I shall never forget the day I first saw him! That, indeed, was a day to be marked in my note-book with a red cross. I kept red ink and maltese ink in my cabin, to be used when things did or did not happen, as the case might be. By this simple method I was enabled to keep track of the notes suitable for the magazines which pay the best, reserving the others for the periodicals which reimburse their army of contributors at the starvation rate of a cent a word, no distinction being made between long and short words. It is depressing, when you think of it, that a long scientific name brings no more than a plain Anglo-Saxon word in one syllable, and that only a cent apiece is paid for new words coined for the occasion and which have never before been printed in any book.

But I digress. It was early in the Spring when my physician said to me: "My dear Mr. Johnson-Sitdown, you are getting dashed dotty." This was a pleasing allusion to my employment, for, as the discerning reader has long since guessed, I was a telegraph operator in a great city, where the click of the instrument was superadded to the roar of the elevated trains, the rumble of the surface cars, and the nerve-destroying concussions made by the breaking of the cable during rush hours morning and evening.

"What you need," said this gifted scientist to me, "is absolute rest and quiet. If you do not pack up and take to the woods within three days from the receipt of this notice, I will not answer for the consequences. Your brain is slowly but surely giving way. Your batteries are becoming exhausted and must be renewed if measurable currents are to be expected. I recommend new cells, rather than recharging from a dynamo. Get busy now, and let me see you no more until September first."

Face to face with my death warrant, as it were, I unhesitatingly obeyed. Fortunately, my grandmother had left me a small log cabin in a clearing, this being her ancestral domicile and the only piece of real estate she possessed at the time of her long-delayed demise some months back. Without waiting to inspect it, I hurried to my new home, accompanied only by a few books on Natural History—which, as I afterward discovered, were by ignorant and untrustworthy writers, seeking to prey upon the credulity of the uninstructed public,—and Tom-Tom, my Cat.

I had not intended to take Tom-Tom, but his fine animal instinct warned him of my impending departure, and he sat upon my bookcase and wailed piteously all through my packing. My foolish heart has always been strangely tender toward the lower animals, and I hastened to reassure 

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