ce to make ready for
breakfast.

He was brushing his hair when he went to the window, and as he looked
out he actually dropped the brush in his surprise.

"Where's my guide-book?" he said. "I know where I am, though. That
must be the East River. Away off there is Long Island. Looks as if it
was all city. Maybe that is Brooklyn,--I don't know. Isn't this a
high house? I can look down on all the other roofs. Jingo!"

He hurried through his toilet, meanwhile taking swift glances out of
the window. When he went out to the elevator, he said to himself:

"I'll go down by the stairs some day, just to see how it seems. A
storm would whistle like anything, round the top of this building!"

When he got down, Mr. Guilderaufenberg was waiting for him, and the
party of ladies went in to breakfast, in a restaurant which occupied
nearly all of the lower floor of the hotel.

"I understand," said Jack, good-humoredly, in reply to an explanation
from Miss Hildebrand. "You pay for just what you order, and no more,
and they charge high for everything but bread. I'm beginning to learn
something of city ways."

During all that morning, anybody who knew Jack Ogden would have had to
look at him twice, he had been so quiet and sedate; but the old,
self-confident look gradually returned during breakfast.

"Ve see you again at supper," said Mr. Guilderaufenberg, as they arose.
"Den ve goes to Vashington. You valks out und looks about. You easy
finds your vay back. Goot-bye till den."

Jack shook hands with his friends, and walked out into the street.

"Well, here I am!" he thought. "This is the city. I'm all alone in
it, too, and I must find my own way. I can do it, though. I'm glad
it's Sunday, so that I needn't go straight to work."

At that moment, the nine o'clock bells were ringing in two wooden
steeples in the village of Crofield; but the bell of the third steeple
was silent, down among the splinters of what had been the pulpit of its
own meeting-house. The village was very still, but there was something
peculiar in the quiet in the Ogden homestead. Even the children went
about as if they missed something or were listening for somebody they
expected.

There were nine o'clock bells, also, in Mertonville, and there was a
ring at the door-bell of the house of Mr. Murdoch, the editor.

"Why, Elder Holloway!" exclaimed Mrs. Murdoch, when she opened the
door. "Please to walk in."

"Thank you, Mrs. Murdoch,