looked less awful, and Burnett had had more lime in his bones, we might have escaped the Powers That Be by simply admitting a sprained ankle and carefully concealing everything else.  But if one man cracks where you can’t finish the deal, even by the most unlimited outlay of mucilage and persistence, and another blazes his whole surface-area in a manner that seems to make the underbrush dubious to count on forever henceforth; why, you then have a logarithm the square of which is probably as far beyond your depth as I am beyond my own just at this point of this sentence.

The long and short of my fresh start is, that your brother wants to write you, but he is so handicapped (forgive me, but you’re the only one who hasn’t had that joke sprung on them!) with bandages, that it’s cruel to expect much of him.  It is true that he has his bosom friend to fall back upon, but if you could see that friend as we see him these days you wouldn’t be sure whether it was true or not.  The old woman, who had the peddler-and-petticoat episode, was not in it the same day with your brother’s friend!  I do assure you.  And anyhow—­even if he still has brains—­his writing apparatus is all done up in arnica, so there you are!

But do not allow me to alarm you unduly!  When all’s said and done, they’re not so badly off physically.  Hair and ribs are mere vanities, anyhow, and we’re here to-day and gone to-morrow!

Something much worse than disfigurements and broken bones has sprung forth from chaos, and has almost stared them out of countenance since.  It is the wolf that is at the door, and the howling and prowling of their particular wolf is not to be sneezed at, let me tell you.  To put a modern political face upon an ancient Greek fable, the wolf in their case symbolizes the bitter question of whose roof is going to roof them when they get out of the plaster casts that are bed and board to them just at present.  Where are they to go?  All those which used to be open to them are suddenly shut tight.  They’ve both been expelled, and both been disinherited.  If I was inclined to look on the blue side of the blanket, I should certainly feel that they were playing in very tough luck.  Burnett, of course, can come to you, and his soul is full of the wish to bring his fellow-fright along with him.  Which wish of his is the gist of my epistle. Can he bring him?  He wants to know before he broaches the proposition.  I’m to be skinned alive if Jack ever learns that such a plea was made, so I beg you whatever other rash acts you see fit to commit during your meteoric flight across my plane of existence, don’t ever give me away.  Firstly, because if I ever get a chance to do so, I’m positive that I should want to cling to you as the mistletoe does to the oak, and could not bear to be given away; and secondly, because I’m so attached to my own skin that I should really suffer pain if it was taken from me by