By the time I had finished this exordium, Melons had disappeared, as I fully expected.

He never reappeared.  The remorse that I have experienced for the part I had taken in what I fear may have resulted in his utter and complete extermination, alas, he may not know, except through these pages.  For I have never seen him since.  Whether he ran away and went to sea to reappear at some future day as the most ancient of mariners, or whether he buried himself completely in his trousers, I never shall know.  I have read the papers anxiously for accounts of him.  I have gone to the Police Office in the vain attempt of identifying him as a lost child.  But I never saw him or heard of him since.  Strange fears have sometimes crossed my mind that his venerable appearance may have been actually the result of senility, and that he may have been gathered peacefully to his fathers in a green old age.  I have even had doubts of his existence, and have sometimes thought that he was providentially and mysteriously offered to fill the void I have before alluded to.  In that hope I have written these pages.

SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF MASTER CHARLES SUMMERTON.

At exactly half past nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, August 26, 1865, Master Charles Summerton, aged five years, disappeared mysteriously from his paternal residence on Folsom Street, San Francisco.  At twenty-five minutes past nine he had been observed, by the butcher, amusing himself by going through that popular youthful exercise known as “turning the crab,” a feat in which he was singularly proficient.  At a court of inquiry summarily held in the back parlor at 10.15, Bridget, cook, deposed to have detected him at twenty minutes past nine, in the felonious abstraction of sugar from the pantry, which, by the same token, had she known what was a-comin’, she’d have never previnted.  Patsey, a shrill-voiced youth from a neighboring alley, testified to have seen “Chowley” at half past nine, in front of the butcher’s shop round the corner, but as this young gentleman chose to throw out the gratuitous belief that the missing child had been converted into sausages by the butcher, his testimony was received with some caution by the female portion of the court, and with downright scorn and contumely by its masculine members.  But whatever might have been the hour of his departure, it was certain that from half past ten A. M. until nine P. M., when he was brought home by a policeman, Charles Summerton was missing.  Being naturally of a reticent disposition, he has since resisted, with but one exception, any attempt to wrest from him a statement of his whereabouts during that period.  That exception has been myself.  He has related to me the following in the strictest confidence.