By bedtime--in their impatience to taste of a terrestrial couch again our
seafarers went to bed early--it was still insufferably hot, and the buzz
of the mosquitoes at the open windows might have passed for an audible
crepitation of the temperature. "We can't stand this, you know,"
the young Englishmen said to each other; and they tossed about all night
more boisterously than they had tossed upon the Atlantic billows.
On the morrow, their first thought was that they would re-embark that day
for England; and then it occured to them that they might find an asylum
nearer at hand. The cave of Aeolus became their ideal of comfort,
and they wondered where the Americans went when they wished to cool off.
They had not the least idea, and they determined to apply for information
to Mr. J. L. Westgate. This was the name inscribed in a bold hand on the back
of a letter carefully preserved in the pocketbook of our junior traveler.
Beneath the address, in the left-hand corner of the envelope,
were the words, "Introducing Lord Lambeth and Percy Beaumont, Esq."
The letter had been given to the two Englishmen by a good friend
of theirs in London, who had been in America two years previously,
and had singled out Mr. J. L. Westgate from the many friends
he had left there as the consignee, as it were, of his compatriots.
"He is a capital fellow," the Englishman in London had said,
"and he has got an awfully pretty wife. He's tremendously hospitable--
he will do everything in the world for you; and as he knows everyone
over there, it is quite needless I should give you any other introduction.
He will make you see everyone; trust to him for putting you into circulation.
He has got a tremendously pretty wife." It was natural that in the hour
of tribulation Lord Lambeth and Mr. Percy Beaumont should have bethought
themselves of a gentleman whose attractions had been thus vividly depicted;
all the more so that he lived in the Fifth Avenue, and that the Fifth Avenue,
as they had ascertained the night before, was contiguous to their hotel.