I can permit myself in this last record of an unrecoverable past to describe a treasured incident just before I left the Dodan home with my father. I was coming out of my room when I found Miss Dodan also emerging from her own bedroom at the opposite end of an upper hall. We met and I said: "Miss Dodan, it is a treacherous confession, but I wish you were going back with us, or that my father would stay a little longer here. I shall miss you." "Yes," she answered. "Aren't you a good nurse?" "Oh, I think you need not misunderstand me," I insisted. "Misunderstanding is rather an English trait, you Americans say," she retorted. "But in this case," I continued, "I hoped any disadvantages of that sort would be overcome by your own feelings." She blushed and looked quite dauntlessly into my eyes: "You mean," she inquired, "that you are sorry to leave me?" My face was very red, I knew, and I felt a puzzling sensation in my throat, but I did not hesitate: "Of course, I am sorry to leave you, more sorry than I can say, but I fear more, that leaving you may mean losing you." This time confusion seemed struggling with a pleased mirth in her face, and with a laugh and a quick movement toward the stairway she exclaimed: "Well, Americans, they say, never lose what they really care to win." I darted forward, but she was too quick for me and the chase ended in the lower hall in a group of people--her parents, my father, visitors and servants--and I saw her disappear with a backward glance, in which, I could swear, I saw two pouting lips. My father was overjoyed to return to our really very comfortable quarters on "Martian Hill," as Mr. Dodan, in reference to my father's infatuation over his imaginary (?) population of Mars, was accustomed to call our professional home. It was, I think, only a few weeks after this that my father called me to his room. He was standing in his morning apparel, a strange garb which he sometimes affected, made up of a black velvet gown brought together at the waist by a stout yellow cord, a bright red skull cap, a sort of sandal shoe, picked out with silver ornaments, his arms covered with loose, puckered sleeves of lace, dotted with black extending up to the close fitting sleeves of the velvet gown which only descended to his elbow. Beneath the gown, when he was thus theatrically attired, he wore a shirt of pale blue silk with a flat collar, over which came a black vest meeting his black trunks and blue hose.