Now, this private hotel of mine was a very old fashioned house, dark
and dingy all day long, with heavy old chandeliers and black old oak,
and dead flowers in broken flower-pots surrounding a grimy grass-plot
in the rear. On this latter my bedroom window looked; and never am
I likely to forget the vile music of the cats throughout my first
long wakeful night there. The second night they actually woke me;
doubtless they had been busy long enough, but it was all of a sudden
that I heard them, and lay listening for more, wide awake in an
instant. My window had been very softly opened, and the draught
fanned my forehead as I held my breath.

A faint light glimmered through a ground-glass pane over the door;
and was dimly reflected by the toilet mirror, in its usual place
against the window. This mirror I saw moved, and next moment I had
bounded from bed.

The mirror fell with a horrid clatter: the toilet-table followed it
with a worse: the thief had gone as he had come ere my toes halted
aching amid the debris.

A useless little balcony - stone slab and iron railing - jutted out
from my window. I thought I saw a hand on the railing, another
on the slab, then both together on the lower level for one instant
before they disappeared. There was a dull yet springy thud on the
grass below. Then no more noise but the distant thunder of the
traffic, and the one that woke me, until the window next mine was
thrown up.

"What the devil's up?"