wants to know why breakfast isn't ready.
Only last week I heard him exhorting Harriet to call him early next day as
he was going to a dance."

They all looked reproachfully at me because I didn't keep a pet insomnia
too. I spoke up for myself. I admitted I hadn't got one, and what was more
was proud of it. All healthy massive thinkers are heavy sleepers, I
insisted. They must sleep heavily to recuperate the enormous amount of
vitality expended by them in their waking hours. Sleep, I informed my
audience, is Nature's reward to the blameless and energetic liver. If they
could not sleep now they were but paying for past years of idleness and
excess, and they had only themselves to blame. I was going on to tell them
that an easy conscience is the best anodyne, etc., but they snatched up
their candles and went to bed. I went thither myself shortly afterwards.

I was awakened in the dead of night by a rapping at my door.

"Who's there?" I growled.

"I--Jane Brown," said a hollow voice.

"What's the matter?"

"Hush, there are men in the house."

"If they're burglars tell 'em the silver's in the sideboard."

"It's the police."

I sat up in bed. "The police!--why?--what?"

"Shissh! come quickly and don't make a noise," breathed Miss Brown.

I hurried into a shooting-jacket and slippers and joined the lady on the
landing. She carried a candle and was adequately if somewhat grotesquely
clad in a dressing-gown and an eider-down quilt secured about her waist by
a knotted bath-towel. On her head she wore a large black hat. She put her
finger to her lips and led the way downstairs. The hall was empty.

"That's curious," said Miss Brown. "There were eighteen mounted policemen
in here just now. I was talking to the Inspector--such a nice young man, an
intimate friend of the late Sir CHRISTOPHER WREN, who, he informs me
privately, did _not_ kill Cock Robin."

She paused, winked and then suddenly dealt me three hearty smacks--one on
the shoulder, one on the arm and one in the small of the back. I removed
myself hastily out of range.

"Tarantulas, or Peruvian ant-bears, crawling all over you," Miss Brown
explained. "Fortunate I saw them in time, as their suck is fatal in
ninety-nine cases out of a million, or so GARIBALDI says in the _Origin of
Species_." She sniffed. "Tell me, do you smell blood?"

I told her that I did not.

"I do," she said, "quite close at hand too. Yum-yum, I like warm blood."
She looked at me throu