The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

HUMOUR SERIES

Edited by W. H. DIRCKS

THE HUMOUR OF AMERICA

ALREADY ISSUED

FRENCH HUMOUR

GERMAN HUMOUR

ITALIAN HUMOUR

AMERICAN HUMOUR

DUTCH HUMOUR

IRISH HUMOUR

SPANISH HUMOUR

RUSSIAN HUMOUR

“SHE SHRILLY OBSERVES,‘THOMAS JEFFERSON, COME RIGHT INTO THE HOUSE THIS MINIT.’”
See page [130].

THE

HUMOUR OF AMERICA

SELECTED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION

AND INDEX OF

AMERICAN HUMORISTS, BY

JAMES BARR. ILLUSTRATIONS

BY C. E. BROCK

THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD.,

PATERNOSTER SQUARE, LONDON, E.C.

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS,

153-157 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.

1909.

CONTENTS.

NOTE.

WHEN the unfortunate man standing on the scaffold was asked by a spectator to make a speech, he said that, considering the interesting programme which had been prepared by their good friend the Sheriff, he could not hope to say anything likely to amuse them. The compiler of a book of humour may recognise a like anxiety on the part of the public to push on to the principal attraction. There arises on his mental vision the eager face of the book-buyer, as he hurriedly skims over the leaves at the commencement of the volume, to find the end of the introduction and the beginning of the humour.

Once upon a time when I was young—in fact, more than eighteen months ago—I wrote an introduction to a volume of American humorous verse. It didn’t say much, but it covered a great deal of space, and looked imposing. The few statements made, however, have risen up and smitten me night and day, and I have never to this moment been able to get away from them. After the volume had been before the public for a few months, I made an everlasting resolve to abstain from all theories, deductions, speculations, prophecies, warnings, and prognostications in regard to any and every humour, whether American or British, new or old, known or unknown. It occurred to me that a new and delightful feature might be added to a book of humour if the reader were permitted the privilege of forming his own conclusions and choosing for himself his favourite among the authors. No doubt many a man has been forced, sorely against his will, to acknowledge, theoretically, the irresistibility of certain writers’ humour, and to spend the best part of his life in trying to see something funny in the writers’ work. No such hopeless task will be imposed by this volume. The different authors included between the covers of this book will speak for themselves. They need no bush.

But instead of writing an introduction for no one to read I have thought it better to arrange a biographical index of American and Canadian humorous writers, giving such pertinent particulars of each author’s life and work as may be of value to the student of American literature. This index will be found at the end of the volume. It comes, it is hoped, within reasonable distance of completeness, and although in the majority of cases the data given is of a broad and general kind, still it is sufficiently explicit to set the student in the way of finding for himself the chief characteristics and work of the different authors. This index, to the best of my knowledge, is the first of its kind that has been arranged, and should at least prove of benefit to any unfortunate compiler who in future ages is asked to prepare a volume of humorous extracts from American authors. The job is a big one now. What it will be if America continues to produce “funny” men at the rate she has done for the past hundred years it is impossible to imagine.

In conclusion, I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness for particulars of the works of many writers to Mr. Oscar Fay Adams’ valuable little work, Handbook of American Authors. The dates which appear in this book are chiefly taken from Appleton’s Dictionary of American Biography.

J. B.

THE HUMOUR OF AMERICA.

MY DOG.

“KOSCIUSKO AND I FROLICKED AROUND.”

I HAVE owned quite a number of dogs in my life, but they are all dead now. Last evening I visited my dog cemetery—just between the gloaming and the shank of the evening. On the biscuit-box cover that stands at the head of a little mound fringed with golden rod and pickle bottles, the idler may still read these lines, etched in red chalk by a trembling hand—

LITTLE KOSCIUSKO,

.........NOT DEAD.........

BUT JERKED HENCE

BY REQUEST.

S. Y. L.

(SEE YOU LATER.)

I do not know why he was called Kosciusko. I do not care. I only know that his little grave stands out there while the gloaming gloams and the soughing winds are soughing.

Do you ask why I am alone here and dogless in this weary world?

I will tell you, anyhow. It will not take long, and it may do me good: Kosciusko came to me one night in winter, with no baggage, and unidentified.

When I opened the door he came in as though he had left something in there by mistake and had returned for it.

He stayed with us two years as a watch-dog. In a desultory way, he was a good watch-dog. If he had watched other people with the same unrelenting scrutiny with which he watched me, I might have felt his death more keenly than I do now.

The second year that little Kosciusko was with us, I shaved off a full beard one day while down town, put on a clean collar and otherwise disguised myself, intending to surprise my wife.

Kosciusko sat on the front porch when I returned. He looked at me as a cashier of a bank does when a newspaper man goes in to get a suspiciously large cheque cashed. He did not know me. I said, “Kosciusko, have you forgotten your master’s voice?”

He smiled sarcastically, showing his glorious wealth of mouth, but still sat there as though he had stuck his tail into the door-steps and couldn’t get it out.

So I waived the formality of going in at the front door, and went around to the portcullis, on the off side of the house, but Kosciusko was there when I arrived. The cook, seeing a stranger lurking around the manor-house, encouraged Kosciusko to come and gorge himself with a part of my leg, which he did. Acting on this hint I went to the barn.

I do not know why I went to the barn, but somehow there was nothing in the house that I wanted. When a man wants to be by himself there is no place like a good, quiet barn for thought. So I went into the barn, about three feet prior to Kosciusko.

Noticing the stairway, I ascended it in an aimless kind of way, about four steps at a time. What happened when we got into the haymow I do not now recall, only that Kosciusko and I frolicked around there in the hay for some time. Occasionally I would be on the top, and then he would have all the delegates, until finally I got hold of a pitchfork, and freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell. I wrapped myself up in an old horse-net and went into the house. Some of my clothes were afterwards found in the hay, and the doctor pried a part of my person out of Kosciusko’s jaws, but not enough to do me any good.

I have owned, in all, eleven dogs, and they all died violent deaths, and went out of the world totally unprepared to die.

Bill Nye.

KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE.

“LAY OUT THERE AND TRY TO SEE
JES’ HOW LAZY YOU KIN BE!”

I.

TELL you what I like the best—

’Long about knee-deep in June,

’Bout the time strawberries melts

On the vines—some afternoon

Like to jes’ git out and rest,

And not work at nothin’ else!

II.

Orchard’s where I’d ruther be—

Needn’t fence it in fer me!

Jes’ the whole sky overhead,

And the whole airth underneath—

Sorto’ so’s a man kin breathe

Like he ort, and kindo’ has

Elbow-room to keerlessly

Sprawl out len’thways on the grass,

Where the shadders thick and soft

As the kivvers on the bed

Mother fixes in the loft

Allus, when they’s company!

III.

Jes’ a sorto’ lazein’ there—

S’ lazy, ’at you peek and peer

Through the wavin’ leaves above,

Like a feller ’ats in love

And don’t know it, ner don’t keer.

Ever’thing you hear and see

Got some sort o’ interest—

Maybe find a bluebird’s nest

Tucked up there conveenently

Fer the boys ’ats apt to be

Up some other apple tree!

Watch the swallers skootin’ past

’bout as peert as you could ast;

Er the Bobwhite raise and whiz

Where some other’s whistle is.

IV.

Ketch a shadder down below,

And look up to find the crow;

Er a hawk away up there,

’Pearantly froze in the air!—

Hear the old hen squawk, and squat

Over every chick she’s got,

Suddent-like!—And she knows where

That air hawk is, well as you!—

You jes’ bet yer life she do!—

Eyes a-glittering like glass

Waitin’ till he makes a pass!

V.

Pee-wees’ singin’, to express

My opinion, ’s second class,

Yit you’ll hear ’em more er less;

Sapsucks gettin’ down to biz,

Weedin’ out the lonesomeness;

Mr. Bluejay, full o’ sass,

In those base-ball clothes o’ his,

Sportin’ ’round the orchard jes’

Like he owned the premises!

Sun out in the field kin sizz,

But flat on yer back, I guess,

In the shade’s where glory is!

That’s jes’ what I’d like to do

Stiddy fer a year er two!

VI.

Plague! ef they aint sompin’ in

Work ’at kindo’ goes agin

My convictions!—’long about

Here in June especially!—

Under some old apple tree

Jes’ a-restin’ through and through,

I could git along without

Nothin’ else at all to do

Only jes’ a-wishin’ you

Was a-gettin’ there like me,

And June was eternity!

VII.

Lay out there and try to see

Jes’ how lazy you kin be!—

Tumble round and souse yer head

In the clover-bloom, er pull

Yer straw hat acrost yer eyes,

And peek through it at the skies,

Thinkin’ of old chums ’ats dead,

Maybe, smilin’ back at you

In betwixt the beautiful

Clouds o’ gold and white and blue!—

Month a man kin railly love—

June, you know, I’m talkin’ of!

VIII.

March ain’t never nothin’ new!—

Aprile’s altogether too

Brash fer me! and May—I jes’

’Bominate its promises,—

Little hints o’ sunshine and

Green around the timber-land—

A few blossoms, and a few

Chip-birds, and a sprout er two—

Drap asleep, and it turns in

’Fore daylight and snows agin!—

But when June comes—Clear my throat

With wild honey! Rench my hair

In the dew! and hold my coat!

Whoop out loud! and throw my hat!—

June wants me and I’m to spare!

Spread them shadders anywhere,

I’ll git down and waller there,

And obleeged to you at that!

James Whitcomb Riley.

BAKED BEANS AND CULTURE.

THE members of the Boston Commercial Club are charming gentlemen. They are now the guests of the Chicago Commercial Club, and are being shown every attention that our market affords. They are a fine-looking lot, well-dressed and well-mannered, with just enough whiskers to be impressive without being imposing.

“This is a darned likely village,” said Seth Adams last evening. “Everybody is rushin’ ’round an’ doin’ business as if his life depended on it. Should think they’d git all tuckered out ’fore night, but I’ll be darned if there ain’t just as many folks on the street after nightfall as afore. We’re stoppin’ at the Palmer tavern; an’ my chamber is up so all-fired high, that I can count all your meetin’-house steeples from the winder.”

Last night five or six of these Boston merchants sat around the office of the hotel, and discussed matters and things. Pretty soon they got to talking about beans: this was the subject which they dwelt on with evident pleasure.

“Waal, sir,” said Ephraim Taft, a wholesale dealer in maple-sugar and flavoured lozenges, “you kin talk ’bout your new-fashioned dishes an’ high-falutin’ vittles; but, when you come right down to it, there ain’t no better eatin’ than a dish o’ baked pork ’n’ beans.”

“That’s so, b’ gosh!” chorussed the others.

“The truth o’ the matter is,” continued Mr. Taft, “that beans is good for everybody,—’t don’t make no difference whether he’s well or sick. Why, I’ve known a thousand folks—waal, mebbe not quite a thousand; but,—waal, now, jest to show, take the case of Bill Holbrook: you remember Bill, don’t ye?”

“Bill Holbrook?” said Mr. Ezra Eastman; “why, of course I do! Used to live down to Brimfield, next to the Moses Howard farm.”

“That’s the man,” resumed Mr. Taft. “Waal, Bill fell sick,—kinder moped round, tired like, for a week or two, an’ then tuck to his bed. His folks sent for Dock Smith,—ol’ Dock Smith that used to carry round a pair o’ leather saddlebags,—gosh, they don’t have no sech doctors nowadays! Waal, the dock, he come; an’ he looked at Bill’s tongue, an’ felt uv his pulse, an’ said that Bill had typhus fever. Ol’ Dock Smith was a very careful, conserv’tive man, an’ he never said nothin’ unless he knowed he was right.

“Bill began to git wuss, an’ he kep’ a-gittin’ wuss every day. One mornin’ ol’ Dock Smith sez, ‘Look a-here, Bill, I guess you’re a goner: as I figger it, you can’t hol’ out till nightfall.’

“Bill’s mother insisted on a con-sul-tation bein’ held; so ol’ Dock Smith sent over for young Dock Brainerd. I calc’late that, next to ol’ Dock Smith, young Dock Brainerd was the smartest doctor that ever lived.

“Waal, pretty soon along come Dock Brainerd; an’ he an’ Dock Smith went all over Bill, an’ looked at his tongue, an’ felt uv his pulse, an’ told him it was a gone case, an’ that he had got to die. Then they went off into the spare chamber to hold their con-sul-tation.

“SARY SAT DOWN BY THE BED, AN’ FED THEM BEANS INTO BILL.”

“Wall, Bill he lay there in the front room a-pantin’ an’ a-gaspin’, an’ a wond’rin’ whether it wuz true. As he wuz thinkin’, up comes the girl to git a clean tablecloth out of the clothes-press, an’ she left the door ajar as she come in. Bill he gave a sniff, an’ his eyes grew more natural like: he gathered together all the strength he had, and he raised himself up on one elbow, and sniffed again.

“‘Sary,’ says he, ‘wot’s that a-cookin’?’

“‘Beans,’ says she; ‘beans for dinner.’

“‘Sary,’ says the dyin’ man, ‘I must hev a plate uv them beans!’

“‘Sakes alive, Mr. Holbrook!’ says she; ‘if you wuz to eat any o’ them beans, it’d kill ye!’

“‘If I’ve got to die,’ says he, ‘I’m goin’ to die happy: fetch me a plate uv them beans.’

“Wall, Sary she pikes off to the doctors.

“‘Look a-here,’ says she; ‘Mr. Holbrook smelt the beans cookin’, an’ he says he’s got to have a plate uv ’em. Now, what shall I do about it?’

“‘Waal, doctor,’ says Dock Smith, ‘what do you think ’bout it?’

“‘He’s got to die anyhow,’ says Dock Brainerd; ‘an’ I don’t suppose the beans’ll make any diff’rence.’

“‘That’s the way I figger it,’ says Dock Smith; ‘in all my practice I never knew of beans hurtin’ anybody.’

“So Sary went down to the kitchen, an’ brought up a plateful of hot baked beans. Dock Smith raised Bill up in bed, an’ Dock Brainerd put a piller under the small of Bill’s back. Then Sary sat down by the bed, an’ fed them beans into Bill until Bill couldn’t hold any more.

“‘How air you feelin’ now?’ asked Dock Smith.

“Bill didn’t say nuthin’: he jest smiled sort uv peaceful like, an’ closed his eyes.

“‘The end hez come,’ said Dock Brainerd sof’ly; ‘Bill is dyin’.’

“Then Bill murmured kind o’ far-away like (as if he was dreamin’), ‘I ain’t dyin’: I’m dead an’ in heaven.’

“Next mornin’ Bill got out uv bed, an’ done a big day’s work on the farm, an’ he hain’t hed a sick spell since. Them beans cured him! I tell you, sir, that beans is,” etc.

Eugene Field.

THE NICE PEOPLE.

“THEY certainly are nice people,” I assented to my wife’s observation, using the colloquial phrase with a consciousness that it was anything but “nice” English, “and I’ll bet that their three children are better brought up than most of——”

“Two children,” corrected my wife.

“Three, he told me.”

“My dear, she said there were two.”

“He said three.”

“You’ve simply forgotten. I’m sure she told me they had only two—a boy and a girl.”

“Well, I didn’t enter into particulars.”

“No dear, and you couldn’t have understood him. Two children.”

“All right,” I said; but I did not think it was all right. As a near-sighted man learns by enforced observation to recognise persons at a distance when the face is not visible to the normal eye, so the man with a bad memory learns, almost unconsciously, to listen carefully and report accurately. My memory is bad; but I had not had time to forget that Mr. Brewster Brede had told me that afternoon that he had three children, at present left in the care of his mother-in-law, while he and Mrs. Brede took their summer vacation.

“Two children,” repeated my wife; “and they are staying with his aunt Jenny.”

“He told me with his mother-in-law,” I put in. My wife looked at me with a serious expression. Men may not remember much of what they are told about children; but any man knows the difference between an aunt and a mother-in-law.

“But don’t you think they’re nice people?” asked my wife.

“Oh, certainly,” I replied; “only they seem to be a little mixed up about their children.”

“SEATED THEMSELVES OPPOSITE US AT TABLE.”

“That isn’t a nice thing to say,” returned my wife.

I could not deny it.

And yet the next morning, when the Bredes came down and seated themselves opposite us at table, beaming and smiling in their natural, pleasant, well-bred fashion, I knew, to a social certainty, that they were “nice” people. He was a fine-looking fellow in his neat tennis-flannels, slim, graceful, twenty-eight or thirty years old, with a Frenchy-pointed beard. She was “nice” in all her pretty clothes, and she herself was pretty with that type of prettiness which out-wears most other types—the prettiness that lies in a rounded figure, a dusky skin, plump, rosy cheeks, white teeth, and black eyes. She might have been twenty-five; you guessed that she was prettier than she was at twenty, and that she would be prettier still at forty.

And nice people were all we wanted to make us happy in Mr. Jacobus’s summer boarding-house on the top of Orange Mountain. For a week we had come down to breakfast each morning, wondering why we wasted the precious days of idleness with the company gathered around the Jacobus board. What joy of human companionship was to be had out of Mrs. Tabb and Miss Hoogencamp, the two middle-aged gossips from Scranton, Pa.,—out of Mr. and Mrs. Biggle, an indurated head-bookkeeper and his prim and censorious wife,—out of old Major Halkit, a retired business man, who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote for circulars of every stock company that was started, and tried to induce every one to invest who would listen to him? We looked around at those dull faces, the truthful indices of mean and barren minds, and decided that we would leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacobus’s biscuits, light as Aurora’s cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the perfume of the late azaleas with which she decked her table, and decided to postpone our departure one more day. And then we wandered out to take our morning glance at what we called “our view”; and it seemed to us as if Tabb and Hoogencamp, and Halkit and the Biggles could not drive us away in a year.

I was not surprised when, after breakfast, my wife invited the Bredes to walk with us to “our view.” The Hoogencamp-Biggle-Tabb-Halkit contingent never stirred off Jacobus’s verandah; but we both felt that the Bredes would not profane that sacred scene. We strolled slowly across the fields, passed through the little belt of wood, and as I heard Mrs. Brede’s little cry of startled rapture, I motioned to Brede to look up.

“By Jove!” he cried; “heavenly!”

We looked off from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue, lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, woods and plains, all massed and mingled in that great silent sea of sunlit green. For silent it was to us, standing in the silence of a high place—silent with a Sunday stillness that made us listen, without taking thought, for the sound of bells coming up from the spires that rose above the tree-tops—the tree-tops that lay as far beneath us as the light clouds were above us that dropped great shadows upon our heads and faint specks of shade upon the broad sweep of land at the mountain’s foot.

“And so that is your view?” asked Mrs. Brede, after a moment; “you are very generous to make it ours too.”

Then we lay down on the grass, and Brede began to talk in a gentle voice, as if he felt the influence of the place. He had paddled a canoe, in his earlier days, he said, and he knew every river and creek in that vast stretch of landscape. He found his landmarks, and pointed out to us where the Passaic and the Hackensack flowed, invisible to us, hidden behind great ridges that in our sight were but combings of the green waves upon which we looked down, and yet on the further side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of villages—a little world of country life, lying unseen under our eyes.

“A good deal like looking at humanity,” he said; “there is such a thing as getting so far above our fellow-men that we see only one side of them.”

Ah, how much better was this sort of talk than the chatter and gossip of the Tabb and the Hoogencamp—than the Major’s dissertations upon his everlasting circulars! My wife and I exchanged glances.

“Now, when I went up the Matterhorn,” Mr. Brede began.

“Why, dear,” interrupted his wife; “I didn’t know you ever went up the Matterhorn.”

“It—it was five years ago,” said Mr. Brede hurriedly; “I—I didn’t tell you—when I was on the other side, you know—it was rather dangerous—well, as I was saying—it looked—oh, it didn’t look at all like this.”

A cloud floated overhead, throwing its great shadow over the field where we lay. The shadow passed over the mountain’s brow, and reappeared far below, a rapidly decreasing blot; flying eastward over the golden green. My wife and I exchanged glances once more.

Somehow the shadow lingered over us all. As we went home, the Bredes went side by side along the narrow path, and my wife and I walked together.

“Should you think,” she asked me, “that a man would climb the Matterhorn the very first year he was married?”

“I don’t know, my dear,” I answered evasively; “this isn’t the first year I have been married, not by a good many, and I wouldn’t climb it—for a farm.”

“You know what I mean?” she said.

I did.

When we reached the boarding-house, Mr. Jacobus took me aside.

“You know,” he began his discourse, “my wife, she used to live in N’ York!”

I didn’t know; but I said, “Yes.”

“She says the numbers on the streets runs criss-cross like. Thirty-four’s on one side o’ the street, an’ thirty-five’s on t’other. How’s that?”

“That is the invariable rule, I believe.”

“Then—I say—these here new folk that you ’n’ your wife seems so mighty taken up with—d’ye know anything about ’em?”

“I know nothing about the character of your boarders, Mr. Jacobus,” I replied, conscious of some irritability. “If I choose to associate with any of them——”

“Jess so—jess so!” broke in Jacobus. “I hain’t nothin’ to say ag’inst yer sosherbil’ty. But do ye know them?”

“Why, certainly not,” I replied.

“Well—that was all I wuz askin’ ye. Ye see, when he come here to take the rooms—you wasn’t here then—he told my wife that he lived at number thirty-four in his street. An’ yistiddy she told her that they lived at number thirty-five. He said he lived in an apartment-house. Now, there can’t be no apartment-house on two sides of the same street, kin they?”

“What street was it?” I inquired wearily.

“Hunderd’n’ twenty-first street.”

“Maybe,” I replied, still more wearily. “That’s Harlem. Nobody knows what people will do in Harlem.”

I went up to my wife’s room.

“Don’t you think it queer?” she asked me.

“I think I’ll have a talk with that young man to-night,” I said, “and see if he can give some account of himself.”

“But, my dear,” my wife said gravely, “she doesn’t know whether they’ve had the measles or not.”

“Why, Great Scott!” I exclaimed, “they must have had them when they were children.”

“Please don’t be stupid,” said my wife. “I meant their children.”

After dinner that night—or rather after supper, for we had dinner in the middle of the day at Jacobus’s—I walked down the long verandah to ask Brede, who was placidly smoking at the other end, to accompany me on a twilight stroll. Half-way down I met Major Halkit.

“That friend of yours,” he said, indicating the unconscious figure at the further end of the house, “seems to be a queer sort of a Dick. He told me that he was out of business, and just looking round for a chance to invest his capital. And I’ve been telling him what an everlasting big show he had to take stock in the Capitoline Trust Company—starts next month—four million capital; I told you all about it. ‘Oh, well,’ he says, ‘let’s wait and think about it.’ ‘Wait!’ says I; ‘the Capitoline Trust Company won’t wait for you, my boy. This is letting you in on the ground floor,’ says I; ‘and it’s now or never.’ ‘Oh, let it wait,’ says he. I don’t know what’s in-to the man.”

“I don’t know how well he knows his own business, Major,” I said as I started again for Brede’s end of the verandah. But I was troubled none the less. The Major could not have influenced the sale of one share of stock in the Capitoline Company. But that stock was a great investment; a rare chance for a purchaser with a few thousand dollars. Perhaps it was no more remarkable that Brede should not invest than that I should not; and yet it seemed to add one circumstance more to the other suspicious circumstances.

When I went upstairs that evening, I found my wife putting her hair to bed—I don’t know how I can better describe an operation familiar to every married man. I waited until the last tress was coiled up, and then I spoke.

“I’ve talked with Brede,” I said, “and I didn’t have to catechise him. He seemed to feel that some sort of explanation was looked for, and he was very outspoken. You were right about the children—that is, I must have misunderstood him. There are only two; but the Matterhorn episode was simple enough. He didn’t realise how dangerous it was until he had got so far into it that he couldn’t back out; and he didn’t tell her, because he’d left her here, you see; and under the circumstances——”

“Left her here!” cried my wife. “I’ve been sitting with her the whole afternoon, sewing, and she told me that he left her at Geneva, and came back and took her to Basle, and the baby was born there. Now I’m sure, dear, because I asked her.”

“Perhaps I was mistaken when I thought he said she was on this side of the water,” I suggested with bitter, biting irony.

“You poor dear, did I abuse you?” said my wife. “But do you know Mrs. Tabb said that she didn’t know how many lumps of sugar he took in his coffee. Now that seems queer, doesn’t it?”

It did. It was a small thing; but it looked queer, very queer.

The next morning it was clear that war was declared against the Bredes. They came down to breakfast somewhat late, and as soon as they arrived the Biggles swooped up the last fragments that remained on their plates, and made a stately march out of the dining-room. Then Miss Hoogencamp arose and departed, leaving a whole fish-ball on her plate. Even as Atalanta might have dropped an apple behind her to tempt her pursuer to check his speed, so Miss Hoogencamp left that fish-ball behind her, and between her maiden self and Contamination.

We had finished our breakfast, my wife and I, before the Bredes appeared. We talked it over, and agreed that we were glad that we had not been obliged to take sides upon such insufficient testimony.

After breakfast it was the custom of the male half of the Jacobus household to go around the corner of the building and smoke their pipes and cigars, where they would not annoy the ladies. We sat under a trellis covered with a grape vine that had borne no grapes in the memory of man. This vine, however, bore leaves, and these, on that pleasant summer morning, shielded from us two persons who were in earnest conversation in the straggling, half-dead flower-garden at the side of the house.

“I don’t want,” we heard Mr. Jacobus say, “to enter in no man’s pry-vacy; but I do want to know who it may be, like, that I hev in my house. Now what I ask of you—and I don’t want you to take it as in no ways personal—is, hev you your merridge-licence with you?”

“No,” we heard the voice of Mr. Brede reply. “Have you yours?”

I think it was a chance shot, but it told all the same. The Major (he was a widower), and Mr. Biggle and I looked at each other; and Mr. Jacobus, on the other side of the grape-trellis, looked at—I don’t know what—and was as silent as we were.

Where is your marriage-licence, married reader? Do you know? Four men, not including Mr. Brede, stood or sat on one side or the other of that grape-trellis, and not one of them knew where his marriage-licence was. Each of us had had one—the Major had had three. But where were they? Where is yours? Tucked in your best-man’s pocket; deposited in his desk, or washed to a pulp in his white waistcoat (if white waistcoats be the fashion of the hour), washed out of existence—can you tell where it is? Can you—unless you are one of those people who frame that interesting document and hang it upon their drawing-room walls?

Mr. Brede’s voice arose, after an awful stillness of what seemed like five minutes, and was, probably, thirty seconds—

“Mr. Jacobus, will you make out your bill at once, and let me pay it? I shall leave by the six o’clock train. And will you also send the waggon for my trunks?”

“I hain’t said I wanted to hev ye leave——” began Mr. Jacobus; but Brede cut him short.

“Bring me your bill.”

“But,” remonstrated Jacobus, “ef ye ain’t——”

“Bring me your bill!” said Mr. Brede.

My wife and I went out for our morning’s walk. But it seemed to us, when we looked at “our view,” as if we could only see those invisible villages of which Brede had told us—that other side of the ridges and rises of which we catch no glimpse from lofty hills or from the heights of human self-esteem. We meant to stay out until the Bredes had taken their departure; but we returned just in time to see Pete, the Jacobus darkey, the blacker of boots, the brusher of coats, the general handy-man of the house, loading the Bredes’ trunks on the Jacobus waggon.

And, as we stepped upon the verandah, down came Mrs. Brede, leaning on Mr. Brede’s arm as though she were ill; and it was clear that she had been crying—there were heavy rings about her pretty black eyes.

My wife took a step towards her.