Klang and steps. 

 Everyone very sore about me. I should worry, however. 

 One hour, I guess. 

 Steps. Sudden throwing of door open. Pause. 

 “Come out, American.” 

 As I came out, toting bed and bed-roll, I remarked: “I’m sorry to leave you,” which made T-c furiously to masticate his insignificant moustache. 

 Escorted to bureau, where I am turned over to a very fat gendarme. 

 “This is the American.” The v-f-g eyed me, and I read my sins in his porklike orbs. “Hurry, we have to walk,” he ventured sullenly and commandingly. 

 Himself stooped puffingly to pick up the segregated sack. And I placed my bed, bed-roll, blankets and ample pelisse under one arm, my 150-odd pound duffle-bag under the other; then I paused. Then I said, “Where’s my cane?” 

 The v-f-g hereat had a sort of fit, which perfectly became him. 

 I repeated gently: “When I came to the bureau I had a cane.” 

 “I don’t give a damn about your cane,” burbled my new captor frothily, his pink evil eyes swelling with wrath. 

 “I’m staying,” I replied calmly, and sat down on a curb, in the midst of my ponderous trinkets. 

 A crowd of gendarmes gathered. One didn’t take a cane with one to prison (I was glad to know where I was bound, and thanked this communicative gentleman); or criminals weren’t allowed canes; or where exactly did I think I was, in the Tuileries? asks a rube movie-cop personage. 

 “Very well, gentlemen,” I said. “You will allow me to tell you something.” (I was beet-colored.) “In America that sort of thing isn’t done.” 

 This haughty inaccuracy produced an astonishing effect, namely, the prestidigitatorial vanishment of the v-f-g. The v-f-g’s numerous confrères looked scared and twirled their 

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