"The sandwich," he began, "not unhappily expresses one of the saddest traits of our American life. I need hardly refer to our deplorable national habit of hiding our shame under a blithe and misleading exterior. Now this article, provided by your generous hospitality for a poor prisoner of war, contains a bit of the breast of some fowl, presumably chicken--we will concede that it is chicken--taken from rather too near the bone to be wholly palatable. Chicken sandwiches in some parts of the world are rather coarsely marked, for purposes of identification, with pin-feathers. You may covet no nobler fame than that of creator of the Flying Sandwich of Annandale. Yet the feathered sandwich, though more picturesque, points rather too directly to the strutting lords of the barn-yard. A sandwich that is decorated like a fall bonnet, that suggests, we will say, the milliner's window--or the plumed knights of sounding war--" With a little sigh, a slow relaxation of muscles, Mr. Gillespie slept. I locked the doors, put out the lights, and tumbled into my own bed as the chapel clock chimed two. In the disturbed affairs of the night the blinds had not been drawn, and I woke at six to find the room flooded with light and my prisoner gone. The doors were locked as I had left them. Mr. Gillespie had departed by the window, dropping from a little balcony to the terrace beneath. I rang for Ijima and sent him to the pier; and before I had finished shaving, the boy was back, and reported Gillespie's boat still at the pier, but one of the canoes missing. It was clear that in the sorry plight of his arms Gillespie had preferred paddling to rowing. Beneath my watch on the writing-table I found a sheet of note-paper on which was scrawled: DEAR OLD MAN--I am having one of those nightmares I mentioned in our delightful conversation. I feel that I am about to walk in my sleep. As my flannels are a trifle bluggy, pardon loss of your dressing-gown. Yours, R. G. P. S.--I am willing to pay for the glass and medical attendance; but I want a rebate for that third sandwich. It really tickled too harshly as it went down. Very likely this accounts for my somnambulism. G. When I had dressed and had my coffee I locked my old portfolio and tossed it into the bottom of my trunk. Something told me that for a while, at least, I should have other occupation than contributing to the literature of Russian geography. CHAPTER IV I EXPLORE TIPPECANOE CREEK The woodland silence, one time stirred By the soft pathos of some passing bird, Is not the same it was before. The spot where once, unseen, a flower Has held its fragile chalice to the shower, Is different for evermore. Unheard, unseen A spell has been! --_Thomas Bailey Aldrich_.