syne, I ran up and knocked their heads together, kicked them into the
dormitory, turned the key on their reproaches, and--these
preliminaries over--descended to grapple with the situation.

Mr. Stimcoe, in night garments, was conducting a dialogue in which he
figured alternately as the tyrant and the victim of oppression.
In the character of Napoleon Bonaparte he had filled a footbath with
cold water, and was commanding the Rev. Philip Stimcoe to strip--as
he put it--to the teeth, and immerse himself forthwith. As the Rev.
Philip Stimcoe, patriot and martyr, he was obstinately, and with even
more passion, refusing to do anything of the kind, and for the
equally cogent reasons that he was a Protestant of the Protestants
and that the water had cockroaches in it.

"Of course," said Mr. Stimcoe to me, "if you present yourself as
Alexander of Russia, there is no more to be said, always provided"--
and here he removed his nightcap and made me a profound bow--"that
your credentials are satisfactory."

Apparently they were. At any rate, I prevailed on him to return to
his room, when he took my arm, and, seating himself on the bedside,
recited to me the paradigms of the more anomalous Greek verbs with
great volubility for twenty minutes on end--that is to say, until
Mrs. Stimcoe returned with the doctor safely tucked under her wing.

At sight of me seated in charge of the patient, Dr. Spargo--a mild
little man--lifted his eyebrows.

"Surely, madam--" he began in a scandalized tone.