The envelope was sealed, and presently Ned was flying along through street after street with the rain pelting in his face and the wind bantering him for the loan of his hat. He did not care! His heart was so much lighter! He saw from afar the great red and blue bottles in the illuminated windows of a drug-store, and here he paused and went within and with much circumspection bought a postage-stamp; then he plunged out in the rain again, making straight for a certain box under a gleaming lamp in the distance that sent its quivering shafts of light far through the gloom. He brought up under the lamp-post, agitated, anxious, but still unswerving. He looked about him expectantly, watchfully,--it might have seemed even fearfully to one noting his attitude from a distance. But he had no longer any fear. The moment was fraught with peculiar importance to him. He had posted many letters for employers, but never one for himself, and never before nor after one like this. A man beyond the furthest limits of the lamp's aureola of misty light had paused too, breathing hard. He was not used to running so far nor running so fast. He thought the boy's look and attitude very suspicious, as Ned, realizing the supreme significance of the moment and the value of this letter to him, slowly and solemnly dropped it into the box, and then swiftly scudded off down the street. When the letter-carrier next came to this box the detective was lurking in its vicinity. He whispered a request and mentioned a name, but the postman shook his head with all the dignity of one invested with a little brief authority, and it seemed that "the regulations" were the only words his tongue would deign to frame. "Why, what harm can it do to let me see the outside of the letters?" insisted the detective plausibly. The postman's head wagged to and fro more slowly under the well applied force of argument. "The handwriting on the outside of the envelope alone will tell me all that I want to know; it is a very important crime which I am investigating." The postman's head ceased to vibrate. Yet he was slow and thoughtful as he laid his hand on the box. As the detective waited eagerly for it to be opened he looked rather like a fox,--so keen, and so crafty, and so alertly expectant. The letters, as they were slowly shuffled before his eyes, he perceived belonged unmistakably to commercial correspondence,--neat, compact, evidently the work of practiced scribes,--except only one; this was blurred and smirched, with a crumpled envelope and a wildly diagonal address, which moreover was grievously misspelled. He stared with breathless interest and curiosity at the scrawling characters:-- Manger A. J. Gorm Manger Gorm's Theter.