_My_ Johnny, as I recovered him, wore mittens on his dumpy hands, and on his head an odd fur bonnet with flaps to cover his rosy ears. He was wadded all over, and suggested to one a little fat Esquimau. As he swam, like a full moon, into my ken, he might have taken but one step across the years from “Baxter’s” to Evercreech. He had no more hair on his face than when I had last parted from him; no less an appearance in it of a perpetual suppressed laughter. What amused, or appeared to amuse him so inextinguishably, no one had ever been able to discover. He had a manner as of some secret understanding with himself which was based on the eternal hilarity of things. When he shook hands with you, you had a feeling that it was only by gripping hard hold of that support that he could stop himself from exploding in your face. And there he would stand, seemingly fighting down his risibility, until he could emit a “How-de-do?” or “How are you?” with the air of asking a social conundrum while he chuckled inwardly over your inability to answer it. He appeared, somehow, to be always swelling with communicativeness, on which, strain as he would, he could not get a start. It was this consciousness of his conversational disability, perhaps, which made him wont to passing utterances of a fearful and cryptic nature--utterances which had no known bearing on anything that had happened, or was happening, or was ever likely to happen. Thus, it might be, as he passed one fielding at cricket, he would swoop into one’s ear with, “How much for a chirp, Plummer? Hoots!” and pass on his darkling way, leaving one prostrate. Or his head, perhaps, would come round a door, utter the inquiry “Which way to the steamers?” and vanish. Although I was, without doubt, his closest friend, I had never succeeded in fathoming the exact source of any of these recondite inspirations. To question him as to them, was to subdue his expression into one of patient tolerance over your inaccessibility to esoteric suggestion. It was a chill morning, a day or two after my last recorded experiences, when he was returned upon my hands, like the most surprising of boomerangs or india-rubber balls. I was sitting cowering and glowering over my fire, when I heard his voice at the door, and I started amazed, and “Johnny!” I cried: “that must be Johnny Dando!” And Johnny it was. He came in smiling, and seized my hand without a word. His eyes dilated; his cheeks, like shining polished apples, seemed to stretch to cracking. “Johnny,” I cried; “take care!” His face split at the mouth, easing the pressure. “Hullo!” he said. “How much for ‘Grafto’?” We pumped out our salutations, hand in hand, grinning and speechless like a couple of veritable Britons. “Where have you come from?” I cried at length. “How did you find me out?”