ongside his pillow.

"We should have been comfortable now but for one defect. Every morning
at five the cook opened the kitchen door, in the way of business, and
rip went that gong! The first time this happened I thought the last
day was come sure. I didn't think it in bed--no, but out of it--for the
first effect of that frightful gong is to hurl you across the house, and
slam you against the wall, and then curl you up, and squirm you like a
spider on a stove lid, till somebody shuts the kitchen door. In solid
fact, there is no clamor that is even remotely comparable to the dire
clamor which that gong makes. Well, this catastrophe happened every
morning regularly at five o'clock, and lost us three hours sleep; for,
mind you, when that thing wakes you, it doesn't merely wake you in
spots; it wakes you all over, conscience and all, and you are good for
eighteen hours of wide-awakeness subsequently--eighteen hours of the
very most inconceivable wide-awakeness that you ever experienced in your
life. A stranger died on our hands one time, aid we vacated and left him
in our room overnight. Did that stranger wait for the general judgment?
No, sir; he got up at five the next morning in the most prompt and
unostentatious way. I knew he would; I knew it mighty well. He collected
his life-insurance, and lived happy ever after, for there was plenty of
proof as to the perfect squareness of his death.

"Well, we were gradually fading toward a better land, on account of the
daily loss of sleep; so we finally had the expert up again, and he ran
a wire to the outside of the door, and placed a switch there, whereby
Thomas, the butler, always made one little mistake--he switched the
alarm off at night when he went to bed, and switched it on again at
daybreak in the morning, just in time for the cook to open the kitchen
door, and enable that gong to slam us across the house, sometimes
breaking a window with one or the other of us. At the end of a week we
recognized that this switch business was a delusion and a snare. We also
discovered that a band of burglars had been lodging in the house the
whole time--not exactly to steal, for there wasn't much left now, but
to hide from the police, for they were hot pressed, and they shrewdly
judged that the detectives would never think of a tribe of burglars
taking sanctuary in a house notoriously protected by the most imposing
and elaborate burglar alarm in America.

"Sent down for the expert agai