As the four fugitives sat upright again, and Droop, rubbing his hands with satisfaction, was about to speak, the door of one of the bedchambers was opened, and a stranger dressed in nineteenth-century attire stepped forward, shading his blinking eyes with his hand.
The two women screamed, but Droop only dropped amazed into a chair.
"Francis Bacon!" he exclaimed.
Then, leaping forward eagerly, he cried aloud:
"Gimme them clothes!"
Of the return trip of the five, little need be said save to record one untoward incident which has been the occasion of a most unfortunate historic controversy.
The date-recording instrument must have been deranged in some way, for when, after a great number of eastward turns around the pole, it marked the year 1898, they had really only reached 1857. Supposing themselves to have actually reached the year erroneously indicated by the recorder, they set off southward and made a first landing in Hartford, Connecticut.
Here they discovered their mistake, and returned to the pole to complete their journey in time. All but Francis Bacon. He declared that so much whirling made him giddy, and remained in Connecticut. Alas! Had Phœbe known the result of this desertion, she would never have consented to it.
Bacon, who had read much of Shakespeare while in the Panchronicon, found on returning thus accidentally to modern America, that this playwright was esteemed the first and greatest of poets and dramatists by the modern world. Then and there he planned a conspiracy to rob the greatest character in literary history of his just fame; and, under the pseudonym of "Delia Bacon," advanced those theories of his own concealed authorship which have ever since deluded the uncritical and disgusted all lovers of common-sense and of justice.