t a sleep? or was it a swoon?

I touched his arm, and called to him by his name.

Ariel instantly stepped between us, with a threatening look at me. At
the same moment Miserrimus Dexter raised his head. My voice had reached
him. He looked at me with a curious contemplative quietness in his eyes
which I had never seen in them before.

"Take away the harp," he said to Ariel, speaking in languid tones, like
a man who was very weary.

The mischievous, half-witted creature--in sheer stupidity or in
downright malice, I am not sure which--irritated him once more.

"Why, Master?" she asked, staring at him with the harp hugged in her
arms. "What's come to you? where is the story?"

"We don't want the story," I interposed. "I have many things to say to
Mr. Dexter which I have not said yet."

Ariel lifted her heavy hand. "You will have it!" she said, and advanced
toward me. At the same moment the Master's voice stopped her.

"Put away the harp, you fool!" he repeated, sternly. "And wait for the
story until I choose to tell it."

She took the harp submissively back to its place at the end of the room.
Miserrimus Dexter moved his chair a little closer to mine. "I know what
will rouse me," he said, confidentially. "Exercise will do it. I have
had no exercise lately. Wait a little, and you will see."

He put his hands on the machinery of the chair, and started on his
customary course down the room. Here again the ominous change in him
showed itself under a new form. The pace at which he traveled was not
the furious pace that I remembered; the chair no longer rushed under him
on rumbling and whistling wheels. It went, but it went slowly. Up the
room and down the room he painfully urged it--and then he stopped for
want of breath.

We followed him. Ariel was first, and Benjamin was by my side. He
motioned impatiently to both of them to stand back, and to let me
approach him alone.

"I'm out of practice," he said, faintly. "I hadn't the heart to make the
wheels roar and the floor tremble while you were away."

Who would not have pitied him? Who would have remembered his misdeeds
at that moment? Even Ariel felt it. I heard her beginning to whine
and whimper behind me. The magician who alone could rouse the dormant
sensibilities in her nature had awakened them now by his neglect. Her
fatal cry was heard again, in mournful, moaning tones--

"What's come to you, Master? Where's the story?"

"Never mind her," I whispered to h