MORE “SHORT SIXES.”

MORE “SHORT SIXES”~
BY H·C·BUNNER~

ILLUSTRATED BY C·J·TAYLOR·
KEPPLER & SCHWARZMANN·PUBLISHERS.
PUCK BUILDING·NEW·YORK·MDCCCXCIV··

Copyright, 1894, by Keppler & Schwarzmann.

TO
A. L. B.

Contents.

THE CUMBERSOME HORSE.

T is not to be denied that a sense of disappointment pervaded Mr. Brimmington’s being in the hour of his first acquaintance with the isolated farm-house which he had just purchased, sight unseen, after long epistolary negotiations with Mr. Hiram Skinner, postmaster, carpenter, teamster and real estate agent of Bethel Corners, who was now driving him to his new domain.

Perhaps the feeling was of a mixed origin. Indian Summer was much colder up in the Pennsylvania hills than he had expected to find it; and the hills themselves were much larger and bleaker and barer, and far more indifferent in their demeanor toward him, than he had expected to find them. Then Mr. Skinner had been something of a disappointment, himself. He was too familiar with his big, knobby, red hands; too furtive with his small, close-set eyes; too profuse of tobacco-juice, and too raspingly loquacious. And certainly the house itself did not meet his expectations when he first saw it, standing lonely and desolate in its ragged meadows of stubble and wild-grass on the unpleasantly steep mountain-side.

And yet Mr. Skinner had accomplished for him the desire of his heart. He had always said that when he should come into his money—forty thousand dollars from a maiden aunt—he would quit forever his toilsome job of preparing Young Gentlemen for admission to the Larger Colleges and Universities, and would devote the next few years to writing his long-projected “History of Prehistoric Man.” And to go about this task he had always said that he would go and live in perfect solitude—that is, all by himself and a chorewoman—in a secluded farm-house, situated upon the southerly slope of some high hill—an old farm-house—a Revolutionary farm-house, if possible—a delightful, long, low, rambling farm-house—a farm-house with floors of various levels—a farm-house with crooked Stairs, and with nooks and corners and quaint cupboards—this—this had been the desire of Mr. Brimmington’s heart.

Mr. Brimmington, when he came into his money at the age of forty-five, fixed on Pike County, Pennsylvania, as a mountainous country of good report. A postal-guide informed him that Mr. Skinner was the postmaster of Bethel Corners; so, Mr. Brimmington wrote to Mr. Skinner.

The correspondence between Mr. Brimmington and Mr. Skinner was long enough and full enough to have settled a treaty between two nations. It ended by a discovery of a house lonely enough and aged enough to fill the bill. Several hundred dollars’ worth of repairs were needed to make it habitable, and Mr. Skinner was employed to make them. Toward the close of a cold November day, Mr. Brimmington saw his purchase for the first time.

In spite of his disappointment, he had to admit, as he walked around the place in the early twilight, that it was just what he had bargained for. The situation, the dimensions, the exposure, were all exactly what had been stipulated. About its age there could be no question. Internally, its irregularity—indeed, its utter failure to conform to any known rules of domestic architecture—surpassed Mr. Brimmington’s wildest expectations. It had stairs eighteen inches wide; it had rooms of strange shapes and sizes; it had strange, shallow cupboards in strange places; it had no hallways; its windows were of odd design, and whoso wanted variety in floors could find it there. And along the main wall of Mr. Brimmington’s study there ran a structure some three feet and a half high and nearly as deep, which Mr. Skinner confidently assured him was used in old times as a wall-bench or a dresser, indifferently. “You might think,” said Mr. Skinner, “that all that space inside there was jest wasted; but it ain’t so. Them seats is jest filled up inside with braces so’s that you can set on them good and solid.” And then Mr. Skinner proudly called attention to the two coats of gray paint spread over the entire side of the house, walls, ceilings and woodwork, blending the original portions and the Skinner restorations in one harmonious, homogenous whole.

Mr. Skinner might have told him that this variety of gray paint is highly popular in some rural districts, and is made by mixing lamp-black and ball-blue with a low grade of white lead. But he did not say it; and he drove away as soon as he conveniently could, after formally introducing him to Mrs. Sparhawk, a gaunt, stern-faced, silent, elderly woman. Mrs. Sparhawk was to take charge of his bachelor establishment during the day time. Mrs. Sparhawk cooked him a meal for which she very properly apologized. Then she returned to her kitchen to “clean up.” Mr. Brimmington went to the front door, partly to look out upon his property, and partly to turn his back on the gray paint. There were no steps before the front door, but a newly-graded mound or earthwork about the size of a half-hogshead. He looked out upon his apple-orchard, which was further away than he had expected to find it. It had been out of bearing for ten years, but this Mr. Brimmington did not know. He did know, however, that the whole outlook was distinctly dreary.

As he stood there and gazed out into the twilight, two forms suddenly approached him. Around one corner of the house came Mrs. Sparhawk on her way home. Around the other came an immensely tall, whitish shape, lumbering forward with a heavy tread. Before he knew it, it had scrambled up the side of his mound with a clumsy, ponderous rush, and was thrusting itself directly upon him when he uttered so lusty a cry of dismay that it fell back startled; and, wheeling about a great long body that swayed on four misshapen legs, it pounded off in the direction it had come from, and disappeared around the corner. Mr. Brimmington turned to Mrs. Sparhawk in disquiet and indignation.

“Mrs. Sparhawk,” he demanded; “what is that?”

“It’s a horse,” said Mrs. Sparhawk, not at all surprised, for she knew that Mr. Brimmington was from the city. “They hitch ’em to wagons here.”

“I know it is a horse, Mrs. Sparhawk,” Mr. Brimmington rejoined with some asperity; “but whose horse is it, and what is it doing on my premises?”

“I don’t rightly know whose horse it is,” replied Mrs. Sparhawk; “the man that used to own it, he’s dead now.”

“But what,” inquired Mr. Brimmington sternly, “is the animal doing here?”

“I guess he b’longs here,” Mrs. Sparhawk said. She had a cold, even, impersonal way of speaking, as though she felt that her safest course in life was to confine herself strictly to such statements of fact as might be absolutely required of her.

“But, my good woman,” replied Mr. Brimmington, in bewilderment, “how can that be? The animal can’t certainly belong on my property unless he belongs to me, and that animal certainly is not mine.”

Seeing him so much at a loss and so greatly disturbed in mind, Mrs. Sparhawk relented a little from her strict rule of life, and made an attempt at explanation.

“He b’longed to the man who owned this place first off; and I don’ know for sure, but I’ve heard tell that he fixed it some way so’s that the horse would sort of go with the place.”

Mr. Brimmington felt irritation rising within him.

“But,” he said, “it’s preposterous! There was no such consideration in the deed. No such thing can be done, Mrs. Sparhawk, without my acquiescence!”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Mrs. Sparhawk; “what I do know is, the place has changed hands often enough since, and the horse has always went with the place.”

There was an unsettled suggestion in the first part of this statement of Mrs. Sparhawk that gave a shock to Mr. Brimmington’s nerves. He laughed uneasily.

“Oh, er, yes! I see. Very probably there’s been some understanding. I suppose I am to regard the horse as a sort of lien upon the place—a—a—what do they call it?—an incumbrance! Yes,” he repeated, more to himself than to Mrs. Sparhawk; “an incumbrance. I’ve got a gentleman’s country place with a horse incumbrant.”

Mrs. Sparhawk heard him, however.

“It is a sorter cumbersome horse,” she said. And without another word she gathered her shawl about her shoulders, and strode off into the darkness.

Mr. Brimmington turned back into the house, and busied himself with a vain attempt to make his long-cherished furniture look at home in his new leaden-hued rooms. The ungrateful task gave him the blues; and, after an hour of it, he went to bed.

He was dreaming leaden-hued dreams, oppressed, uncomfortable dreams, when a peculiarly weird and uncanny series of thumps on the front of the house awoke him with a start. The thumps might have been made by a giant with a weaver’s beam, but he must have been a very drunken giant to group his thumps in such a disorderly parody of time and sequence.

Mr. Brimmington had too guileless and clean a heart to be the prey of undefined terrors. He rose, ran to the window and opened it. The moonlight lit up the raw, frosty landscape with a cold, pale, diffused radiance, and Mr. Brimmington could plainly see right below him the cumbersome horse, cumbersomely trying to maintain a footing on the top of the little mound before the front door. When, for a fleeting instant, he seemed to think that he had succeeded in this feat, he tried to bolt through the door. As soon, however, as one of his huge knees smote the panel, his hind feet lost their grip on the soft earth, and he wabbled back down the incline, where he stood shaking and quivering, until he could muster wind enough for another attempt to make a catapult of himself. The veil like illumination of the night, which turned all things else to a dim, silvery gray, could not hide the scars and bruises and worn places that spotted the animal’s great, gaunt, distorted frame. His knees were as big as a man’s head. His feet were enormous. His joints stood out from his shriveled carcass like so many pine knots. Mr. Brimmington gazed at him, fascinated, horrified, until a rush more desperate and uncertain than the rest threatened to break his front door in.

“Hi!” shrieked Mr. Brimmington; “go away!”

It was the horse’s turn to get frightened. He lifted his long, coffin-shaped head toward Mr. Brimmington’s window, cast a sort of blind, cross-eyed, ineffectual glance at him, and with a long-drawn, wheezing, cough-choked whinny he backed down the mound, got himself about, end for end, with such extreme awkwardness that he hurt one poor knee on a hitching-post that looked to be ten feet out of his way, and limped off to the rear of the house.

The sound of that awful, rusty, wind-broken whinny haunted Mr. Brimmington all the rest of that night. It was like the sound of an orchestrion run down, or of a man who is utterly tired of the whooping-cough and doesn’t care who knows it.

The next morning was bright and sunshiny, and Mr. Brimmington awoke in a more cheerful frame of mind than he would naturally have expected to find himself in after his perturbed night. He found himself inclined to make the best of his purchase and to view it in as favorable a light as possible. He went outside and looked at it from various points of view, trying to find and if possible to dispose of the reason for the vague sense of disappointment which he felt, having come into possession of the rambling old farm-house, which he had so much desired.

He decided, after a long and careful inspection, that it was the proportions of the house that were wrong. They were certainly peculiar. It was singularly high between joints in the first story, and singularly low in the second. In spite of its irregularity within, it was uncompromisingly square on the outside. There was something queer about the pitch of its roof, and it seemed strange that so modest a structure with no hallway whatever should have vestibule windows on each side of its doors, both front and rear.

But here an idea flashed into Mr. Brimmington’s mind that in an instant changed him from a carping critic to a delighted discoverer. He was living in a Block House! Yes; that explained—that accounted for all the strangeness of its architecture. In in instant he found his purchase invested with a beautiful glamour of adventurous association. Here was the stout and well-planned refuge to which the grave settlers of an earlier day had fled to guard themselves against the attack of the vindictive red-skins. He saw it all. A moat, crossed no doubt by draw-bridges, had surrounded the building. In the main room below, the women and children had huddled while their courageous defenders had poured a leaden hail upon the foe through loop-holes in the upper story. He walked around the house for some time, looking for loop-holes.

So pleased was Mr. Brimmington at his theory that the morning passed rapidly away, and when he looked at his watch he was surprised to find that it was nearly noon. Then he remembered that Mr. Skinner had promised to call on him at eleven, to make anything right that was not right. Glancing over the landscape he saw Mr. Skinner approaching by a circuitous track. He was apparently following the course of a snake fence which he could readily have climbed. This seemed strange, as his way across the pasture land was seemingly unimpeded. Thinking of the pasture land made Mr. Brimmington think of the white horse, and casting his eyes a little further down the hill he saw that animal slowly and painfully steering a parallel course to Mr. Skinner, on the other side of the fence. Mr. Skinner went out of sight behind a clump of trees, and when he arrived it was not upon the side of the house where Mr. Brimmington had expected to see him appear.

As they were about to enter the house Mr. Brimmington noticed the marks of last night’s attack upon his front door, and he spoke to Mr. Skinner about the horse.

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Skinner, with much ingenuousness; “that horse. I was meaning to speak to you about that horse. Fact is, I’ve kinder got that horse on my hands, and if it’s no inconvenience to you, I’d like to leave him where he is for a little while.”

“But it would be very inconvenient, indeed, Mr. Skinner,” said the new owner of the house. “The animal is a very unpleasant object; and, moreover, it attempted to break into my front door last night.”

Mr. Skinner’s face darkened. “Sho!” he said; “you don’t mean to tell me that?”

But Mr. Brimmington did mean to tell him that, and Mr. Skinner listened with a scowl of unconcealed perplexity and annoyance. He bit his lip reflectively for a minute or two before he spoke.

“Too bad you was disturbed,” he said at length. “You’ll have to keep the bars up to that meadow and then it won’t happen again.”

“But, indeed, it must not happen again,” said Mr. Brimmington; “the horse must be taken away.”

“Well, you see it’s this way, friend,” returned Mr. Skinner, with a rather ugly air of decision; “I really ain’t got no choice in the matter. I’d like to oblige you, and if I’d known as far back that you would have objected to the animal I’d have had him took somewheres. But, as it is, there ain’t no such a thing as getting that there horse off this here place till the frost’s out of the ground. You can see for yourself that that horse, the condition he’s in now, couldn’t no more go up nor down this hill than he could fly. Why, I came over here a-foot this morning on purpose not to take them horses of mine over this road again. It can’t be done, sir.”

“Very well,” suggested Mr. Brimmington; “kill the horse.”

“I ain’t killin’ no horses,” said Mr. Skinner. “You may if you like; but I’d advise you not to. There’s them as mightn’t like it.”

“Well, let them come and take their horse away, then,” said Mr. Brimmington.

“Just so,” assented Mr. Skinner. “It’s they who are concerned in the horse, and they have a right to take him away. I would if I was any ways concerned, but I ain’t.” Here he turned suddenly upon Mr. Brimmington. “Why, look here,” he said, “you ain’t got the heart to turn that there horse out of that there pasture where he’s been for fifteen years! It won’t do you no sorter hurt to have him stay there till Spring. Put the bars up, and he won’t trouble you no more.”

“But,” objected Mr. Brimmington, weakly, “even if the poor creature were not so unsightly, he could not be left alone all Winter in that pasture without shelter.”

“That’s just where you’re mistaken,” Mr. Skinner replied, tapping his interlocutor heavily upon the shoulder; “he don’t mind it not one mite. See that shed there?” And he pointed to a few wind-racked boards in the corner of the lot. “There’s hoss-shelter; and as for feed, why there’s feed enough in that meadow for two such as him.”

In the end, Mr. Brimmington, being utterly ignorant of the nature and needs of horse-flesh, was over-persuaded, and he consented to let the unfortunate white horse remain in his pasture lot to be the sport of the Winter’s chill and bitter cruelty. Then he and Mr. Skinner talked about some new paint.

* * *

It was the dead waist and middle of Mr. Brimmington’s third night in his new house, when he was absolutely knocked out of a calm and peaceful slumber by a crash so appalling that he at first thought that the side of the mountain had slid down upon his dwelling. This was followed by other crashes, thumps, the tearing of woodwork and various strange and grewsome noises. Whatever it might be, Mr. Brimmington felt certain that it was no secret midnight marauder, and he hastened to the eighteen-inch stairway without even waiting to put on a dressing-gown. A rush of cold air came up from below, and he had no choice but to scuttle back for a bath-robe and a candle while the noises continued, and the cold air floated all over the house.

There was no difficulty in locating the sounds. Mr. Brimmington presented himself at the door of the little kitchen, pulled it open, and, raising the light above his head, looked in. The rush of wind blew out his light, but not before he had had time to see that it was the white horse that was in the kitchen, and that he had gone through the floor.

Subsequent investigation proved that the horse had come in through the back door, carrying that and its two vestibule windows with him, and that he had first trampled and then churned the thin floor into match-wood. He was now reposing on his stomach, with his legs hanging down between the joists into the hollow under the house—for there was no cellar. He looked over his shoulder at his host and emitted his blood-curdling wail.

“My Gracious!” said Mr. Brimmington.

That night Mr. Brimmington sat up with the horse, both of them wrapped, as well as Mr. Brimmington could do it, in bed-clothes. There is not much you can do with a horse when you have to sit up with him under such circumstances. The thought crossed Mr. Brimmington’s mind of reading to him, but he dismissed it.

* * *

In the interview the next day, between Mr. Brimmington and Mr. Skinner, the aggressiveness was all on Mr. Brimmington’s side, and Mr. Skinner was meek and wore an anxious expression. Mr. Brimmington had, however, changed his point of view. He now realized that sleeping out of Winter nights might be unpleasant, even painful to an aged and rheumatic horse. And, although he had cause of legitimate complaint against the creature, he could no longer bear to think of killing the animal with whom he had shared that cold and silent vigil. He commissioned Mr. Skinner to build for the brute a small but commodious lodging, and to provide a proper stock of provender—commissions which Mr. Skinner gladly and humbly accepted. As to the undertaking to get the horse out of his immediate predicament, however, Mr. Skinner absolutely refused to touch the job. “That horse don’t like me,” said Mr. Skinner; “I know he don’t; I seen it in his eyes long ago. If you like, I’ll send you two or three men and a block-and-tackle, and they can get him out; but not me; no, sir!”

Mr. Skinner devoted that day to repairing damages, and promised on the morrow to begin the building of the little barn. Mr. Brimmington was glad there was going to be no greater delay, when, early in the evening, the sociable white horse tried to put his front feet through the study window.

But of all the noises that startled Mr. Brimmington, in the first week of his sojourn in the farm-house, the most alarming awakened him about eight o’clock of the following morning. Hurrying to his study, he gazed in wonder upon a scene unparalleled even in the History of Prehistoric Man. The boards had been ripped off the curious structure which was supposed to have served the hardy settlers for a wall-bench and a dresser, indifferently. This revealed another structure in the form of a long crib or bin, within which, apparently trying to back out through the wall, stood Mr. Skinner, holding his tool-box in front of him as if to shield himself, and fairly yelping with terror. The front door was off its hinges, and there stood Mrs. Sparhawk wielding a broom to keep out the white horse, who was viciously trying to force an entrance. Mr. Brimmington asked what it all meant; and Mrs. Sparhawk, turning a desperate face upon him, spoke with the vigor of a woman who has kept silence too long.

“It means,” she said, “that this here house of yours is this here horse’s stable; and the horse knows it; and that there was the horse’s manger. This here horse was old Colonel Josh Pincus’s regimental horse, and so provided for in his will; and this here man Skinner was to have the caring of him until he should die a natural death, and then he was to have this stable; and till then the stable was left to the horse. And now he’s taken the stable away from the horse, and patched it up into a dwelling-house for a fool from New York City; and the horse don’t like it; and the horse don’t like Skinner. And when he come back to git that manger for your barn, the horse sot onto him. And that’s what’s the matter, Mr. Skimmerton.”

“Mrs. Sparhawk,” began Mr. Brimmington—

“I ain’t no Sparhawk!” fairly shouted the enraged woman, as with a furious shove she sent the Cumbersome Horse staggering down the doorway mound; “this here’s Hiram Skinner, the meanest man in Pike County, and I’m his wife, let out to do day’s work! You’ve had one week of him—how would you have liked twenty years?”

MR. VINCENT EGG AND THE WAGE OF SIN.

VINCENT EGG and the daughter of his washerwoman walked out of the front doorway of Mr. Egg’s lodging-house into the morning sunlight, with very different expressions upon their two faces.

Mr. Vincent Egg, although he was old and stout and red-nosed and shabby in his attire, wore a look that was at once timorous, fatuous, and weakly mendacious; a look that tried to tell the possible passer-by that his red nose and watery eyes bloomed and blinked in the smiles of Virginie. Virginie, although she was young and pretty and also thin of face and poverty-stricken of garb, wore a look which told you plainly and most honestly beyond a question, that she had no smiles for Mr. Egg or for any one else. They walked down the middle of the street side by side, but that they could not very well help doing, for the street was both narrow and dirty, and the edges of the stone gutter down its midway offered the only clean foothold in its entire breadth. As they walked on together, Mr. Egg made a few poor-spirited attempts to start up a gallant conversation with the girl; but she made no response whatever to his remarks, and strode on in dark-faced silence, her empty wash-basket poised between her lank right hip and her thin right elbow. Mr. Egg hemmed and cleared a husky throat, and employed both his unsteady hands in setting his tall, shabby silk hat upon his head in such a manner that its broad brim might keep the sunlight out of his eyes.

Mr. Vincent Egg was in the little city of Drignan on business. His lodgings were in the rue des Quatres Mulets, because they were the cheapest lodgings he could find. There are prettier towns than Drignan, and even in Drignan there are many better streets than the rue des Quatres Mulets. But it was much the same to Mr. Egg. He took his shabby lodgings, the rebuffs of the fair, the sunlight of other men’s fortunes dazzling his weak eyes—all these things he took with an easy indifference of mind so long as life gave him the little he asked of it, namely: a periodic indulgence in alcoholic unconsciousness. A simple drunk, once a month, of at least a week’s duration, was what Mr. Egg’s soul most craved and desired; but if his fluctuating means made the period of intoxication briefer or the period of sobriety longer, he bore either event with a certain simple heroism. He wanted no “spree,” no “toot,” no “tear;” a modest spell of sodden, dreamy, tearfully happy soaking in the back-room of some cheap wine-shop where he and his ways were known—this was all that remained of ambition and aspiration in Mr. Egg’s life; which had been, for the rest, a long life, a harmless life (except in the stern moralist’s sense), and a life that was decidedly a round, complete and total failure in spite of an exceptional allotment of abilities and opportunities. Mr. Egg had been many things in the course of that long and varied life—lawyer, doctor, newspaper-man, speculator, actor, manager, horse-dealer and racetrack gamester, croupier (and courier, even, after a fashion)—and heaven knows what else beside, of things avowable and unavowable. Just at present, he was supplying an English firm of Tourist-Excursion Managers with a guide-book of their various routes, at the rate of eighteen-pence per page of small type, and his traveling expenses—third-class. He had just finished “doing up” the district last allotted to him; and, after two weeks’ of traveling about, he had spent another fortnight in writing up his notes in a dingy little lodging-house room in the rue des Quatres Mulets. He knew his ground thoroughly, and that was the cheapest place.

Such was Mr. Vincent Egg, after a half-century of struggle with the world; and something of an imposing figure he made, too, in his defeat and degradation. His nose was red, his cheeks were puffed and veined, there were bags under his bloodshot eyes, his close-cropped hair was thin, his stubby little gray moustache, desperately waxed at the ends, gave an incongruously foreign touch to his decidedly Anglo-Saxon face—and his clothes were shockingly shabby. But then he wore his clothes, as few men in our day can wear clothes; and they were his clothes; his very own, and not another’s. People often spoke of him, after seeing him once, as “that big, soldierly-looking old man in the white hat.” But he did not wear a white hat. His hat, which was one of the largest, one of the jauntiest and one of the oldest ever seen, had also been, in its time, one of the blackest. It was his coat that gave people an idea of his having something about him that suggested white. It was a tightly-buttoned frock-coat of an indescribable light-dirty color. Most hopelessly shabby men cling to some standard of taste in dress that was the standard in their last-remembered days of prosperity. That coat—if it were one coat and not only one of a long-lived family—marked the fact that the last season of prosperity Mr. Egg had enjoyed was a season, now some twenty years gone, when the London “swells” or “nobs,” or whatever they called them then, wore frock-coats of certain fashionable light shades of fawn and mouse-color, then known, I believe, as “London Smoke” and “French Gray.” While it can not be said that Mr. Egg’s coat was familiar in every quarter of Europe (for it rarely staid long enough in any one place), it had certainly been seen in all. And more than one Austrian officer, after passing Mr. Egg in that garment of pallid, dubious and puzzling hue, had turned sharply around to satisfy himself that it was not a uniform-coat in a condition of profanation. A certain state and dignity that still clung to this coat, and the startling cleanness of his well-scissored cuffs and collars were all that remained to give Mr. Egg a hold upon exterior respectability.

With such a history, Mr. Egg was naturally well versed in the freemasonry of poverty and need. As his eyes became accustomed to the sun, he looked at the girl’s pinched face, and his tones suddenly changed. Vincent Egg spoke several languages, and he knew all their social dialects and variations. It was in friendly and familiar speech that he addressed the girl, and asked her—What was the matter? and, Was the business going ill?

If Virginie had been the poor girl you meet with in the stories written by English ladies of a mildly religious turn of mind, she would have dropped a little curtsey and said with a single tear, “Indeed, sir, I had not meant to speak, but you have hit upon the truth. The business goes very ill, indeed, and without help I do not see how my poor mother can survive the Winter.” But Virginie, obeying the instincts of her nature and her education, responded to Mr. Egg with a single coarse French adjective which is only to be rendered in English, I am afraid, by the word “stinking.”

Mr. Egg was not in the least shocked. He cast his blinking eyes about him at the filthy roadway, at the narrow old stone houses that crowded both sides of the street with the peaked roofs of their over-hanging upper-stories, almost shutting out the sky above his head, at the countless century-old stains of damp and rust and shameful soilure upon their dull faces, and he said simply:

“Fichu locale!”

Thereby he amply expressed to his hearer his opinion that if the business deserved the adjective she had accorded it, the explanation was to be found in its unfortunate location. This opened the flood gates of Virginie’s speech. She told Mr. Egg that he was entirely right about the location, and gave him a few casual corroborative details which showed him that she knew what she was talking about. She also confided to him enough of her family affairs to account for the bitterness of her spirit and her contempt for mirthful dalliance. It was nothing but the old endless story of poverty in one of its innumerable variants. This time the father, a jobbing stone-mason, had not only broken his leg in Marseilles, but on coming out of the hospital had got drunk, assaulted a gend’arme, made a compound fracture of it, and laid himself up for several months. This time the mother had a rheumatic swelling of one arm, which hindered her in her washing. This time the eldest boy had got himself into some trouble in trying to evade the performance of his term of military duty. This time the youngest child had some torturing disease of the spine that necessitated—or rather needed—an operation. And, of course, as at all times, there were five or six hungry mouths, associated with as many pairs of comparatively helpless hands, between Virginie and that youngest. And as to business, that was certainly bad. It was particularly bad of late—although it was always bad in Drignan. Virginie told Mr. Egg that he was “rudement propre,” or “blazing clean”—clean as they were not in Drignan, she assured him. In fact, it appeared, this strange English gentleman, who had paid as high as a franc-and-a-half a week for his washing, had been accepted by Virginie’s family as designed in the mercy of Divine Providence to tide them over their period of distress. His departure at the end of two weeks was a sore disappointment in a financial point of view.

Vincent Egg was a very kind-hearted man, and he listened to this recital, and uttered sympathetic ejaculations in the right places. He was sorry about the youngest child, very sorry; he had known a case like it. Perhaps, he suggested, business might pick up. Messrs. Sculry & Co., the great English managers of Tourists’ Excursions, were going to make Drignan a stopping-place for their excursions on the way to Avignon. It was going to be a stopping-place of only a few hours, but, perhaps, it might bring some business. Who knew? Virginie brightened up when she heard this, and said that was so. Those English, she remarked, were always washing—no disrespect intended to the gentleman.

“And here,” she said, as they came abreast of a narrow gateway on the other side of the street from Mr. Egg’s lodging-house, “is where I live. It is on the ground floor. Will Monsieur come in and see the baby?” And her eyes lit up for the first time with a real interest—the interest, half-proud, and half-morbid, of a poor, simple creature who longs to exhibit to the world the affliction of monstrosity which sets her poor household apart from others of its kind.

Now, Mr. Egg had not the slightest desire to see the baby, and he had no intention whatever of going in; but, glancing through the narrow doorway, he saw a succession of arches in the courtyard beyond, and some old bits of mediæval masonry, which excited his curiosity. If this were the remains of some old monastery that had escaped his notice, it might mean a half-page more—nine-pence—in his guide-book. He strolled in by Virginie’s side, heedless of her chatter. No; it was not the ruin

of an ecclesiastical structure. The courtyard was only a part of an old stable and blacksmith-shop; old, but no older probably than the rest of that old street, which might have been standing at the time of Louis XIV—though it probably wasn’t. From its proximity to a canal that marked the line of an old moat, Mr. Egg made a safe guess that it was a small remnant of the stables and farriery attached to the barracks of the original fortifications of the town.

At any rate, it was no fish for the net of Messrs. Sculry & Co.’s guide-book compiler; and he was turning to go, when Virginie, who had supposed that he was merely following in her lead, to feast his eyes upon the sick baby, said simply, as she pushed open a door, “This way, Monsieur,” and, before he knew it, he had entered his washerwoman’s room.

Although it was a ground-floor room, damp, dark and old, it was clean with a curious sort of cleanness that seems to belong to the Latin races—a cleanness that gives one the impression of having been achieved without the use of soap and water: as if everything had been scraped clean instead of being washed clean. Virginie’s mother was clean, too, in spite of her swollen and helpless arm, and the three or four children who were playing on the stone floor were no dirtier than healthy children ought to be between washes. But Mr. Egg had hardly had time to take more than cursory note of these facts before his attention was riveted by the sick child in the French woman’s arms—so pitiful a little piece of suffering childhood that a much harder-hearted man than Mr. Vincent Egg might readily have been shocked at the sight of it. As for Mr. Egg, he simply dropped into a seated posture upon a convenient bench, and stared in the fascination of pity and horror.

Mr. Egg knew little of children and less of their diseases. In the ordinary course of things, such matters were not often brought to his attention; and, to tell the truth, had he known what he was to see there, no persuasion would have induced him to enter that poor little room. Now that he did see it, however, he could not move his eyes: the spectacle had for him a hideous attraction of novelty. Virginie and her mother exhibited the poor little misshapen thing, and rattled over the history of the case with a volubility which showed that it was no new tale. For fifteen minutes their visitor sat and stared in horrified silence; and, when at last he made his way back to the street, he found that his mind was in a more disturbed state than he had known it to be in many years.

It is the people who most avoid the sight of human suffering who very often are the most sharply shocked by it when that sight is obtruded upon them. Your professional nurse soon learns to succor without lamentation: it is the person who “really has no faculty for nursing” who goes into spasms of sensibility over the sight of a finger caught in a cog-wheel, and runs about clamoring for new laws for the suppression of all machinery not constructed of India-rubber. Up to half an hour before, Mr. Egg had never wasted many thoughts upon the millions of suffering babies in this world; and now he could not turn his thoughts to anything except the particular baby that he had just seen.

And yet, as he had told Virginie, he had known of a similar case before, though it belonged to a time so long ago that it had practically faded from his mind. It was the case of his own brother, who had died in infancy of some such trouble, one of the earliest victims of an operation at that time in its earliest experimental stages. That was more than half a century ago, and Vincent Egg had no remembrance whatever of the little brother. But he did remember his first childish impression of a visit to the hospital where the little one lay—of the smell of the disinfectants and the chill of the whitewashed walls.

The heart of Mr. Egg was touched, and he felt himself moved with a strong desire to extend some help to these people who were so much worse off than he was. Yet Mr. Egg’s intellectual parts told him that there was no possibility of his doing anything of the sort. He knew, beyond any chance of fond delusion, his present position and his future prospects. He had his ticket back to Lyons, where the local branch of Messrs. Sculry & Co. had its office; he had in his valise at his lodgings just enough money for his necessary sustenance upon his journey. And not one other penny, not one soumarkee would he have until, at Messrs. Sculry & Co.’s office, his work had been measured down to the last syllable, and he had received therefor as many times eighteen-pence as he had produced pages. That would be, it was true, quite a neat little sum, but—and here came in the big BUT of Mr. Egg’s existence.

For Mr. Egg knew exactly what was going to become of that money. To draw it at all, he would have to present himself at the office in a condition of sobriety, which would be the last effort of a period of abstinence that he was beginning to find very trying. Then, so much of it must go to buying himself back into the three or four attenuated credits by grace of which he lived his poor life at Lyons; and just enough would be left to give him that fortnight of drunken stupor for which he had worked so long and so hard.

Mr. Egg needed an effort rather of the memory than of the imagination to forecast the recurrence of that familiar stupor. He could see himself leaving the spick-and-span, highly respectable office of the Lyons agency of Messrs. Sculry & Co., and hurrying off upon the few bits of business that must be attended to before he could present himself at “his” wine-shop, which was a very dirty one, indeed, kept by a certain M. and Mme. Louis Morel, in an appropriately unclean back street. There he knew just what to expect in the way of noisy, ready-handed, false-faced welcome. Then would come the tantalizingly-prolonged bargaining over the score to be settled and the score to be begun, and at last he would be free to take possession of that dark, ill-ventilated little back room which was always reserved for the periodical retirements of this regular patron of the house. It was a little room like a ship’s stateroom, hardly large enough to contain its dirty red velvet divan, its round table and its two chairs; yet for a week or a fortnight it would be his, and behind it, in the hallway, was a bed on which he could stretch himself in the hours when he felt the need of deeper slumber than the hard cushions of the divan permitted. There his few friends, outcasts and adventurers like himself, would drop in to see him, one or two at a time, to help him on his murky way with challenges to bouts of brandy-drinking, in which he would always pay for two glasses to the other man’s one. Then, as the procession of callers went on, it would grow dim and dimmer and vague and yet more vague, until it was lost in a hazy, wavering dream, wherein familiar faces of men and women stared at him from out of days so long gone by that in his dream he could fancy them happy.

That was what lay before him. Mr. Vincent Egg knew it as well as he knew that the calendar months would go on in their regular order, and the tides in the sea would continue to rise and fall. Under these circumstances, nothing was more certain than that the unfortunate family of Mr. Egg’s washerwoman need look for no help whatever from Mr. Egg’s prospective earnings. “It’s a damned shame!” said Mr. Egg to himself, slapping his thigh. And it was a shame. But there it was.

Suddenly a great thought struck Mr. Egg—a thought so great and so forcible in the blow that it dealt his mental apprehension that for three minutes he stood stock-still in the gutter in the middle of the rue des Quatre Mulets. Then somebody poured a pail of water out of a door-way and drowned him out, but he went on his way, quite indifferent to wet feet.

Mr. Vincent Egg went to his lodgings, and there extracted from his valise the very small sum of money which he had laid aside for his necessary sustenance on his trip to Lyons. This he took to a sign-painter on the outskirts of Drignan, to whom he paid the whole of it for the execution of a small but conspicuous sign-board, which he carried away with him under his arm.

* * *

The usual afternoon wind was blowing in Drignan, chill and raw, with a depressing flavor of a spoilt ocean about it. The sky was overcast, and everything was dismal in the dismal little town. Dismalest of all, perhaps, was a wretched little corner of waste land, between the old barrack-wall and the dirty canal behind it. A few sick, stunted, faded olive and orange trees in the lee of a mean stone wall showed that the place had at one time been a garden or courtyard. Heaps of rubbish here and there showed also that it had long outlived its usefulness. Here sat, one on each side of a tiny fire of twigs, a shabby, soldierly-looking old gentleman and a sallow, lanky young girl with a sullenly pretty face. Right in the sluggish smoke of the fire, the old man held a small sign-board still fresh from the painter’s hand, and the more the smoke took the brightness out of the new colors, the more he gazed at it with thoughtful approval. The girl said nothing; but sat and stared at the fire and listened with an air of weary and indifferent toleration while the old man repeated over and over what sounded like a monotonous narrative recitation. From time to time she nodded her head; and, at last, she began to repeat after the old man in a listless, mechanical way. It was late in the afternoon before they rose and scrambled over the heaps of rubbish to the street, where the old gentleman bade the girl good-by with what were evidently words of earnest admonition. His iteration seemed to annoy her, for finally she let slip, in a tone of anger, a specimen of the speech of the people which wasn’t exactly this; though at this we will let it go:

“Vous savez, mons vieux, je m’en fiche bien de votre Pé—Pé—Pétrarque—et de votre Laure aussi—”

Then she as quickly dropped back into her natural tone of hopeless submission to all who were less wretched than herself, and said, with something like gratitude in her voice:

“All the same, it is very kind of you, sir, I will try to do as you have told me.”

And they parted, she entering a near-by passage-way, and he going to the railroad station.

* * *

Mr. Vincent Egg stood in the private office of the Lyons branch of Messrs. Sculry & Co., the great Excursion Managers. He was, for him, unusually smart as to his clothes—to those who knew him, a sign that he had reached the end of his period of abstinence. The Manager of the Branch, a thin, raw, red-faced little Englishman with sandy whiskers, was looking over the proofs of the guide-book pages set up from Mr. Egg’s copy.

“Oh, ah, yes, Egg!” he said; “I knew there was something particular I wanted to speak to you about. Here it is.” And he slowly read aloud:

* * *

“Another and perhaps the principal attraction of Drignan is the ruin, pathetic in its dignity, of the mansion of the Conte dei Canale, the exiled Venetian, where the immortal poet Petrarch and the no less immortal lady of his love, whom he has celebrated in undying verse, met secretly, in the year 1337, to bid each other a long and chaste farewell. News of the lovers’ design having reached the ears of de Sade, the husband of the beauteous Laura, his base mind suspected an elopement, and he dispatched his liveried minions to separate the pair, and, if possible, to immolate on the altar of his vengeance the gentle and talented poet. It is supposed to be in consequence of injuries received in the resultant

struggle that Petrarch went into retirement for three years at Vaucluse (a spot which no holder of Messrs. Sculry & Co.’s 7-9 extra-trip coupon should fail to see). This exquisite chapter in the lives of the lovers over whom so many tears of sentiment have been shed, has been strangely neglected by the historians; but survives undimmed in local tradition. A full account will be found on page 329. The house is now 47 bis rue des Quatres Mulets. Behind it may still be seen what remains of the magnificent orangery and olive-garden of the Conte dei Canale. Access to this is gained from the second gateway from the corner of the Passage des Porcs, and should not be confounded with the entrance to the Jardin de Perse, a resort of somewhat frivolous character, situated on the second crossing below, rue Clément V.”—

Here the Manager raised his head. “I suppose that’s for the men?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Egg; “that’s for the men.”

“Well,” said the Manager, “what about this other attraction, this Petrarch and Laura place?”

“Well,” said Mr. Egg, blinking at him, for it was still early in the morning; “there it is, as large as life, with a sign on the door that looks as if it had been there fifty years; and I’ll give it to you as my opinion that if you don’t work that attraction, the Novelty Excursion Company will jump in and work it for you.”

“Ay, ay!” said the Manager, irritably; “that’s all very well; but how about the fees? That excursion goes by way of Drignan to save money. The London office won’t thank me if I give them any extra fees to pay.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Egg, pleasantly; “is that all? Here, give me that proof.” And, taking the sheets from the manager, he wrote as follows, on the margin:

“The mansion is at present owned by a respectable family who also do trustworthy washing. A polite, well-informed attendant is always ready to show the premises on payment of a moderate fee of 35 centimes, (3½ d.) Although no part of the regular excursion, the liberal time allowed by Messrs. Sculry & Co., for rest and refreshment in Drignan, will enable excursionists to visit this shrine of deathless romance.”

The Manager took the amended proof back, and read it admiringly.

“By Jove, Egg!” he said; “that does it to the Queen’s taste! An attraction like that, and not a penny’s expense to the concern! I suppose, of course, really and truly, it’s all Tommy-rot?”

“I suppose so,” said Mr. Egg, pleasantly.

“Never was any such business, I suppose,” went on the Manager.

“I don’t believe it, myself,” said Mr. Egg, shaking his head sagely.

“Well,” said the Manager, “it’s all right for business, so far as the Avignon tour is concerned. And, oh! I say, Egg, I don’t suppose you could keep permanently straight, could you?”

“At my time of life,” said Mr. Egg, blandly, “a gentleman’s habits are apt to be fixed.”

“I suppose so,” sighed the Manager. “Well, all the same, the London office was very much pleased with the last job you did, Egg, and they have authorized me, at my discretion, to increase your honorarium. We’ll make it a shilling a page, beginning with the present.”

When Mr. Vincent Egg reached the street, he looked at the unexpected pile of wealth in his hand.

“This is a three weeks’ go at elysium,” said he to himself; “such as I haven’t had in many a year. And, so far as I am concerned, it is the Fruit of Falsification, and the Wage of Sin.”

But when Mr. Egg next awoke from his period of slumber in M. Morel’s back-room, and stretched himself upon the hard cushion of the red velvet divan, throngs of gawking tourists were trying to steep themselves in sentiment as they gazed about the old room off the rue des Quatres Mulets, and looked over the wall at the faded orange and olive trees, and listened to the story which Virginie told, like a talking-doll, and dropped into her hand a welcome stream of copper or silver, according as they were English or Americans.

THE GHOOLLAH.

TOOK a long drive one day last Summer to see an old friend of mine who was in singularly hard luck; and I found him in even harder luck and more singular than I had expected. My drive took me to a spot a few miles back of a Southern sea-coast, where, in a cup-like hollow of the low, rocky hills, treeless save for stunted and distorted firs and pines, six or eight score of perspiring laborers, attired in low-necked costumes consisting exclusively of a pair of linen trousers a-piece, toil all day in the blazing sun to dig out some kind of clay of which I know nothing, except that it looks mean, smells worse, has a name ending in ite, and is of great value in the arts and sciences. They may make fertilizer out of it, or they may make water-colors: Billings told me, but I don’t know. There are some things that one forgets almost as readily as a blow to one’s pride. Moreover, this stuff was associated in my mind with Big Mitch.

Of course Billings was making a fortune out of it. But as it would take six or eight years to touch the figure he had set for himself, and as he had no special guarantee of an immortal youth on this earth, and as, until the fortune was made, he had to live all the year around in that god-forsaken spot, and to live with Big Mitch, moreover, I looked upon him as a man in uncommonly hard luck. And he was.

I had been visiting friends in a town some miles inland, and it had occurred to me that it would be an act of Christian charity to drive over the hills to Billings’s place of servitude, and to condole with my old friend. I had nothing else to do—a circumstance always favorable to the perpetration of acts of Christian charity—and I went. He was enthusiastically glad to see me—I was the first visitor he had ever had—and he left his office at once, and led me up the burning hot sand-hill to his house, which was a very comfortable sort of place when you got there. It was an old-fashioned Southern house, small but stately, with a Grecian portico in front, supported by two-story wooden pillars. Here he was established in lonely luxury, with no one to love, none to caress, swarms of darkeys, and a cellar full of wines that would have tempted the Dying Anchorite to swill. Casually dispatching half a dozen niggers after as many bottles of champagne as they thought we might need to whet our appetites for luncheon, Billings bade me welcome again, and we fell to friendly talk.

He began with that kind of apology for his condition that speaks its own futility, and its despair of any credence. Of course, he said, it was not a very cheerful sort of life, but it had its compensations—quiet, good for the nerves, opportunity for study and all that sort of thing, self-improvement. And then, of course, there was society, such as it was—mainly, he had to admit, the superannuated bachelors and worn-out old maids who clung to those decaying Southern plantations—for, it is hardly necessary to say, not an acre of property in that forlorn region, save only Billings’s mud-bank, had yielded a cent of revenue since the war. And, of course, the unpleasant part of it was that none of them lived less than ten or fifteen miles away, and were only to be reached by a long ride, and as he—Billings—was never at ease in the saddle, on account of his liver, this practically shut him out. But then, of course, Mitch went everywhere, and enjoyed it very much.

“Oh, yes!” said I, reminded of the most unpleasant part of my duty; “and how is Mitch?”

“He’s dirty well, and it’s devilish little you care!” brayed out an incredibly brazen

voice just behind my ear, and a big red hand snatched the bottle of champagne from my grasp, while a laugh, that sounded like a hyena trying to bellow, rang in my ears. A great, big, raw-boned youngster, dressed in clothes of an ingenious vulgarity, dropped heavily into a chair by my side and laid a knobby broad red hand on my knee, where it closed with a brutal grip. That was Big Mitch, whose real name was Randolph Mitchel, and who being by birth a distant connection of dear old Billings, might reasonably have been expected to be some sort or variety of gentleman. Yet, if you wanted to sum up Big Mitch, his ways, manners, tastes, ideas and spiritual make-up generally,—if he could be said to have any spiritual make-up—you had only to say that he was all that a gentleman is not, and you had a better descriptive characterization of the man than you could have got in a volume telling just what he was. This was not by any means my first acquaintance with Mr. Randolph Mitchel. When I was a young man his father had stood my friend, and though he had dropped out of my sight when he went, a hopeless consumptive, to vegetate in some Western sanitarium, it was natural enough that he should send to me to use my good offices in behalf of his son, who had been expelled from a well-known fresh-water college of the Atlantic slope, very shortly after he had entered it.

Now I am not a hard-hearted man, and a boy with a reasonable, rational, normal amount of devil in him can do pretty nearly anything he wants to with me; therefore it signifies something when I say that after giving up a week to the business, I had to write to poor old Mr. Mitchel, at the Consumptives’ Home, Bilhi, Colorado, not only that was it impossible to get his son Randolph reinstated at that particular college, but that I did not believe that there was any college ever made where the boy had a prospect of staying even one term out. It was not that he was vicious; he was no worse on the purely moral side than scores of wild boys. But he was the most hopelessly, irreclaimably turbulent, riotous, unruly, insolent, brutal, irreverent, unmannerly and generally blackguardly young devil that I had ever encountered; and the entire faculty of the college said, in their own scholastic way, that he beat their time. He had not even the saving graces of good-nature, thoughtlessness and mirthful good-fellowship, which may serve as excuse for much youthful waywardness. The students disliked him as thoroughly as their professors did, and although he was smart as a steel trap and capable of any amount of work when he wanted to do it, nobody in that college wanted him,—not even the captain of the foot-ball team.

Was I right? Had I wronged the boy? I asked that captain, and he said No.

Big Mitch was only twenty-three or so, but he had been many things in his young life. He had run away and traveled with a circus. He had been a helper in a racing stable. I don’t know what he was when his father made a last desperate appeal to poor Billings, and Billings, who did not know what he was letting himself in for, sent him down to start up work on the recently purchased mud-pit. There Mitch found his billet, and he led a life of absolute happiness, domineering over a horde of helpless, ignorant negros, and white men of an even lower grade who sought work in that wretched place. And what a life he led the dear, gentle, kindly old fellow who had sold himself to fortune-getting in that little Inferno! I knew how Billings must loathe him; I knew, indeed, how he did loathe him, though he was too gentle to say it, but I knew that the burden my poor old friend had put upon himself would not soon be shifted. For Big Mitch was useful, nay, indispensable, for the first time in his life. He was as honest as he was tough, and he could handle that low grade of human material as few others could have done. The speculation would have been a failure without him. “In fact,” Billings told me afterward with a sad smile, “it is not only that he raises the efficient of the works; he is the efficient of the works.”

Big Mitch never bore me the slightest ill-will for the report I had made to his father. He was too indurated an Ishmael for that. He knew everybody disliked him, but he did not care a cent for that. When he wanted other people’s company, he took it. The question of their enjoyment was one that never entered his mind. It was in pure delight in seeing me that he grabbed my knee, pinched my knee-cap until it sent a qualm to my stomach, and told me that he had ordered my driver to go home, and that I had got to stay and see the country. Things came pretty near to a lively squall when I got the impudence of this through my head; but when Billings joined his frightened, anxious pleadings to the youth’s brutalities, and I saw his humbled, troubled, mortified face, I yielded.

We were free from Mitch after luncheon, and poor Billings began to make a pitiful little apology; but I stopped him.

“I don’t mind,” I said; “I was only thinking of you.”

“Oh, I’ve got accustomed to it,” he said, trying to smile; “and it’s really more tolerable than you would think, when you get to know him. And when he is too—too trying—why, there is one place that he understands he must respect. Come to my library. You are the first person who has ever entered it except myself.”

He led me to the door of a room at the end of a dark passage-way. As he put the key in the lock I noticed a curious smell.

“I want you to see,” said he, “the sort of thing I’m interested in.”

I had not been five seconds in the room before I knew what it was—the sort of thing he was interested in. Loneliness breeds strange maggots in the brain of a New Yorker temporarily engaged in the mud-mining business. My old friend Billings was now a full-blown Theosophist, and he had that little room stuffed full of more Mahatma-literature and faquir trumpery than you could shake a stick at. There were skulls and fans and grass-cloth things and heathen gods till—literally—your eyes couldn’t rest. There were four-legged gods and eight-legged gods, and gods with their legs where their arms ought to be, and gods who were of the gentleman-god and lady-god sex at one and the same time, and gods with horns and miscellaneous gods, and a few other gods. In odd places here and there, where he had not had time to arrange them properly, there were a few more gods.

And then my poor old friend sat down and tried to put me through the whole business, and tell me what a great and mysterious thing it was, and what a splendid scheme it would be to get into the two-hundred and ninety-seventh state or the thirtieth dilution or the thirty-third degree, or something, for when you got there you were nothing, don’t you know?

I was short on Vishnu and I didn’t know beans about Buddha, and for a long time, I am afraid, I gave dear old Billings a great deal of grief. But finally I began to get a new light, and Billings convinced me that there was something in it, and we had some more champagne.

That evening Mitch came for us with a carryall, and said he was going to drive us twenty miles inland to a “dancing-in-the-barn” function on somebody’s plantation. I proved to him then and there that he was not. Billings nearly melted into a puddle while the operation was going on. He could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw Big Mitch drive off alone, and I think he had a slight chill. At any rate, he had the champagne brought to the library, and there he told me that he had not believed such a thing to be possible; that he looked upon me in a new light, and that he thought my Ghoollah must be stronger than Mitch’s Ghoollah. I told him that I should be ashamed of myself if it wasn’t; and then I asked him what a Ghoollah was. Please do not ask me if I have spelled that word right. I am spelling it by ear, and if my ear for Hindoo is as bad as my ear for music, I have probably got it wrong. It sounded something like the noise that pigeons make, and that is as near as I can get to it. According to Billings, it was Hindoo for my vital essence and my will power and my conscience and my immortal soul and pretty nearly every other spiritual property that I carried around in my clothes. Everyone, it appeared, had a Ghoollah. If your Ghoollah was stronger than the other man’s Ghoollah, you bossed the other man. If you had a good and happy Ghoollah, you were good and happy. If you had a bad Ghoollah, you were bilious. If my Theosophy is wrong, please do not correct it. I prefer it wrong. I told him that I did not see that having a Ghoollah was anything more than being yourself, but he said it was; that folks could swap Ghoollahs, or lend them out on call loans.

Then it all came out. That was the reason that he was driving deeper and deeper into Theosophy. He had got so sick of Mitch that, feeling it impossible to shake off his burden, he had seized upon this Ghoollah idea as offering a ray of hope. He was now trying to learn how to get into spiritual communication with somebody—anybody—else, who would swap Ghoollahs with him after business hours, so that they could ride-and-tie, as it were, and give his own weary Ghoollah a rest.

“Look here, Billings,” I said, “this is all rubbish. Now, I’m not dealing in Ghoollahs, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You can find some sort of a job here for a decent young fellow, and I’ll send one down who’ll be grateful for the place and who will be a companion to you. It’s Arthur Penrhyn, Dr. Penrhyn’s boy; a nice, pleasant young fellow—just what his father used to be, you remember? He was to have graduated at Union this year, but he broke down from over-study. That’s the kind of Ghoollah you want, and he’ll do you no end of good.”

* * *

This happened in June. I had never expected to see Billings’s mud-heap again, but I saw it before the end of July. I went there because Billings had written me that if I cared for him and our life-long friendship, and for poor Penrhyn’s boy I must come at once. He could not explain by letter what the matter was.

It added to my natural concern when, on my arrival, Billings hurried me into the library and I found it as theosophic as ever. I had hoped that that nonsense was ended. But worse was to come.

“When you were here before,” said Billings, impressively, without having once mentioned champagne, “you scoffed at a light which you couldn’t see. Now, my friend, I am going to let you see it with your own eyes, and you shall tell me whether or no you are convinced that it is possible for one human being to exchange his entity with another. If I have brought you here on a wild goose chase, I am willing to have you procure a judicial examination into my sanity, and I will abide the issue.”

He spoke with so much quiet gravity that he made me feel creepy.

“See here, old man,” I said; “do you mean to tell me that you have succeeded in pairing off with any other fellow’s Ghoollah, or Woollah, or whatever it is?”

“No,” he said, coloring a little; “it’s not I. It’s—it’s—it’s—in fact, it’s that boy Penrhyn.”

“What the deuce do you mean?” I demanded.

“I mean that Arthur Penrhyn has changed, or, rather, is changing his spiritual essence with another man.”

“Indeed,” said I; “and who’s the other man?”

“Randolph Mitchel,” said Billings.

“Mitch?”

“Mitch!”

There is no need of describing the rest of that interview. You have probably met the man who believes that the spirit of his grandmother came out of the cabinet and shook hands with him. You can probably imagine how you would talk to that man if he had brought you eight hundred miles to tell you about it. That is what happened in Billings’s library that afternoon, and it ended, of course, in our calling each other “old man” a great many times over, and in my agreeing to stay to the end of the week, and in Billings giving me his word of honor not to open his mouth on the subject unless at the end of that time I asked him to and admitted that he was right in sending for me. And then Billings did something that knocked my consciousness of superiority clean out of me, and gave a severe shock to my confidence. He offered to bet me five hundred dollars to anything that would make it interesting on that contingency, and he called me down and down till I had to compromise on a bet of fifty dollars even. I have met many men in the course of my life who believed in various spook-religions, but that was the first and only time that I ever met a man who would back his faith with a cold money bet.

* * *

By way of changing the subject, we strolled down to the quarry. It was even hotter than before, and it smelt worse, and I did not wonder that it had driven poor old Billings to Theosophy. It was a scene of interesting activity, but it could not be called pleasant. I have a great respect for the dignity of labor, but I think labor looks more dignified with its shirt on than when reduced to a lone pair of breeches.

I was about to make a motion to return to the house, when suddenly a string of peculiarly offensive oaths, uttered in a shrill angry voice, drew my attention to a heavy wire rope which a gang of men were hauling across my path. Looking up I saw, as well as I could see anything, against the dazzling background of the hill, a short, insignificant-looking figure perched on a rock, from whence it directed, with many gesticulations and an abounding stream of profanity, the operations of the toiling, grunting, straining creatures who dragged at the ponderous cable. Its operations seemed to be conducted with more vehemence than judgement, and two or three times the rope was on the edge of slipping back into the pit behind, when it was saved by the men’s quick response to some directions given in a low, strong voice by a man who stood in my rear. Some little hitch occurred after a minute or two, and the small figure, in an access of rage, rushed down from the rock, and, showering imprecations all around, leaped in among the workmen, pushing, shoving and cuffing, and after considerable trouble finally got them to doing what he wanted. I heard the heavier voice behind me utter half-aloud an expression of annoyance and disgust. Then the little figure passed me, running back to its rock, and hailed me as it passed.

“Hello, Governor!” it said; “you here? See you when I get this job done!”

“Billings,” said I, “who on earth is that?”

“Arthur Penrhyn,” said Billings. I looked again and saw that it was. Then I turned round and saw behind me the gigantic form of Mitch. He, too, spoke to me as I passed, and with a look of simple pleasure in his face that made it seem absolutely strange to me.

“Glad to see you, Sir,” he said.

Sir!

* * *

“It’s a most remarkable case altogether,” said Billings, who had got back to his normal self, and had brought out the champagne. “When that boy came here he was just as you described him—just like his poor father in the days when we first knew each other. He brooded a little too much, and seemed discontented; but, considering his disappointment at college, that was natural enough. Well, do you know, I believe it’s he that’s doing the whole thing, and that he is effecting the substitution for his own ends, though I don’t know what they are.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “he wants his Ghoollah to get the job away from Mitch’s Ghoollah.”

“Ahem!” said Billings, looking a little embarrassed; “I—in fact, I’ve discovered that the best Pundits do not use that word. It ought to be—”

Here Billings gave me the correct word; but I draw the line at Ghoollah, and Ghoollah it stays while I am telling this story.

“He hadn’t been here a week before I noticed that he kept his eyes fixed on Mitch all the time they were together. He looked at him as though he were actually trying to absorb him. Before long, I saw that Mitch began to be troubled under that steady gaze. He seemed at first angry, then distressed, and he had long fits of silence. His boisterousness has been vanishing steadily; but it is not sullenness that he displays—on the contrary, I have never known him so gentle. He is just as efficient in his duties, without being so extremely—demonstrative as he used to be. And as for that other boy, who probably had never uttered a profane word in his life, or spoken rudely to any human being—well, you heard him to-day!”

I made up my mind to try to drink fifty dollars’ worth of Billings’s champagne before the end of the week to even up on my bet; and, as the days went on, each new development only served to urge me to greater assiduity in the task. The spirit of Big Mitch looked out of little Arthur Penrhyn’s insolent eyes, spoke out of his foul mouth, and showed itself even in tricks of gesture and carriage, and in lines of facial expression. And Big Mitch, though his huge, uncouth frame and coarse lineaments lent themselves but ill to the showing of it, carried within him a new spirit of gentleness and humility. We saw little of him, for after work hours he kept persistently to his room. But once, late at night, seeing him, through his open door, asleep over a book, I stepped softly in and looked over his big shoulders at the half-dozen volumes that littered his table. They were college text-books, and on the fly-leaf of each one was the name of Arthur Penrhyn.

* * *

I had packed my valise, and was looking for Billings to pay him his fifty dollars, when Big Mitch came out of his room—it was the noon hour—and he asked me for the favor of a few words.

“I am ashamed to trouble you, sir,” he said, “but if you could help me to get any sort of a job in New York, or anywhere else, I’d be more thankful than I could tell you. I can afford to take almost any sort of a place where there’s a future, for I am pretty well ahead of the game financially, and I’ve earned my interest in this concern. And it’s in such shape now that Mr. Billings can get along without me.”

“But, my dear boy,” I said, “why do you want to go?”

Big Mitch frowned and fidgeted nervously; then he exploded.

“I’ll give it to you straight,” he said. “It’s that Penrhyn pup. When he first came here I thought I was just about the nicest little man on God’s footstool. I was as contented with myself as a basket of eggs. I knew it all. I was so sharp you could cut glass with me. I was the only real sport in the outfit. See? And I’d got a roving commission to jump on people’s necks. Well, you know what I was. And I liked myself. See?”

“But?” I began. “Arthur Penrhyn—”

“So did he! I don’t believe any one in the world was ever stuck on me before, but he was. That little ape hadn’t been here a week before he began to do everything he saw me do, and pretty soon he had me down so fine that he might have been my twin-brother, if we ever had such runts in our family. Well, I began to sour on the show. Understand? I could see for myself it wasn’t pretty. Well, one day I came around a corner, and there was that baboon sassing back to old man Billings. I was just going to pick him up and break his neck, when I felt kind of sick at my stomach, and I says to myself, ‘You swine! that’s the way you’ve been treating that white man! How do you like yourself now?’”

Big Mitch clutched desperately at his rumpled hair.

“I’m going to be a gentleman,” he grunted, “if I have to chew gravel to do it. I’ll do it, though, and I’ll show up some day and surprise the old man before he cashes in his last lung. But if I don’t get a fresh start pretty soon, I’ll do something to that Penrhyn monkey that won’t be any young lady’s dancing-class, you bet your boots!

* * *

I told Billings. First he paid me fifty dollars. Then he made a bonfire of all his theosophic outfit. Then he went down to the quarry and announced that he was his own boss from that time on; and by way of a sample demonstration he called up Arthur Penrhyn and knocked the everlasting Ghoollah out of him. Then he came back to the house and looked at the thermometer.

To this day, I never see champagne without thinking of drinking some.

CUTWATER OF SENECA.

HE story I am about to tell is hardly a story at all. Perhaps I had better call it a report, and let it go at that, with a word of explanation as to how I came to report it.

In 1884 a new state survey and a new re-districting act between them cut off about one-quarter of a northern timber county close to the Canada border, and delivered over the severed portion to its neighbor on the southerly side, a thickly settled county with several large towns and with important manufacturing interests. This division left the backwoods county temporarily without a judiciary or a place of holding court. But the act provided for the transfer of all pending cases to the courts of the more fortunate county down below, and gave the backwoods District Attorney the privilege of trying in the said courts such cases as might arise in his own bailiwick during his term of office then current.

No such cases occurred, however, until the period stated by the act was nearly at an end, when the District Attorney of the mutilated county came down to Metropole, our County Seat, to try a murder case. As our backwoods neighbors were a somewhat untrammelled, uncouth and free-and-easy folk at their quietest, his coming naturally attracted some curious interest, especially after it became known that he had come into town sitting side by side with the prisoner in the smoking-car, and discussing politics with him. His name was Judge Cutwater, and he was generally spoken of as Cutwater of Seneca—perhaps because he had at some time been a Judge in Seneca, New York; perhaps because there was no comprehensible reason for so calling him, any more than there was comprehensible reason for various and sundry other things about him.

He was a man who might have been sixty or seventy or eighty. Indeed, he might have been a hundred, and he may be now, for all I know. But he was lean, wiry, agile, supple and full of eternal youth. He might have been good-looking if he had cared to be, for he had a fine old-fashioned eagle face, and a handsome, flowing gray moustache, the grace of which was spoiled by a straggling thin wisp of chin whiskers, and a patch of gray stubble on each cheek. And, of course, he chewed tobacco profusely and diffusely, and in his long, grease-stained, shiny broadcloth coat, his knee-bagged breeches, his big slouch hat, and his eye-glasses with heavy black horn rims, suspended from his neck by a combination of black ribbon and pink string, he looked what he was, as clearly as though he had been labelled—the representative of the Majesty of the Law among a backwoods people out of odds with fortune, desperate, disheartened, down on their luck, and lost to self-respect.

He said he was a good Democrat, and I think he was. He saw the prisoner locked up, bade him a kindly “Good night, Jim,” and ordered the jailer to let him have all the whiskey he wanted. Then Judge Cutwater called on his brother of the local bench, greeting him with a ceremonious and stately dignity that absolutely awed the excellent old gentleman, and dropping an enormous Latin quotation on him as he departed, just by way of utterly flattening him out. After that he strolled over to the hotel, grasped the landlord warmly by the hand, and in the space of half an hour told him a string of stories of such startling novelty, humor and unfitness for publication that, as the landlord enthusiastically declared, the recent Drummers’ Convention could not be said to be “in it” with the old man.

The next day the case of Jim Adsum for the murder of his mate in a logging camp was called in court; and District Attorney Cutwater’s trying of it was a circus that nearly drove old Judge Potter into an apoplectic fit, and kept the whole court room in what both those eminent jurists united—it was the only thing they did unite in—in characterizing as a disgraceful uproar.

And yet, somehow, by four o’clock he had evidence enough in to convict the prisoner; the defence had not a single exception worth the noting, and was rattled as to its state of mind; and that weird old prosecutor, who repeatedly spoke of the prisoner at the bar as “Jim,” and made no secret of the fact that they had been bosom friends and companions in the forest, had worked up a case that made the best lawyers in the room stare at him with looks of puzzled surprise and amazed respect.

When he rose to sum up, he slowly and thoughtfully drew a tin tobacco-box from his trousers’ pocket, opened it and deposited therein his quid, after passing his right hand, with a rapid and skillful motion, across his gray moustache. This feat he performed with a dignity that at once fascinated and awed the beholder. Then he began:

“Your Honor and Gentlemen of the Jury: It is a rare and a seldom occurrence that a prosecuting official, sworn to exert his utmost energies to further the execution of the law, is called upon to invoke the awful vengeance of that law, and the retribution demanded by outraged humanity, upon the head of one under whose blanket he has lain within the cold hollows of the snow-clad woods; with whom he has shared the meagre food of the pioneer; side by side with whom he has struggled for his rights and his liberties, at the daily and hourly risk of his life, with half-breed Injuns and with half-breeder Kanucks. Sech, gentlemen, is the duty that lies before this servant of the Law to-day; and sech, gentlemen, is the duty that will be done, without fear or favor, without consideration of friendship or hallowed association; and this man, Jim Adsum, knows it, knowing me, as well as he ever knew anything in the fool life that is now drawing to a close.

“You have heard, Gentlemen of the Jury, the evidence that has been laid before you on the part of the prosecution, and you have heard the attempt made by the learned counsel for the defence to discredit that evidence in his eloquent but frivolous opening on behalf of his unfortunate client. I trust that you have given to the one the appreciative attention which it deserves, and that you have let the other slip, naked and shivering, into the boundless oblivion of your utter contempt.

“What, Gentlemen of the Jury, are the circumstances of this case? We learn by the testimony for the people that on the twenty-seventh of November a party of seven men started off for the upper waters of the Sagus River, some to join a lumber camp, and others, among them this defendant, James Adsum, and his victim, Peter Biaux, a Frenchman, in the pursuit of their usual vocation—which may be said to be hunting for fur-skins, on general principles. This party of seven men is snowed up, and goes into camp at the junction of Sagus and First Rivers, and for eleven days remains thus snow-bound in that icy solitude, the only human beings within hundreds of miles.

“There has been, Gentlemen of the Jury, as has been shown to you, an old grudge between the prisoner at the bar and the deceased; a grudge of many years standing. There is no use of going into the origin of that grudge. Some says it was cards; some, business; some, drink; and I personally know that it was a woman; but that makes no difference before this present tribunal. Let it be enough that there was bad blood between the men; that it broke forth, as two witnesses have told you, day

after day, within the confines of that little camp crowded within its snow-bound arena in the heart of the immeasurable solitudes of the wintry forest. Again and again the other members of the party intervened to make peace between them. At last, upon the eighth day of December, matters come to a crisis, and a personal encounter ensued between the two men, in the course of which the deceased, being a Frenchman, is badly mauled, and Jim, here, being without his knife, through carelessness, is correspondingly cut. The two are separated; and, for fear of further mischief, the Frenchman is sent down the river to fish through the ice, and the prisoner is kept in the camp. That night, by order of the head of the party, he sleeps between two men. These two men have told you their story—how one of them woke in the night at the sound, as he thought, of a distant shot, and became aware that Adsum was no longer at his side—how, reaching out his hand, he grasped another hand, and taking it for the prisoner’s, was reassured and fell asleep again—and how, weeks afterward, he first found out that that hand was the hand of the man who had been detailed to sleep on the other side of the prisoner. You have heard, gentlemen, how these two men awoke in the morning to find Adsum lying between them, shaking and shivering with a chill under his heavy blanket. You have heard of the long and unsuccessful search for Peter Biaux, and of the accidental discovery of his mangled body three months later, under the ice of the Sagus River, at a point ten miles below the camp. You have heard how each of these witnesses was haunted by a suspicion that he had unwittingly betrayed the trust reposed in him, and how, at last, when they spoke together of their watch on that fatal night, their suspicion flashed, illumined with the fire of heaven’s truth, into a hijjus certainty.

“You have been told, gentlemen, that the case of the people rests upon circumstantial evidence. It does, gentlemen; it does; and the circumstances are all there. You have heard how when these two witnesses exchanged notes, they came to one conclusion, and that is the conclusion to which I shall bring your minds. The witness Duncan said to the witness Atwood: ‘Jim done it!’ The witness Atwood replied to him: ‘Jim done it!’ And I say to you, Gentlemen of the Jury: ‘Jim done it!’ And you done it, Jim; you know you did!

“And now, gentlemen, what sort of a man is this prisoner at the bar? We must consider him for the purposes of this trial as two men—on the one hand, as the brave, upright and courageous trapper which he has on numberless occasions, to my personal knowledge, shown himself to be—and I may say to you, Gentlemen of the Jury, that I would not be here talking to you now if he had not a-been on one or two occasions. And on the other hand, Gentlemen of the Jury, I am going to show him to you as the red-handed murderer I always told him he would be if he gave the rein to his violent passions. Besides, the darn fool’s drunk half the time.

“You have been told, gentlemen, by the learned counsel for the defence, that this crime was committed in a rough country, where deeds of violence are so common that it is possible that this man may have died by another hand, murdered by a totally different person, for totally different causes and reasons, and under circumstances totally unconnected with the circumstances set forth in this case. Gentlemen, it is a rough country—rough as the speech of its children, rough as their food and fare, rough as the storms they face, and nigh as rough as the whiskey they drink. But it is a country, gentlemen, where every man knows his neighbor’s face and his neighbor’s heart, where the dangers and privations of life draw men closer together than they are drawn in great cities like this beautiful town of yours, which is honored by the citizens I see sot before me in this jury box. In that great snow-clad wilderness, on that bitter eighth of December, with the thermometer thirty degrees below zero, I can assure you, gentlemen, that there was no casual, accidental, extemporaneous murderer lilly-twiddling around that chilly solitude, sauntering among twenty-foot snowdrifts for the purpose of striking down a total stranger with nineteen distinct and separate cuts, and then fading away into nothingness like the airy fabric of a vision. And Jim doing nothing all that time? Gentlemen, the contention of the counsel ain’t sense!

“Gentlemen, I wish I could tell you that it was so. I wish I could tell you so for Jim’s sake. I wish I could tell you so for your own sakes, for on you is soon to rest the awful yet proud responsibility of deciding that a fellow human being’s life is forfeit to his blood-guiltiness. I wish I could tell you so for my own sake, regarding myself as a friend of Jim’s. But it is the District Attorney, the Prosecutor for the People, that you must listen to while he tells you the story of what happened that night.

“It was half-past eleven of that night when this man Adsum arose. How do I know? Look in the almanac and see where the moon stood at half-past eleven! It was then that he slipped from between his two guards and drew back to where the flickering camp-fire cast the shadow of a pine tree on the wall of snow that shut in their little resting-place. There he stood in that shadow—a shadow that laid on his soul and on his face—and waited to see if one of his comrades stirred. At his feet lay the two men that had been set to guard him, Jared Duncan and Bill Atwood. Eb Spence laid over the way with his feet to the fire. By him laid Sol Geary and Kentucky Wilson. Why, Jim, I can see it all just as if I was there! And then you—he—then, Gentlemen of the Jury, this prisoner at the bar, slipped from that camp where his companions lay, bound to him as he was bound to them, in the faith of comradeship; and, as he left that little circle, that spot trodden out of the virgin snow, he left behind him his fidelity, his self-respect and his manhood; his mind and soul and heart full of the black and devilish thought of taking by treacherous surprise the life of a comrade. Up

to that hour, his spirit had harbored no sech evil thought. The men he had theretofore killed—and I am not saying, gentlemen, that he had not killed enough—had been killed in fair and open fight, and there is not a one of them all but will be glad and proud to meet him as gentleman to gentleman at the Judgement Day. But now it was with murder in his heart—base, cowardly, faithless murder—that he left that camp; it was with murder in his heart that he sneaked, crouching low, down where the heavy shadows hid the margin of the ice-bound stream. It was with murder in his heart that he laid himself flat upon his belly on the ice when he came within two rod of the Beaver Dam, and worked along, keeping ever in the shadow till he come down to where that Frenchman, who, six hours before, had et out of the same pan with him, stood with his light by his side, gazing down into the black hole in the ice that was to be the mouth of his grave and the portal of his entrance into eternity. Murder, gentlemen, murder nerved his arm when he struck out that light with the fur cap you see now in his hand; and murder’s self filled him with a maniac’s rage as he rose to his feet and shot and stabbed the defenceless back of his unsuspecting comrade. This, gentlemen, this—and no tale of a prowling stranger—this, gentlemen, is the truth; and I will appeal to the prisoner, himself, gentlemen, to bear me out. Jim Adsum, you can lie to this Judge and you can lie to this Jury; you can lie to your neighbors and you can lie to your own conscience; but you can’t lie to old man Cutwater, and you know it. Now, Jim, was not that just about the way you done it?”

And Jim nodded his head, turned the fur cap over in his hands, and assented quietly:

“Just about.”

Twenty-five minutes later the Jury went out, and Judge Cutwater stalked slowly and thoughtfully over to the prisoner, and touched him on the shoulder.

“Jim,” he said, meditatively, “if I know anything about juries, and I think I do, I’ve hanged you on that talk as sure as guns. Your man’s summing-up didn’t amount to pea-soup. I’m sorry, of course; but there wasn’t no way out of it for either you or me. However, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. My term as District Attorney expires to-morrow at twelve; and, if you’ll send that fool counsel of yours round to me at the tahvern, I’ll show him how to drive a horse and cart through the law in this case and get you a new trial, like rolling off a log.”

And as Mr. Adsum got not only one but three new trials during the time that I kept track of him, I have every reason to believe that Judge Cutwater of Seneca kept his promise as a man, as faithfully as he performed his duty as a prosecutor for the people.

MR. WICK’S AUNT.

HE Wick family had run the usual course of families for many, many years, and was quite old and respectable when causes, natural and extraordinary, none of them being pertinent to this statement, reduced said family to three members, viz:

Miss Angelica Sudbury Wick, of the Boston branch of the family, who lived in the house of her guardian, old Jonas Thatcher, with whom we have no further concern, and who is therefore to be considered as turned down, although in his day he was a highly respected leather merchant. Miss Angelica Wick was fair and sweet and good up to the last requirement of young womanhood.

Mr. Winkelman Hempstead Wick, of the Long Island branch of the family, a distant cousin of the young lady, and a young man of conscientious mind, an accountant by profession, and very nearly ready to buy out his employer.

Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick, also of the Long Island branch of the family, the grand-uncle of young Winkelman, who had brought up the young man in his own house, and who loved him more than anything else in the world, until, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, he fell in love with, and married a lady named Louisa Nasmyth Pine, whom we will dismiss from consideration as we dismissed the old leather merchant, although she was a most estimable and attractive lady, and did fancy embroidery extremely well. Her only concern with this story is that she bore the elder Mr. Wick a baby, and died three or four months subsequently. But that was enough; plenty; as much as was necessary.

The way that marriage came about was this: old Mr. Wick wanted to see the Wick family perpetuated, but young Mr. Wick was one of those cautious, careful, particular men who get to be old bachelors before they know it. No girl whom he knew was quite exactly what he wanted. If she had been, she would have been too good for any man on earth. In fact, it took young Mr. Wick a number of years to realize that any way he could marry, he could only marry a human being like himself. In the meanwhile his grand-uncle grew impatient; and finally he said that if Winkelman didn’t fix on a girl and get her to agree to marry him by the first of next January, he, Aaron Bushwick Wick, would marry somebody himself. Miss Louisa Nasmyth Pine, being then close on to forty, helped him to get under the line just in time to save his grand-nephew from engaging himself to an ill-tempered widow with five children—which is the kind of woman that those particular men generally pick up in the end. And it serves them right.

And so this marriage brought into existence the baby—Beatrice Brighton Wick.

Old Mr. Wick’s endeavors to hand the name of Wick down to posterity were crowned, as you see, with only partial success. He had a Wick, it was true, but it was a Wick that would be put out by marriage. He found himself obliged to fall back on young Winkelman, and he bethought himself of the distant cousin in Boston. He knew nothing of her, but he reasoned that if she were a Wick, she must be everything that was lovely and desirable; and so he said to his grand-nephew:

“Wink, you know that I am a man of my word. If you will go and marry that girl, and if the two of you will take care of that confounded baby, who is crying again, while I put in three or four years in Europe till it gets to some sort of a rational age, I will buy your employer out, guarantee you what is necessary for you to live on in some healthy country place—no city air for that child, do you understand!—and when I die you’ll be her guardian and have the usufruct of her estate and be residuary legatee and all that sort of thing.”

Winkelman Wick knew that his grand-uncle was a man of his word, and that “all that sort of thing” meant a very, very comfortable sort of thing, for the old gentleman was rich and had liberal ideas, and drank more port than was good for him. He had no fancy for marrying a strange girl, but he thought there could be no harm in going out to Boston and taking a look at his, so far, distant cousin. Under pretense of wanting to write up the Wick genealogy, he went to Boston, and passed some time under Mr. Thatcher’s hospitable roof. He found Angelica Wick all that his fancy might have painted her but hadn’t; and, as Mr. Thatcher had six daughters of his own, all of them older than Angelica, and none so good-looking, he did not find any difficulty in inducing his pretty cousin to marry him—and she did not back out even when he sprung the baby contract on her. She said that she was a true woman and that she would stand by him, but that she thought it might be a little awkward. Feminine intuition is a wonderful thing. When it is right, it is apt to be right.

The elder Mr. Wick was as good as his word,—only, as is often the case with people who pride themselves upon being as good as their word, he took his own word too seriously. He died of apoplexy shortly after landing at Liverpool. His will, however, was probated in New York, and thus escaped a legacy tax. The will fully carried out every promise he had made to his young kinsman, but he had drawn it to follow absolutely the terms of his proposition. He had never for an instant contemplated the possibility of his dying before he wanted to—people who make their wills very rarely do—and he had so drawn the document that Mr. and Mrs. Winkelman Wick could come into their inheritance only after carrying out their part of the contract, which was to take care of their aunt, baby Beatrice Brighton Wick, for the space of four years, during which Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick had intended, without consideration of the designs of Divine Providence, to sojourn in Europe.

This brings the situation exactly down to bed-rock. On the tenth of April, eighteen hundred and tumty-tum, Mr. Winkelman Wick and Miss Angelica Wick were married in the old Wick house on Montague Street, Brooklyn. On the twenty-fifth of April Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick ended his journey across the Atlantic at the Port of Liverpool, England. On the twenty-seventh of April he started on that other journey for which your heirs pay your passage money—and he certainly was not happy in his starting place. On the twenty-eighth of the same month young Mr. and Mrs. Wick knew the terms of their grand-uncle’s will; and on the thirtieth the old Wick mansion was in the hands of the trustees, and the young Wicks were in a hotel in charge of their baby-aunt, Beatrice, who was herself in charge of an aged Irishwoman, whose feet were decidedly more intelligent than her brain. That is one of the beauties of Ireland. You can get every variety of human being there from a cherub to a chimpanzee.

They were very comfortable in the hotel, and would have liked to stay there, but that awful contract had as many ways of making itself disagreeable as an octopus has. They had pledged themselves, with and for the benefit of the baby, to provide a suitable place in the country without unreasonable delay. Their lawyer informed them that reasonable delay meant three weeks and not one day more. As their contract began on the tenth of April, they had, therefore, one day left to them to carry out this provision. Moreover, the contract, after defining the phrase “a suitable country place” in terms that would have fitted a selling advertisement of the Garden of Eden, went on to specify that no place should be considered suitable that was not at least forty miles from any city of twenty thousand inhabitants, or upward. When Mr. Aaron Bushwick Wick wanted pure country air for a baby, he wanted it pure. If he could, he would probably have had it brought in sealed bottles.

Picking a place of residence for four long years is not an agreeable task under conditions such as these, especially to a young couple prematurely saddled with parental cares, and equipped with only twenty days of experience in the matrimonial state. They discussed the situation for hours on end. Mrs. Wick wept, and Mr. Wick contributed more profanity than is generally used by a green husband. They even asked the Irish nurse if she could not suggest some suitable place, and they stated the whole situation to her very clearly and carefully. She thought a while, and then suggested Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland. However, indirectly, she assisted them to solve the problem. Mr. Wick told her to go to Jericho; and Mrs. Wick suddenly brightened up and said:

“Why, that’s so, Winkelman!”

Mr. Wick stared in horror at his wife. Was the sweet young thing going crazy under the strain? But no; Mrs. Wick was looking as bright as a rose after an April shower, and she grew brighter and brighter as she stood thinking in silence, nodding her pretty head affirmatively, pursing her lips, and checking off the various stages of her thought with her finger tip on her cheek. Finally she said:

“And you could use the little room for a dressing room. Yes, dear, I’m quite certain it will do beautifully.”

After a while Mr. Wick convinced his wife that he was not a mind-reader, and then he got some information. Of course she did not stay convinced—no woman ever did. All women think that the mechanism of their thought is visible like a model in a glass case.

Mrs. Wick had forgotten that she herself owned a country house. This was more excusable than it seems on the face of it, for she had never seen the house, nor had she ever expected to see it. In fact, it was hardly to be called a house; it was only a sort of bungalow or pavilion which had once belonged to a club of sportsmen, and which her father had taken for a bad debt. It was situated in the village of Jericho, of which she knew nothing more than that her father had said that it was a good place for trout, and was accessible by several different railroads. Concerning the house itself she was better informed. She had had to copy the plans of its interior on many occasions when her guardian had made futile efforts to sell or to rent it. She also knew that the place was fully furnished, and that an old woman lived in it as care-taker, rent free, and liable to be dispossessed at any moment.

The nurse was told that they would go to Jericho with her. She only asked would the baby take her bottle now or wait till she got there?

* * *

Jericho Junction is one of those lonely and forsaken little stopping-places on the outskirts of the great woods that are the sportsman’s paradise, with a dreary, brown-painted, pine box, just big enough for the ticket agent, the baggage master, the telegraph operator, the flagman, the local postmaster, and the casual or possible intending passenger. As this makes two persons in all, the structure is not large.

The casual passenger and the full corps of local railway officials were both present at Jericho Junction when the 6:30 P. M. train loomed out of the dreary, raw May twilight, and drew up in front of the little box. Now, these two occupants of the tiny station were neighbors but not friends. Farmer Byam Beebe lived “a piece back in the country, over t’wards Ellenville South Farms.” Mr. John D. Wilkins, station agent, telegraph operator, and all the rest of the functionaries of Jericho Junction, dwelt in his little box, midway between Ellenville South Farms and the nearest important town, Bunker’s Mills, a considerable manufacturing settlement. A houseless stretch of ten miles separated the neighbors; but not even ten miles had stood between them and a grudge of many years’ duration. Beebe hated Wilkins, and Wilkins hated Beebe. Never mind why. They were close neighbors for that region; and that more close neighbors do not kill each other testifies every day to the broad spread of Christian charity.