y thoughts.
Trout-fishing was a desideratum. I would take my rod and plenty of
books, would live simply and frugally, and it should make a new man of
me by Christmas. It was now October. I went to sleep thinking of autumn
tints against an autumn sunset. It must have been very early, certainly
not later than ten o'clock; the previous night I had not slept at all.

Now, this private hotel of mine was a very old fashioned house, dark and
dingy all day long, with heavy old chandeliers and black old oak, and
dead flowers in broken flower-pots surrounding a grimy grass-plot in the
rear. On this latter my bedroom window looked; and never am I likely to
forget the vile music of the cats throughout my first long wakeful night
there. The second night they actually woke me; doubtless they had been
busy long enough, but it was all of a sudden that I heard them, and lay
listening for more, wide awake in an instant. My window had been very
softly opened, and the draught fanned my forehead as I held my breath.

A faint light glimmered through a ground-glass pane over the door; and
was dimly reflected by the toilet mirror, in its usual place against the
window. This mirror I saw moved, and next moment I had bounded from bed.

The mirror fell with a horrid clatter: the toilet-table followed it with
a worse: the thief had gone as he had come ere my toes halted aching
amid the debris.

A useless little balcony--stone slab and iron railing--jutted out from
my window. I thought I saw a hand on the railing, another on the slab,
then both together on the lower level for one instant before they
disappeared. There was a dull yet springy thud on the grass below. Then
no more noise but the distant thunder of the traffic, and the one that
woke me, until the window next mine was thrown up.

"What the devil's up?"

The voice was rich, cheery, light-hearted, agreeable; all that my own
was not as I answered "Nothing!" for this was not the first time my
next-door neighbor had tried to scrape acquaintance with me.

"But surely, sir, I heard the very dickens of a row?"

"You may have done."

"I was afraid some one had broken into your room!"

"As a matter of fact," said I, put to shame by the undiminished
good-humor of my neighbor, "some one did; but he's gone now, so let him
be."

"Gone? Not he! He's getting over that wall. After him--after him!" And
the head disappeared from the window next mine.

I rushed into the corridor, and was just