berg
curiosity-shop?" he asked.

"He didn't," Waynflete explained. "I never saw the ambassador, and
neither did the old German lady who kept the shop. She told me she
bought it from a Japanese acrobat who was out of an engagement and
desperately hard up. But she told me also that the acrobat had told her
that the garment had belonged to an ambassador who had given it to him
as a reward of his skill, and that he never would have parted with it
if he had not been dead-broke."

Stuyvesant held the robe up to the light and inspected the embroidery
on the skirt of it.

"Yes," he said, at last, "this would account for it, I suppose. This
bit here was probably meant to suggest 'the well where the head was
washed,'--see?"

"I see that those lines may be meant to represent the outline of a
spring of water, but I don't see what that has to do with my dream,"
Waynflete answered.

"Don't you?" Stuyvesant returned. "Then I'll show you. You had on this
silk garment embroidered here with an outline of the well in which was
washed the head of Kotsuke no Suke, the man whom the Forty-Seven Ronins
killed. You know the story?"

"I read it in Japan, but----" began Cosmo.

"You had that story stored away in your subconsciousness," interrupted
his friend. "And when you hypnotized yourself by peering into the
crystal ball, this embroidery it was which suggested to you to see
yourself as the hero of the tale--Oishi Kuranosuke, the chief of the
Forty-Seven Ronins, the faithful follower who avenged his master by
pretending to be vicious and dissipated--just like Brutus and
Lorenzaccio--until the enemy was off his guard and open to attack."

"I think I do recall the tale of the Forty-Seven Ronins, but only very
vaguely," said the hero of the dream. "For all I know I may have had
the adventure of Oishi Kuranosuke laid on the shelf somewhere in my
subconsciousness, as you want me to believe. But how about my Persian
dragon and my Iberian noblewoman?"

Paul Stuyvesant was examining the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador
with minute care. Suddenly he said, "Oh!" and then he looked up at
Cosmo Waynflete and asked: "What are those buttons? They seem to be old
coins."

"They are old coins," the other answered; "it was a fancy of mine to
utilize them on that Japanese dressing-gown. They are all different,
you see. The first is----"

"Persian, isn't it?" interrupted Stuyvesant.

"Yes," Waynflete explained, "it is a Persian daric. And th