worse than dumb-unintelligible. He sputtered inconsequent
ejaculations at me in this fashion:

"'To think of it, to-morrow, perhaps! And you know what a
business! Oh, damnation! Anyhow, that must not be! Ah! Monsieur
Lampron, how women do talk!'

"And with this Monsieur Plumet left me.

"I must confess, old fellow, that I am not burning with desire to
get mixed up in this mess, or to go and ask Madame Plumet for the
explanation which her husband was unable to give me. I shall bide
my time. If anything turns up to-morrow, they are sure to tell me,
and I will write you word.

"My mother sends you her love, and begs you to wrap up warmly in the
evening; she says the twilight is the winter of hot climates.

"The dear woman has been a little out of sorts for the last two
days. Today she is keeping her bed. I trust it is nothing but a
cold.

"Your affectionate friend,

"SYLVESTRE LAMPRON."

CHAPTER XIII. STARTLING NEWS FROM SYLVESTRE

MILAN, June 18th.

The examination of documents began this morning. I never thought we
should have such a heap to examine, nor papers of such a length. The
first sitting passed almost entirely in classifying, in examining
signatures, in skirmishes of all kinds around this main body.

My colleagues and I are working in a room in the municipal Palazzo del
Marino, a vast deserted building used, I believe, as a storehouse. Our
leathern armchairs and the table on which the documents are arranged
occupy the middle of the room. Along the walls are several cupboards,
nests of registers and rats; a few pictures with their faces to the
wall; some carved wood scutcheons, half a dozen flagstaffs and a
triumphal arch in cardboard, now taken to pieces and rotting--gloomy
apparatus of bygone festivals.

The persons taking part in the examination besides the three Frenchmen,
are, in the first place, a little Italian judge, with a mean face,
wrinkled like a winter apple, whose eyelids always seem heavy with
sleep; secondly, a clerk, shining with fat, his dress, hair, and
countenance expressive of restrained jollity, as he dreams voluptuous
dreams of the cool drinks he means to absorb through a straw when the
hour of deliverance shall sound from the frightful cuckoo clock, a relic
of the French occupation, which ticks at the end of the room; thirdly,
a creature whose position is difficult to determine--I t