Quires of paper were exhausted; he worked all day and all the evening with no result.

That it was not in a foreign language my friend was well assured.
"For well hee knows the Latine and the Dutche; Of Fraunce and Toscanie he hath a touche." Russian is familiar to him, and Arabic would not have been an unknown quantity.

So he began again with the next day, and had been breaking the Sabbath until four o'clock in the afternoon, when I entered, and the mystic advertisement was submitted to me.

I glanced at it, and at once read it into English, though as I read the smile at my friend's lost labour vanished in a sense of sympathy for what the writer must have suffered.

It was as follows, omitting names:-- "MANDY jins of -- - -- -.