was awake, he stole softly out and was the first in the dining-room for
breakfast. He owned to casual acquaintance in moments of expansion that
breakfast was his best meal, but he did what he could to make it his
worst by beginning with oranges and oatmeal, going forward to beefsteak
and fried potatoes, and closing with griddle cakes and syrup, washed down
with a cup of cocoa, which his wife decided to be wholesomer than coffee.
By the time he had finished such a repast, he crept out of the
dining-room in a state of tension little short of anguish, which he
confided to the sympathy of the bootblack in the washroom.

He always went from having his shoes polished to get a toothpick at the
clerk's desk; and at the Middlemount House, the morning after he had been
that drive with Mrs. Lander, he lingered a moment with his elbows beside
the register. "How about a buckboa'd?" he asked.

"Something you can drive yourself"--the clerk professionally dropped his
eye to the register--"Mr. Lander?"

"Well, no, I guess not, this time," the little man returned, after a
moment's reflection. "Know anything of a family named Claxon, down the
road, here, a piece?" He twisted his head in the direction he meant.

"This is my first season at Middlemount; but I guess Mr. Atwell will
know." The clerk called to the landlord, who was smoking in his private
room behind the office, and the landlord came out. The clerk repeated Mr.
Lander's questions.

"Pootty good kind of folks, I guess," said the landlord provisionally,
through his cigar-smoke. "Man's a kind of univussal genius, but he's got
a nice family of children; smaht as traps, all of 'em."