CHAPTER IX.
two business men transact a little business.
—"Pray, sir, have you seen a gentleman with a weed hereabouts, rather a saddish gentleman? Strange where he can have gone to. I was talking with him not twenty minutes since."
By a brisk, ruddy-cheeked man in a tasseled traveling-cap, carrying under his arm a ledger-like volume, the above words were addressed to the collegian before introduced, suddenly accosted by the rail to which not long after his retreat, as in a previous chapter recounted, he had returned, and there remained.
"Have you seen him, sir?"
Rallied from his apparent diffidence by the genial jauntiness of the stranger, the youth answered with unwonted promptitude: "Yes, a person with a weed was here not very long ago."
"Saddish?"
"Yes, and a little cracked, too, I should say."
"It was he. Misfortune, I fear, has disturbed his brain. Now quick, which way did he go ?"
"Why just in the direction from which you came, the gangway yonder."
"Did he? Then the man in the gray coat, whom I
