Then, remembering himself, he kept on until he reached a convenient place to turn round, and letting the bay mare have her head, he soon overtook Whitey, jogging on always at the same pace and caring as little for the high steppers around him as did his master. To keep behind the slow vehicle was not an easy matter, for the bay fretted and tossed her head, and would have whisked her tail if she had one to whisk. But Alex. kept her well in hand and followed on, wondering if the “old duffer” would never leave the park. He did leave it at last, and Alex. left it, too, and drove down Fifth Avenue and into Sixth, and still on into a cross street, where Whitey stopped before the respectable looking house with a brick front, a brass plate and “Joel Pledger” upon it. Alex. had been sure he would stop there, and was glad, for the bay mare was getting restless and pulling hard at the bit, and the moment she felt the reins loosened she dashed on over the rough pavement with a clatter, scarcely allowing Alex. time to turn his head and make sure that the girl was going up the steps. He knew now where she was stopping and where Joel Pledger lived, but was it the Joel his uncle Amos knew? “I’ll find out to-morrow, and if it isn’t, maybe I’ll see the girl,” he thought; and the next morning about eleven o’clock he was ringing the bell at No. 28, noticing, while he stood waiting, how clean everything was around the door and the narrow windows on the sides. “It takes ’em a long time to get here. They must have a mighty lazy maid,” he thought, giving a second pull at the old-fashioned bell. He was taking out his card for the servant girl, when the door opened and he was confronted by Mrs. Pledger herself, a tall and portly woman of sixty-five, her lips shut tightly together and a look as if she scented a peddler or an agent, both her abominations. But Alex.’s face and manner disarmed her. He was neither an agent nor a peddler, and her lips relaxed a little of their tightness, and in response to his interrogatory, “Mrs. Pledger?” she replied: “Yes, I am Mrs. Pledger; walk in and take a chair.”