He walked the floor for half an hour puzzling over his enigma, then he hunted out two other glass plates.
He sat down and puzzled over these things a good while, but kept muttering, “It’s no use; I can’t understand it. They don’t tally right, and yet I’ll swear the names and dates are right, and so of course they ought to tally. I never labeled one of these thing carelessly in my life. There is a most extraordinary mystery here.”
He was tired out, now, and his brains were beginning to clog. He said he would sleep himself fresh, and then see what he could do with this riddle. He slept through a troubled and unrestful hour, then unconsciousness began to shred away, and presently he rose drowsily to a sitting posture. “Now what was that dream?” he said, trying to recall it; “what was that dream?—it seemed to unravel that puz—”
He landed in the middle of the floor at a bound, without finishing the sentence, and ran and turned up his light and seized his “records.” He took a single swift glance at them and cried out—
“It’s so! Heavens, what a revelation! And for twenty-three years no man has ever suspected it!”
[CHAPTER XXI.]
Doom.
He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.