unusual cry was heard of "Master
Rattlin wanted," which was always understood to be the joyful signal
that some parent or friend had arrived as a visitor. I was immediately
hurried into the house, a whispering took place between Mr and Mrs
Root, and the consequence was, that I was bustled up into the bedroom,
and my second-best clothes, which I then had on, were changed for the
best, and, with a supererogatory dab with a wet towel over my face, I
was brought down, and, my little heart playing like a pair of castanets
against my ribs, I was delivered into the tender keeping of the
pedagogue.

Having taken me by the hand, whilst he was practising all the amenities
with his countenance, he opened the parlour-door, where the
supposititious visitor was expected to be found, and lo! the room was
empty. Mrs Root and the servants were summoned, and they all
positively declared, and were willing to swear to the fact, that a
gentleman had gone into the room, who had never gone out. It was a
front parlour, on the ground-floor, and from the window he could not
have emerged, as the area intervened between that and the foot pavement;
and to see a gentleman scrambling through by that orifice into the
principal street of, and from one of the principal houses of the town,
whilst all the people were going to church, was a little too
preposterous even for Mr Root's matter-of-fact imagination. However,
they all peeped up the chimney one after the other, as if an elderly,
military-looking gentleman, encumbered with a surtout, for thus he was
described, would have been so generous as to save my schoolmaster a
shilling, by bustling up his chimney, and bringing down the soot. The
person was not to be found; Root began to grow alarmed--a constable was
sent for, and the house was searched from the attics to the cellar. The
dwelling was not, however, robbed, nor any of its inmates murdered,
notwithstanding the absconder could not be found.

Now, Mr Root was a wise man in his own generation, yet was he,
notwithstanding, a great fool. He was one of that class who can
sometimes overreach a neighbour, yet, in doing so, inevitably loses his
own balance, and tumbles into the mire. A sagacious ninny, who had an
"_I told you so_," for every possible event after it had happened.

Instead of taking the common-sense view of the affair of the missed
gentleman, and supposing that the footman had been bribed to let him
quietly out at the street-doo