We had some difficult young charges at Sanstead House. Abney's policy of benevolent toleration ensured that. But Ogden Ford stood alone. * * * * * I have said that it is difficult for me to place the lesser events of my narrative in their proper order. I except three, however which I will call the Affair of the Strange American, the Adventure of the Sprinting Butler, and the Episode of the Genial Visitor. I will describe them singly, as they happened. It was the custom at Sanstead House for each of the assistant masters to take half of one day in every week as a holiday. The allowance was not liberal, and in most schools, I believe, it is increased; but Mr Abney was a man with peculiar views on other people's holidays, and Glossop and I were accordingly restricted. My day was Wednesday; and on the Wednesday of which I write I strolled towards the village. I had in my mind a game of billiards at the local inn. Sanstead House and its neighbourhood were lacking in the fiercer metropolitan excitements, and billiards at the 'Feathers' constituted for the pleasure-seeker the beginning and end of the Gay Whirl. There was a local etiquette governing the game of billiards at the 'Feathers'. You played the marker a hundred up, then you took him into the bar-parlour and bought him refreshment. He raised his glass, said, 'To you, sir', and drained it at a gulp. After that you could, if you wished, play another game, or go home, as your fancy dictated. There was only one other occupant of the bar-parlour when we adjourned thither, and a glance at him told me that he was not ostentatiously sober. He was lying back in a chair, with his feet on the side-table, and crooning slowly, in a melancholy voice, the following words: _'I don't care--if he wears--a crown, He--can't--keep kicking my--dawg aroun'.'_ He was a tough, clean-shaven man, with a broken nose, over which was tilted a soft felt hat. His wiry limbs were clad in what I put down as a mail-order suit. I could have placed him by his appearance, if I had not already done so by his voice, as an East-side New Yorker. And what an East-side New Yorker could be doing in Sanstead it was beyond me to explain. We had hardly seated ourselves when he rose and lurched out. I saw him pass the window, and his assertion that no crowned head should molest his dog came faintly to my ears as he went down the street. 'American!' said Miss Benjafield, the stately barmaid, with strong disapproval. 'They're all alike.' I never contradict Miss Benjafield--one would as soon contradict the Statue of Liberty--so I merely breathed sympathetically. 'What's he here for I'd like to know?' It occurred to me that I also should like to know. In another thirty hours I was to find out.