quire all her courage, all
her magnificent impudence, to browbeat Dr. Spargo into coming, for I
doubt if the Stimcoes had ever paid him a stiver.

"But you can be very useful," she went on, in a tone unusually
gentle. "You will find Mr. Stimcoe in his bedroom--at least, I hope
so, for he suffers from a hallucination that some person or persons
unknown have incarcerated him in a French war-prison, such being the
effect of to-day's--er--proceedings upon his highly strung nature.
The illusion being granted, one can hardly be surprised at his
resenting it."

I nodded, and promised to do my best.

"You are a very good boy, Harry," said Mrs. Stimcoe--a verdict so
different from that which I had arrived expecting, or with any right
to expect, that I stood for some twenty seconds gaping after her as
she pulled her shawl closer and went on her heroic way.

I found Mr. Stimcoe in _deshabille_, on the first-floor landing,
under the derisive surveillance of Masters Doggy Bates, Bob
Pilkington, and Scotty Maclean, whose graceless mirth echoed down to
me from the stair-rail immediately overhead. Ignoring my preceptor's
invitation to bide a wee and take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang
syne, I ran up and knocked their heads together, kicked them into the
dormitory, turned the key on their reproaches, and--these
preliminaries over--descended to grapple with the situation.

Mr. Stimcoe, in night garments, was conducting a dialogue in which he
figured alternately as the tyrant and the victim of oppression.
In the character of Napoleon Bonaparte he had filled a footbath with
cold water, and was commanding the Rev. Philip Stimcoe to strip--as
he put it--to the teeth, and immerse himself forthwith. As the Rev.
Philip Stimcoe, patriot and martyr, he was obstinately, and with even
more passion, refusing to do anything of the kind, and for the
equally cogent reasons that he was a Protestant of the Protestants
and that the water had cockroaches in it.

"Of course," said Mr. Stimcoe to me, "if you present yourself as
Alexander of Russia, there is no more to be said, always provided"--
and here he removed his nightcap and made me a profound bow--"that
your credentials are satisfactory."

Apparently they were. At any rate, I prevailed on him to return to
his room, when he took my arm, and, seating himself on the bedside,
recited to me the paradigms of the more anomalous Greek verbs with
great volubility for twenty minutes on end--t