penance. This merest idea is suggested by something which happened when
The Clever Man instituted a search for his missing knife--but I must
introduce The Clever Man to my reader before describing that rather
beguiling incident.

Conceive a tall, well-dressed, rather athletic, carefully kept, clean and
neat, intelligent, not for a moment despondent, altogether superior man,
fairly young (perhaps twenty-nine) and quite bald. He wins enough every
night at _banque_ to enable him to pay the less fortunate to perform his
_corvee d'eau_ for him. As a consequence he takes his vile coffee in bed
every morning, then smokes a cigarette or two lazily, then drops off for
a nap, and gets up about the middle of the morning promenade. Upon
arising he strops a razor of his own (nobody knows how he gets away with
a regular razor), carefully lathers his face and neck--while gazing into
a rather classy mirror which hangs night and day over his head, above a
little shelf on which he displays at such times a complete toilet
outfit--and proceeds to annihilate the inconsiderable growth of beard
which his mirror reveals to him. Having completed the annihilation, he
performs the most extensive ablutions per one of the three or four pails
which The Enormous Room boasts, which pail is by common consent dedicated
to his personal and exclusive use. All this time he has been singing
loudly and musically the following sumptuously imaginative ditty:

"mEEt me tonIght in DREAmland,
UNder the SIL-v'ry mOOn,
meet me in DREAmland,
sweet dreamy DREAmland--
there all my DRE-ams come trUE."

His English accent is excellent. He pronounces his native language, which