CHAPTER ONE.
WHO SHOT THE DOG?
A shot! a yell! silence! Such, as soon as I could collect myself sufficiently to form an idea at all, were my midnight sensations as I sat up in my bed, with my chin on my knees, my hair on end, my body bedewed with cold perspiration, and my limbs trembling from the tips of my fingers to the points of my toes.
I had been peacefully dreaming--something about an automatic machine into which you might drop a Latin exercise and get it back faultlessly construed and written out.

I had, in fact, got to the point of attempting nefariously to avail myself of its services.

I had folded up the fiendish exercise on the passive subjunctive which Plummer had set us overnight, and was in the very act of consigning it to the mechanical crib, when the shot and the yell projected me, all of a heap, out of dreamland into the waking world.
At first I was convinced it must have been the sound of my exercise falling into the machine, and Plummer's howl of indignation at finding himself circumvented.
No! Machine and all had vanished, but the noises rang on in my waking ears.
Was it thunder and storm?
No.

The pale moonlight poured in a gentle flood through the window, and not a leaf stirred in the elms without.
Was it one of the fellows fallen out of bed?
No.

On every hand reigned peaceful slumber.