Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/117

 his mind to thoughts of the Langton bungalow. He was not sure what a bungalow was, but among his mother’s china were some cheap modern imitations of old willow-pattern plates in blue; and his sister had once told him the nursery story of the Chinese lovers whose history was pictured in the design; and he recalled the house in her story as a bungalow. Consequently, he saw the Langton cottage in Prussian blue with scroll-work eaves and a pagoda’s finials. Consequently, also, the Langton trout stream was as broad as the Chinese river, and it floated a junk with a shed in its stern.

He struggled vaguely with the absurdities of this fancy, but without succeeding in correcting them. The sight of the Hudson River distracted him. After a great deal of kaleidoscopic meditation, he arrived at nothing better than a picture of himself, disguised in his former uniform of a telegraph messenger, climbing over a zigzag fence of Chinese lattice to deliver a forged telegram to