I felt that the cups
of black coffee restored the lost balance in some measure.

Before we had settled into our wonted places--in fact, almost as we
entered--Halson looked over his shoulder and said: "Mr. Wanhope, I want
you to hear this story of my friend's. Go on, Newton--or, rather, go
back and begin again--and I'll introduce you afterwards."

The stranger made a becoming show of deprecation. He said he did not
think the story would bear immediate repetition, or was even worth
telling once, but, if we had nothing better to do, perhaps we might do
worse than hear it; the most he could say for it was that the thing
really happened. He wore a large, drooping, gray mustache, which, with
the imperial below it, quite hid his mouth, and gave him, somehow, a
martial effect, besides accurately dating him of the period between the
latest sixties and earliest seventies, when his beard would have been
black; I liked his mustache not being stubbed in the modern manner, but
allowed to fall heavily over his lips, and then branch away from the
corners of his mouth as far as it would. He lighted the cigar which
Halson gave him, and, blowing the bitten-off tip towards the fire,
began:

"It was about that time when we first had a ten-o'clock night train from
Boston to New York. Train used to start at nine, and lag along round by
Springfield, and get into the old Twenty-sixth Street Station here at
six in the morning, where they let you sleep as long as you liked. They
call you up now at half-past five, and, if you don't turn out, they haul
you back to Mott Haven, or New Haven, I'm not sure which. I used to go
into Boston and turn in at the old Worcester Depot, as we called it
then, just about the time the train began to move, and I usually got a
fine night's rest in the course of the nine or ten hours we were on the
way to New York; it didn't seem quite the same after we began saying
Albany Depot: shortened up the run, somehow.

[Illustration: "NO BURGLAR COULD HAVE MISSED ME IF HE HAD WANTED AN EASY
MARK"]

"But that night I wasn't very sleepy, and the porter had got the place
so piping hot with the big stoves, one at each end of the car, to keep
the good, old-fashioned Christmas cold out, that I thought I should be
more comfortable with a smoke before I went to bed; and, anyhow, I could
get away from the heat better in the smoking-room. I hated to be leaving
home on Christmas Eve, for I never had done that before, and I hated t