PAGE
Sport Royal:
Chapter I.The Sequel to the Ball,[1]
“II.At the Hôtel Magnifique,[31]
“III.The Mission of the Ruby,[54]
A Tragedy in Outline,[99]
A Malapropos Parent,[102]
How they Stopped the “Run,”[115]
A Little Joke,[126]
A Guardian of Morality,[139]
Not a Bad Deal,[154]
Middleton’s Model,[169]
My Astral Body,[185]
The Nebraska Loadstone,[204]
A Successful Rehearsal,[216]

SPORT ROYAL.

An Extract from the Journals
of Julius Jason, Esquire.


CHAPTER I.
The Sequel to the Ball.

Heidelberg seems rather a tourist-ridden, hackneyed sort of place to be the mother of adventures. Nevertheless, it is there that my story begins. I had been traveling on the Continent, and came to Heidelberg to pay my duty to the castle, and recruit in quiet after a spell of rather laborious idleness at Homburg and Baden. At first sight I made up my mind that the place would bore me, and I came down to dinner at the hotel, looking forward only to a bad dinner and an early bed. The room was so full that I could not get a table to myself, and, seeing one occupied only by a couple of gentlemanly looking men, I made for it, and took the third seat, facing one of the strangers, a short, fair young man, with a little flaxen mustache and a soldierlike air, and having the other, who was older, dark, and clean-shaved, on my left. The fourth seat was empty.