tiles upon the penthouse had been clawed from top to bottom as if by some mighty tropical cat, and John for a brief instant savored that elated perplexity which generally occurs to heroes in the opening paragraphs of a sensational novel. "It's a very old house," he thought, hopefully, and began to grade his reason to a condition of sycophantic credulity. "And, of course, anything like a ghost at seven o'clock in the morning is rare--very rare. The evidence would be unassailable...." After toadying to the marvelous for a while, he sought a natural explanation of the phenomenon and honestly tried not to want it to prove inexplicable. The noise began again overhead; a fleeting object darkened the casement like the swift passage of a bird and struck the penthouse below; there was a slow grinding shriek, a clatter of broken tiles and leaden piping; a small figure stuck all over with feathers emerged from the herbaceous border and smiled up at him. "Good heavens, my boy, what in creation are you trying to do?" John shouted, sternly. "I'm learning to toboggan, Uncle John." "But didn't I explain to you that tobogganing can only be carried out after a heavy snowfall?" "Well, it hasn't snowed yet," Harold pointed out in an offended voice. "Listen to me. If it snows for a month without stopping, you're never to toboggan down a roof. What's the good of having all those jolly hills at the back of the house if you don't use them?" John spoke as if he had brought back the hills from America at the same time as he was supposed to have brought back the toboggan. "There's a river, too," Harold observed. "You can't toboggan down a river--unless, of course, it gets frozen over." "I don't want to toboggan down the river, but if I had a Canadian canoe for the river I could wait for the snow quite easily."