The young man was sleeping heavily, spread out upon the doctor's staid old four-post bed; not in years, if ever, had that respectable piece of furniture witnessed such a spectacle, and the doctor had a quaint fancy that it withdrew itself shudderingly from the contamination. It had been his mother's, and a kind of feminine severity appeared in its starched and ruffled valance, as of indignant petticoats. He leaned over and scanned Teddy's face, holding his own chin in his hand, with knotted brows; then he felt the sleeper's pulse, listened to his thick breathing, shook his head with a perplexed look, and began mechanically to gather up the clothes thrown here and there about the room. He went back and surveyed the bed again. "Very strange," said Doctor Vardaman. And again: "Very strange!" He went downstairs, and, not without a sardonic grin, brought up a pitcher of ice-water, and placed it in readiness on the little old mahogany candle-stand at the sufferer's right hand. The dining-room was a woeful picture as he re-entered it. In the middle of the table, the pyramid of jellies and cream had partly dissolved and trickled down to mix with a waste of crumbled cake, cigar-stumps and ashes, nut-shells, soiled napkins, shattered china--the doctor sat down amid the desolation, likening himself to Marius among the ruins of Carthage. There was a dreary odour--an odour? A _stench_, Doctor Vardaman vigorously characterised it--of stale wine, stale coffee, stale tobacco. Fragments of cheese swam in pudding-sauce; spent bottles cumbered the sideboard; the door was open into the kitchen, affording a vista of plates piled in tottering heaps, pots and pans crowded on the cold range, a bowl of dishwater crowned with scum in the sink, half-eaten meats and vegetables stiffening grimly in lakes of discoloured gravy. "Faugh!" said the doctor in strong distaste, and closed the door on the depressing scene. He sat down in his place at the head of the table. Huddesley would have a job of cleaning up this squalid hole on the morrow, he thought, and wondered how the man was getting on in his new sphere; smiled, too, as he reflected that the dream of Huddesley's life was being fulfilled. He had wanted to be a "hactor," and indeed he had some turn that way, poor creature! It was strange to think how unequally the gifts of Fate are distributed: now there was Huddesley, an honest man, not at all a dull man, who, if he had been born in any class but the servant class, even in a less respectable one, might have made more of himself! That inherited attitude of servility was a greater bar to his advancement than dulness or vice; in America it might have been different; we have no definite classes, and no traditions of behaviour. But in England a man who habitually says "sir," and drops his _h's_--here the old gentleman came bolt upright in his chair, upon a sudden moving recollection. Huddesley had not dropped a single _h_ nor added one on, since assuming Teddy's