en his door flew open in the morning and
in rushed the doctor with a newspaper crumpled up in his hand.

"'My dear boy,' he cried, 'I owe you a thousand apologies. You're the
most ill-used lad and I the greatest numskull in the county. Listen to
this!' And he sat down upon the side of the bed, flattened out his
paper upon his knee, and began to read.

"The paragraph was headed, 'Disaster to the Ascombe Hounds,' and it went
on to say that four of the hounds, shockingly torn and mangled, had been
found in Winton Fir Wood upon the South Downs. The run had been so
severe that half the pack were lamed; but the four found in the wood
were actually dead, although the cause of their extraordinary injuries
was still unknown.

"'So, you see,' said the doctor, looking up, 'that I was wrong when I
put the dead hounds among the delusions.'

"'But the cause?' cried Wat.

"'Well, I think we may guess the cause from an item which has been
inserted just as the paper went to press:--

"Late last night, Mr. Brown, of Smither's Farm, to the
east of Hastings, perceived what he imagined to be an enormous
dog worrying one of his sheep. He shot the creature, which
proves to be a grey Siberian wolf of the variety known as
_Lupus Giganticus_. It is supposed to have escaped from some
travelling menagerie.

"That's the story, gentlemen, and Wat Danbury stuck to his good
resolutions, for the fright which he had cured him of all wish to run
such a risk again; and he never touches anything stronger than
lime-juice--at least, he hadn't before he left this part of the country,
five years ago next Lady Day."

THE THREE CORRESPONDENTS

There was only the one little feathery clump of dom palms in all that
great wilderness of black rocks and orange sand. It stood high on the
bank, and below it the brown Nile swirled swiftly towards the Ambigole
Cataract, fitting a little frill of foam round each of the boulders
which studded its surface. Above, out of a naked blue sky, the sun was
beating down upon the sand, and up again from the sand under the brims
of the pith-hats of the horsemen with the scorching glare of a
blast-furnace. It had risen so high that the shadows of the horses were
no larger than themselves.

"Whew!" cried Mortimer, mopping his forehead, "you'd pay five shillings
for this at the hummums."

"Precisely," said Scott. "But you are not asked to ride twenty miles in
a Turkish bath with a field-gla