thought best to humour him once more. Accordingly I set about writing
in his notebook from the volume of criticism he had supplied.

"Change a word now and then and skip around here and there," he
suggested as I wrote, "so's it'll sound more like me."

"Quite so, sir," I said, and continued to transcribe from the printed
page. I was beginning the fifth page in the notebook, being in the
midst of an enthusiastic description of the bit of statuary entitled
"The Winged Victory," when I was startled by a wild yell in my ear.
Cousin Egbert had leaped to his feet and now danced in the middle of
the pavement, waving his stick and hat high in the air and shouting
incoherently. At once we attracted the most undesirable attention from
the loungers about us, the waiters and the passers-by in the street,
many of whom stopped at once to survey my charge with the liveliest
interest. It was then I saw that he had merely wished to attract the
attention of some one passing in a cab. Half a block down the
boulevard I saw a man likewise waving excitedly, standing erect in the
cab to do so. The cab thereupon turned sharply, came back on the
opposite side of the street, crossed over to us, and the occupant
alighted.

He was an American, as one might have fancied from his behaviour, a
tall, dark-skinned person, wearing a drooping moustache after the
former style of Cousin Egbert, supplemented by an imperial. He wore a
loose-fitting suit of black which had evidently received no proper
attention from the day he purchased it. Under a folded collar he wore
a narrow cravat tied in a bowknot, and in the bosom of his white shirt
there sparkled a diamond such as might have come from a collection of
crown-jewels. This much I had time to notice as he neared us. Cousin