Bump. Bump. Bump-bump. Bump.
I sat up in bed and listened intently. It seemed to me as if someone
with a muffled hammer were trying to knock bricks out of the wall.
"Burglars," I said to myself (one assumes, as a matter of course, that
everything happening in this world after 1 a.m. is due to burglars), and
I reflected what a curiously literal, but at the same time slow and
cumbersome, method of housebreaking they had adopted.
The bumping continued irregularly, yet uninterruptedly.
My bed was by the window. I reached out my hand and drew aside a corner
of the curtain. The sunlight streamed into the room. I looked at my
watch: it was ten minutes past five.
A most unbusinesslike hour for burglars, I thought. Why, it will be
breakfast-time before they get in.
Suddenly there came a crash, and some substance striking against the
blind fell upon the floor. I sprang out of bed and threw open the
window.
A red-haired young gentleman, scantily clad in a sweater and a pair of
flannel trousers, stood on the lawn below me.
"Good morning," he said cheerily. "Do you mind throwing me back my
ball?"
"What ball?" I said.
"My tennis ball," he answered. "It must be somewhere in the room; it
went clean through the window."