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unbearable as the snow; and so, seeking relief, I went out on the second day to look at my horse, slipped on a stone, broke my collarbone, and thereafter underwent not the snow test, but the test of flat-on-the-back. A test that comes once too often for any man to stand.

However, I bore up cheerfully. I was now merely a spectator, and from my couch in the big room I could lie and watch the human interplay with that detached, impassive, impersonal feeling which French writers tell us is so valuable to the litterateur, and American writers to the faro-dealer.

“I shall go crazy in this abominable, mee-serrhable place!” was Etienne’s constant prediction.

“Never knew Mark Twain to bore me before,” said Ross, over and over. He sat by the other window, hour after hour, a box of Pittsburg stogies of the length, strength, and odour of a Pittsburg graft scandal deposited on one side of him, and “Roughing It,” “The Jumping Frog,” and “Life on the Mississippi” on the other. For every chapter he lit a new stogy, puffing furiously. This, in time, gave him a recurrent premonition of cramps, gastritis, smoker’s colic, or whatever it is they have in Pittsburg after a too deep indulgence in graft scandals. To fend off the colic, Ross resorted time and again to Old Doctor Still’s Amber-Coloured U.S. A. Colic Cure. Result, after forty-eight hours—nerves.

“Positive fact I never knew Mark Twain to make me tired before. Positive fact.” Ross slammed