"I'm going down stairs to ask at the office," said the Unwiseman. "They'll probably know all about it."
So the little old gentleman pattered down the hall to the elevator and went to the office to inquire as to the fate of the Emperor Napoleon. In five minutes he was back again.
"Say, Mollie," he whispered through the key-hole. "I wish you'd ask your father about the Umpire. I can't seem to find out anything about him."
"Don't they know at the office?" asked Mollie.
"Oh I guess they know all right," said the Unwiseman, "but there's a hitch somewhere in my getting the information. Far as I can find out these people over here don't understand their own language. I asked 'em in French, like this: 'Mounseer le Umpire, est il mort?' And they told me he was no more. Now whether no more means that he is not mort, or is mort, depends on what language the man who told me was speaking. If he was speaking French he's not dead. If he was speaking English he is dead, and there you are. It's awfully mixed up."
"I-guess-seez-ded-orright," whistled Whistlebinkie. "He was dead last time I heard of him, and I guess when they're dead once there dead for good."
"Well you never can tell," said the Unwiseman. "He was a very great man, the Umpire Napoleon was, and they might have only thought he was dead while he was playing foxy to see what the newspapers would say about him."
So Mollie asked her father and to the intense regret of everybody it turned out that the great Emperor had been dead for a long time.
"It's a very great disappointment to me," sighed the Unwiseman, when Mollie conveyed the sad news to him. "The minute I knew we were coming to France I began to read up about the country, and Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the things I came all the way over to see. Are the Boys de Bologna dead too?"
"I never heard of them," said Mollie.