The young man glanced uneasily over his shoulder, but all beyond the lamp was a gloomy blank, The same moment he trod upon some tough, thick substance, which yielded beneath his foot!  Thoroughly startled, he jumped back.  It lay near the foot of the clock.  He stooped, picked it up, and held in his hands the well-known haversack, from which he had parted on board the “Empire State.”  How his heart beat as he examined it!  It was stained and whitened with salt water, and the strap was broken in two.  Opening it, there were his toilet articles and all his other treasures,—­even the cherished miniature,—­not much the worse for their wetting.  So there could no longer be any doubt that his uncle had come back.  Where was he?

That queer fancy about the clock stuck in Balder’s head!  Somehow or other it must be connected with Doctor Glyphic.  The haversack, dropped at its foot, was direct evidence.  Yet, did ever wise man harbor notion so irrational!  Its manifest absurdity only excuse for thinking it.

With no declared object in view, Balder grasped the clock by its high shoulders and shook it, but with no result.  He next struck the smartly with clenched fist:  the blow sounded,—­not hollow, but close and muffled!  The case either solid, or filled with something that deadened the echo.  Filled with what? who would think of putting anything in a clock?  It was big enough to be sure, to hold a man, if he could find a way to get in!

The sequence of thoughts is often obscure, but Balder’s next idea, wild as it was, could hardly be called incoherent.  A man might be conceived to be in the clock; perhaps a man was in it; but if so, the man could be none other than Doctor Hiero Glyphic!

This conclusion once imagined, suspense was unendurable.  The logician tried to open the front of the case, but it was riveted fast.  With impetuous fingers he then wrenched at the disc.  With a sound like a rusty screech, it came off in his hands.  The lamp so flickered that Balder feared it was going out, and even at this epoch had to look round to reassure himself.  Meanwhile, a pungent, but not unpleasant odor saluted his nostrils:  he turned back to the clock,—­a clock no longer!—­and beheld the unmistakable lineaments of his worthy uncle peeping forth with half-shut eyes from the place where the dial-plate had been.

The nephew dropped the dial-plate, and it was shattered on the granite floor.  He was badly frightened.  There was no delusion about the face,—­it was a sufficiently peculiar one; and the miniature portrait, though doing the Doctor’s beauty at least justice, was accurate enough to identify him by.  This was no unsubstantial apparition,—­no brain phantom, to waver and vanish, leaving only an uncomfortable doubt whether it had been at all.  Stolid, undeniable matter was, peering phlegmatically between its wrinkled eyelids.