I offered to help him dress, but he would not hear of it; and besides, he said he would not feel comfortable unless dressed by a practised hand.  However, he finally concluded that he was such old friends with the Earl that it would not make any difference how he was dressed.  So we took a cab, he gave the driver some directions, and we started.  By and by we stopped before a large house and got out.  I never had seen this man with a collar on.  He now stepped under a lamp and got a venerable paper collar out of his coat pocket, along with a hoary cravat, and put them on.  He ascended the stoop, and entered.  Presently he reappeared, descended rapidly, and said: 

“Come—­quick!”

We hurried away, and turned the corner.

“Now we’re safe,” he said, and took off his collar and cravat and returned them to his pocket.

“Made a mighty narrow escape,” said he.

“How?” said I.

“B’ George, the Countess was there!”

“Well, what of that?—­don’t she know you?”

“Know me?  Absolutely worships me.  I just did happen to catch a glimpse of her before she saw me—­and out I shot.  Haven’t seen her for two months—­to rush in on her without any warning might have been fatal.  She could not have stood it.  I didn’t know she was in town—­thought she was at the castle.  Let me lean on you—­just a moment—­there; now I am better—­thank you; thank you ever so much.  Lord bless me, what an escape!”

So I never got to call on the Earl, after all.  But I marked the house for future reference.  It proved to be an ordinary family hotel, with about a thousand plebeians roosting in it.

In most things Rogers was by no means a fool.  In some things it was plain enough that he was a fool, but he certainly did not know it.  He was in the “deadest” earnest in these matters.  He died at sea, last summer, as the “Earl of Ramsgate.”