The Facts in the Curious Case of H. Hyrtl, Esq

"Well, sir," said the little man, when Mr. Sisseton had closed the door. "What am I to learn to my advantage?"

At the moment Mr. Sisseton was enjoying the spectacle of that mental panorama in which the past unfolds and which is said to visit those about to drown. Ten years before, to a day, on a delightful June morning he had taken the express for Boston. Jenny was at school in a suburb of that city, and it was to see her that the excursion had been planned. He was not an accomplished traveler. Thus far his journeys -- save that terrible one which we call the War -- had been uneventful and few; as clerk in a wholesale grocery-shop his opportunities for travel had been slight; but a pension for which he had diligently petitioned to the Government had been granted, and to celebrate the occasion the firm he served had allowed him a holiday. On that morning he was therefore in the best of spirits, and as the train moved from the Grand Central Station he hummed very contendedly to himself. The distressing ugliness of the outlying districts were passed unmarked; it was the fragrance of Connecticut intervals that first attracted his attention; then he fell to musing about the possible existence of the people who dwelled in the roomy, white homesteads that appeared and vanished, the vocations of the loungers at the trim little stations that starred the route. A desire for life in the country beset him; he began to picture the pleasures he would enjoy on some little farm where Jenny could grow up in health and innocence, and presently his head nodded and he was asleep.