The man was Fighting Anderson of Birkenbog himself, and he kept crying, "Where have you hidden her, rascal, thief? I will kill you, villain of a scribbler! It was because you were plotting this that you dare not show your face in the country!" But every time he threw himself upon me, Amelia, who did not want for spunk, dug at him with the two-pronged fork, and stuck it through so many plies of his mantle till he was obliged to cry out, "Here, lassie, lay down that leister, or ye will hae me like miller Tamson's riddle, that the cat can jump through back-foremost." After adjusting his coat collar he turned to me and demanded, in a more sensible and quiet way, what had become of his daughter. At the question, Amelia went into one of her foolish fits of laughter and cried out, "What, anither of them?" Whereupon to prevent misunderstandings, I explained that the young lady was my landlady's daughter, and a friend of Freddy Esquillant's. "Oh, you students," he said, and sat down to wipe his brow, having seen from the most cursory examination of our abode, wholly open to the view, and exiguous at the best, that certainly Charlotte was not hidden there. "She left home three days syne as if to go to Miss Huntingdon's," he said, "and ever since her mother has gone from one hysteric to another. So, knowing nothing better to do, and maybe judging you by myself in my own young days (for which I am sure I ask your pardon) I started out to make sure that everything had been done decently and in order. Though as sure as my name is Robert Anderson, I cannot think why you did not come and wed the lass decently at home----" We were at this point in our explanation, Amelia's ear was (doubtless) close to the back of the door, and Birkenbog was relapsing into his first belief, when I heard the key in the lock and the light foot of Freddy in the passage. It came as a huge relief, for here was my witness. He entered, and, seeing the visitor, bowed and deposited his books in the corner. He was for going out again, doubtless thinking that Charlotte's father and I were at business together. So, indeed, we were--but not such as I wished to keep anyways private between us. I could not, with any self-respect, go on depending any longer on Amelia's two-pronged fork. So I said, "Freddy, bear me witness that I have not been out of the house this week, except to go to the printer's with my work----" "Fegs," cried a voice through the jar of the door, "there is no need for Freddy to bear ye out in that. You have only to look at the carpet under the legs of your chair. It has gotten a tairgin', as if all the hosts of King Pharaoh had trampled over it down to the Red Sea!" But I would not keep the old man any longer in suspense. "I fear, Birkenbog," I said, "that you have given yourself a bootless journey. From what I suspect, your flown bird will be nested nearer home." "Where?" he cried; "tell me the scoundrel's name."