house for the imposture which you have attempted to play here?"

"No apologies are due, sir; and as for the rest of it, I publicly charge
you with pilfering my note from Mr. Burgess and substituting a copy of it
signed with your own name. There is no other way by which you could have
gotten hold of the test-remark; I alone, of living men, possessed the
secret of its wording."

There was likely to be a scandalous state of things if this went on;
everybody noticed with distress that the shorthand scribes were
scribbling like mad; many people were crying "Chair, chair! Order!
order!" Burgess rapped with his gavel, and said:

"Let us not forget the proprieties due. There has evidently been a
mistake somewhere, but surely that is all. If Mr. Wilson gave me an
envelope--and I remember now that he did--I still have it."

He took one out of his pocket, opened it, glanced at it, looked surprised
and worried, and stood silent a few moments. Then he waved his hand in a
wandering and mechanical way, and made an effort or two to say something,
then gave it up, despondently. Several voices cried out:

"Read it! read it! What is it?"

So he began, in a dazed and sleep-walker fashion:

"'The remark which I made to the unhappy stranger was this: "You are far
from being a bad man. [The house gazed at him marvelling.] Go, and
reform."' [Murmurs: "Amazing! what can this mean?"] This one," said the
Chair, "is signed Thurlow G. Wilson."