“Neither would any earl of Rossmore, betwixt
William’s contribution and Mulberry—as
earl; but it’s office hours, now, you see, and
the earl in me sleeps. Come—I’ll
show you his very room.”
They reached the neighborhood of the New Gadsby about
nine in the evening, and passed down the alley to
the lamp post.
“There you are,” said the colonel, triumphantly,
with a wave of his hand which took in the whole side
of the hotel. “There it is—what
did I tell you?”
“Well, but—why, Colonel, it’s
six stories high. I don’t quite make out
which window you—”
“All the windows, all of them. Let him
have his choice—I’m indifferent,
now that I have located him. You go and stand
on the corner and wait; I’ll prospect the hotel.”
The earl drifted here and there through the swarming
lobby, and finally took a waiting position in the
neighborhood of the elevator. During an hour
crowds went up and crowds came down; and all complete
as to limbs; but at last the watcher got a glimpse
of a figure that was satisfactory— got
a glimpse of the back of it, though he had missed his
chance at the face through waning alertness.
The glimpse revealed a cowboy hat, and below it a
plaided sack of rather loud pattern, and an empty sleeve
pinned up to the shoulder. Then the elevator
snatched the vision aloft and the watcher fled away
in joyful excitement, and rejoined the fellow-conspirator.
“We’ve got him, Major—got him
sure! I’ve seen him—seen him
good; and I don’t care where or when that man
approaches me backwards, I’ll recognize him
every time. We’re all right. Now
for the requisition.”
They got it, after the delays usual in such cases.
By half past eleven they were at home and happy,
and went to bed full of dreams of the morrow’s
great promise.
Among the elevator load which had the suspect for
fellow-passenger was a young kinsman of Mulberry Sellers,
but Mulberry was not aware of it and didn’t
see him. It was Viscount Berkeley.
Arrived in his room Lord Berkeley made preparations
for that first and last and all-the-time duty of the
visiting Englishman—the jotting down in
his diary of his “impressions” to date.
His preparations consisted in ransacking his “box”
for a pen. There was a plenty of steel pens on
his table with the ink bottle, but he was English.
The English people manufacture steel pens for nineteen-twentieths
of the globe, but they never use any themselves.
They use exclusively the pre-historic quill.
My lord not only found a quill pen, but the best one
he had seen in several years—and after
writing diligently for some time, closed with the
following entry:
Butin one thing I have made an
immense mistake, I ought to
have
SHUCKED my title and changed my
name before I started.
