Thanks to the incessant sting of his finger and the maddening exasperation of the predicament he was in, Carrington was nearly frantic.
"Oh," he exclaimed, "I'll have to disturb them for that oil sooner or later, so I'd better do it right off."
With that he started for the boss's door, trailing the hose after him. His heart thumped as he rang the bell. Standing in close to the wall, he kept the nozzle behind his back, thinking it better to explain before displaying his appendage.
There was a sound of slippered feet, and, from the opposite direction, a sound of slipping hose. The door was unlocked, and the remainder of the canvas-and-rubber coil that had kept back the water unrolled down upon the floor.
"Who's there?" growled Mr. Stockbridge, arrayed in a bath-robe and squinting out into the dimly lighted corridor without his glasses.
Mortification seemed to paralyze Carrington's speech. Bringing the nozzle forward abjectly, so that Mr. Stockbridge could see his plight, he faltered:
At that moment his finger was shot like a bullet from a gun, and the ensuing stream of water caught Mr. Stockbridge squarely in the throat.
Simultaneously, a supreme inspiration came to Carrington.
"I'm a _fireman_," he cried in a disguised voice. "Wake your family at once!"
Whereupon, as Mr. Stockbridge rushed back into the apartment, Carrington, dropping the hose, made a thrilling rescue of himself down the stairway, and darted into the street before the drowsy dignitary in the vestibule could raise his head.
FELICE ELEFANTINE, _Soloiste of the evening_
I. GASTRONOMIC SYMPHONY--_Kovik-Bordunov_
(a) Allegretti (b) Pistachio (c) Chianti (d) Risotto, con aglio
III. ARIA FROM "IL CAMPANILE" _Gondola_ (SIGNORINA ELEFANTINE)
I. _Gastronomic Symphony_. It is not certain when Ptior Kovik-Bordunov was born. His parents, being thrifty peasants, put him in a basket and left him on the steppes of Russia. Adopted by a Russian Princess, named Caviar Vodka, he was raised as if he had been her own dog. His early musical inclination was so pronounced that he was sent to the Warsaw Conservatory, where he served three terms. Soon after being released from this institution he wrote "Samovar," the opera that made him famous. "Samovar" so pleased the Czar that young Bordunov was given a pension and a bath. But alas! either his sudden success or the bath so affected his mind, that from that time on the authorities were obliged to keep him in confinement. The above symphony was written on the walls of his cell, from which it was transcribed after his suicide. It depicts the blight of all his hopes, the sorrows of Russia, the drowning of his fiancée, the height of the steppes, and the agonies of indigestion.