While I was rapidly muttering these observations, he was pulling away from me and stealing into the house after his prophet.  Finding that there was no stopping him, I followed, in obedience, perhaps, to that great and no doubt beneficent, but as yet unexplained, instinct which causes sheep to leap after their bellwether.  We were in a basement, or semi-subterranean story.  I felt the walls of a narrow passage on either side of me, and can swear to a kitchen near by, for I smelt its cooking-range.  I walked on the foremost end of my toes, and would have paid five dollars for a pair of list slippers.  Rather than take another such little promenade as I had in that passage, I would submit to be placed on the middle sleeper of a railroad-bridge, with an express-train coming at me without a cowcatcher.  Presently I overtook the Doctor’s coat-tails again, and found that they were ascending a staircase.  At the top of the stairs was a door, and on the other side of the door was a room, the uses of which I won’t undertake to swear to, for I never saw it, although I was in it longer than I wanted to be.  All I know is that it seemed to be as full of chairs, and tables, and sofas, and sideboards, and stoves, and crickets, as if it had been a shop for second-hand furniture.  I was just rubbing my shins after an encounter with a remarkably solid object, nature uncertain, when somebody near me fell over something with a crash and a groan.  Immediately somebody else seized me by the cravat and began to throttle me.  Whoever it was, I floored him with a right-hander, and sent him across the other person, as I judged by the combined grunt, and the desperate, though dumb struggle which followed.  Now there were two of them down, and how many standing I could not guess.  An instant afterward, a muffled voice, like that of a man only half awake, shouted from a room behind me, “Who’s there?  Get out!  I’m a-coming!” This seemed to encourage the individuals who were having a rough-and-tumble on the carpet, for they commenced roaring simultaneously, “Help! murder! thieves! fire!” without, however, relaxing hostilities for a moment.

The next pleasant incident was a pistol-shot, the ball of which whizzed so near my head that it made me dodge, although I have not the least notion who fired it or whom it was aimed at.  Female screams and masculine shouts now sounded from various directions.  Thinking that I had done all the good in my power, I concluded to get out of this confusion; but either the doorway by which we entered had suddenly walled itself up, or else I had lost my reckoning; for, stumble where I would, feel about as I would, I could not find it.  I did, indeed, come to an opening in the wall, but there was no staircase the other side of it, and it simply introduced me to another invisible apartment.  I had no chance to reflect upon the matter and decide of my own free will whether I would go in or not.  A sudden rush of fighting, howling persons swept me along, jammed me against a pillar,