r. All had suggestions to offer to account for my
having been forgotten there, and the theory which we finally agreed on
offers at least a plausible explanation, although whether it be in its
details the true one, nobody, of course, will ever know. The layer of
ashes found above the chamber indicated that the house had been burned
down. Let it be supposed that the conflagration had taken place the
night I fell asleep. It only remains to assume that Sawyer lost his
life in the fire or by some accident connected with it, and the rest
follows naturally enough. No one but he and Dr. Pillsbury either knew
of the existence of the chamber or that I was in it, and Dr.
Pillsbury, who had gone that night to New Orleans, had probably never
heard of the fire at all. The conclusion of my friends, and of the
public, must have been that I had perished in the flames. An
excavation of the ruins, unless thorough, would not have disclosed the
recess in the foundation walls connecting with my chamber. To be sure,
if the site had been again built upon, at least immediately, such an
excavation would have been necessary, but the troublous times and the
undesirable character of the locality might well have prevented
rebuilding. The size of the trees in the garden now occupying the site
indicated, Dr. Leete said, that for more than half a century at least
it had been open ground.

[Footnote 1: In accounting for this state of mind it must be
remembered that, except for the topic of our conversations, there was
in my surroundings next to nothing to suggest what had befallen me.
Within a block of my home in the old Boston I could have found social
circles vastly more foreign to me. The speech of the Bostonians of the
twentieth century differs even less from that of their cultured
ancestors of the nineteenth than did that of the latter from the
language of Washington and Franklin, while the differences between the
style of dress and furniture of the two epochs are not more marked
than I have known fashion to make in the time of one generation.]

CHAPTER V.

When, in the course of the evening the ladies retired, leaving Dr.
Leete and myself alone, he sounded me as to my disposition for sleep,
saying that if I felt like it my bed was ready for me; but if I was
inclined to wakefulness nothing would please him better than to bear
me company. "I am a late bird, myself," he said, "and, without
suspicion of flattery, I may say that a companion