WE sought you at your house, Kit,” said Dr. Ulswater; “we sought you also at the establishment where you generate that mystical fluid which now travels meekly, invisibly, its slender wires, and now spits like a red-hot cat. You electrical engineers have your fingers on the pulse of the universe. I admire in you the representatives of the age.
“The condition of affairs in Portate was most mixed and unclassified. No light anywhere, except here and there a smoky lantern, and such sulphurous beams as the eye of imagination might detect, or conceive, gleaming from the bosoms of some thousands of furious citizens. We reached the railway station with the feeling of having been miraculously rescued. The town, however, was quieting down. Most of the citizens had gone home to plot your assassination. Your ultimatum seemed to be everywhere known. Evidently you were not meaning to be found that night by friend or foe, and therefore Sadler and I went our way in the interests of archæology.
“There is a national museum at the capital of this country, which contains an extraordinary collection of Inca relics, but is as disorderly as Portate emotions. Thither we went by the slowest train the ingenuity of man ever invented, getting what sleep we could, through the night, upon car seats of mistaken construction, each one of which was a populous commonwealth of bugs.
“Arrived at our destination in the morning, I found my way to the Museum, and presently was buried from the world, lost to the present. It must have been near noon when Sadler came and found me surrounded by pottery, weapons, tools, and the swathed bundles of the mummied dead.
“'Doctor,' he said; 'when's your birthday?'
“I reflected.
“'Bless my soul, it's to-morrow! This thing's got to stop! I'll be older than an Inca!'
“'You're a swaddled infant,' he said. I thought Mrs. Ulswater said it was to-morrow. I've got a present for you.'
“Birthdays, indeed! What had I to do with birthdays, who was reborn into eternity on the day I married Mrs. Ulswater! I had no use for them. I wished some one would make me a present of the treasures of that mixed-up and ruinous museum, and rescue them for archaeology. Carvings! Do you happen to know that the Inca signs of the Zodiac are practically identical with the Egyptian, that, moreover, they probably antedate them, that——”
“No, we don't,” interrupted Sadler. “It ain't so.”