Chapter V (1)

Night had come. It got in on the evening train, and was late, as usual. The drowsy bat was on the wing; or rather, the wing was on the drowsy bat. Both wings, in fact, were on the d. b. Down in the mossy glade, where deepening shadows mock the starlight’s gleam, she waits. Her Italian marble brow is clouded with a weight of sorrow. Her finely-chiseled chin is still; the plastic chewing gum, pasted on the trunk of a rugged oak, cools and hardens in the evening air. The firm tread of a manly No. 9 comes crashing through the woodland.

’Tis he.

“Bertrande!”

“Margueritte!”

They said no more. They could not. They had forgotten the rest of each other’s names. They sat in the deeping shadows of the gloaming, holding each other’s hands, and trying to think of something nice to say.

Suddenly his delicate nostrils quivered and trembled with a startled light.

“Margueritte!” he exclaimed, “we must fly! I hear the sound of native applejack upon the evening air! M’ff! m’ff!”

“Oh, hevings!” she cried, “it is, it is me long lost fathyer!”

“Then,” he exclaimed, drawing a United States regulation cavalry saber from his bosom, “I am lost!”

“Oh, no, not lost;” she said in earnest tones, “go straight ahead till you come to the _Hawkeye_ office, then turn up Market Street two blocks and follow the street car track south until you smell beer. Then you will know where you are. Fe-ly! Fe-ly! Me fathyer comes.”

“Methought,” he said, pausing in his flight, and speaking sternly, “Methought thou haddedest not a father.”

“I haive, I haive,” she shrieked, “and it is he!”

And as she spake a fatherly looking man parted the bushes and stood by her side. He was clad in a dark blue cut-away coat, with a button-hole bouquet, white vest, lilac kids, lavender pants, a pink necktie, waxed mustache, and a high hat. His boots were four and a half; his snowy handkerchief was perfumed with jockey club, and his breath with whisky sour. He was twenty-one years of old.

Bertrande regarded him sadly, and said to her he loved:

“It seems to me your father is rather juvenile.”

“Dear Bertrande,” she said, laying her head upon her father’s shoulder, “he married awful young.”

“Ah,” said Bertrande, bitterly, “I thought may be you had adopted him.”

And turning on his heel he was gone.

A REMINISCENCE OF EXHIBITION DAY.

“Well, no,” the boy said, “the thing didn’t go off exactly as I expected. You see, I was the sixth boy in the class, that was next to the head when the class formed left in front, and I was pretty near the first boy called on to declaim. I had got a mighty good ready and had a bully piece too. Ah, it was a rip staver.”

And the boy sighed as he paused to lift a segment out of a green apple, and placed it where it would do the most good, for a cholera doctor. We asked what piece it was.

“Spartacus to the Gladiators,” he said. “Just an old he raker of a piece. I got it all by heart, and used to go clear out to the Cascade to rehearse and hook strawberries. Old Fitch”--Mr. Fitch was the boy’s preceptor, one of the finest educators in the state--“he taught me all the gestures and inflections and flub drubs, and said I was just layin’ over the biggest toad in the puddle----”

“Excelling all your competitors, probably Mr. Fitch said,” we suggested.

“Yes,” the boy replied, “he’s a toney old cyclopedia on the patter, is old Fitchy. But him and me was both dead sure I was goin’ to skin the rag off the bush----”

“Win all the honors,” we gently corrected.

“Yes,” he said, “and the way it went off was bad. You see, I didn’t feel easy in my Sunday clothes on a week day to begin with. And my collar was too tight and my necktie was too blue, and I was in a hurry to get off early, so I only blacked the toes of my boots, and left the heels as red as a concert ticket. And the crowd there was in the school-house. Jammed. Every body in their good clothes and every body looking solemn as Monday morning. When my name was called something came up in my throat as big as a foot-ball. I couldn’t swallow it and I couldn’t spit it out. And when I got up on the platform--oh, Godfrey’s cordial! did you ever see a million heads without any bodies?”

We felt ashamed of our limited experience while we confessed that we could not recall having witnessed such a phenomenon.

“I never did till then,” the boy went on, “but they were there, for a fact, and I began to remember when these heads danced round and round the room that I had been forgetting my piece in the last five minutes just as fast as I ever forgot to fix the kindling wood at night. But I commenced. I got along with ‘It had been a day of triumph in Capua’ and ‘Lentulus returning with victorious eagles’ and all that well enough; but when I got on into the heavy business, I was left, sure. If Spartacus had talked to the gladiators as I did, they would have thought he was drunk and hustled him off to bed. It was awful. I stumbled along until I came to ‘Ye stand here now like giants as ye are. The strength of brass is in your rugged sinews, but to-morrow some Roman Adonis, breathing sweet perfume from his curling locks, will with his dainty fingers pat your red brawn and bet his sesterces upon your blood.’”

“That was excellent, capital,” we said, applauding, for the boy had growled off the last sentence like a first heavy villain.

“Oh yes, is it though?” he said, with some asperity. “Well, that’s the way I was going to say it that Friday, but what I did say was, ‘The strength of brass is in your rugged sinews, but to-morrow afternoon (you see I got to thinking of a base ball match) some Doman Aronis breathing sweet perfumery from his curly socks, will pat your bed rawn and bet his sister sees your blood.’”

“Did they laugh?” we asked.

“Oh no!” he replied, with an inflection that type won’t take. “Oh, no; they never smiled again; _they_ didn’t. It was when I got down a little that they felt bad. When he says, ‘If ye are beasts, then stand here waiting like fat oxen for the butcher’s knife.’ I told them, ‘If ye be cat fattle, then wait here standing like a butcher for the carving knife.’ And I got worse and worse until it came to this, ‘Oh, Rome, Rome, thou hast been a tender mother to me. Thou hast taught the poor timid shepherd boy, who never knew a harsher tone than a flute note, to gaze into the glaring eyeballs of the fierce Numidian lion, even as a boy upon a laughing girl. Thou hast taught him to drive the sword through rugged links of mail and brass and warm it in the marrow of his foe!’”

“Bravo!” we shouted.

“Cheese it,” he said, sententiously; “I didn’t say it just that way. I said, ‘Oh Rome, thou has ten a binder mother to me. Thou hast taught the poor boy who never knew a sheep note to glare into the laughing ear of a fierce Numidian eyeball even as a lyin’ boy at a girl. Thou hast taught him to mail his ragged brass through swords of link, and marry it in the warmer of his foe.’”

“And then?” we asked.

“I cried,” he said, “and went down. Everybody was cry’n’. They all had their faces in their handkerchiefs or behind fans, and were shaking so it nearly jarred the school-house.”

“You should practice elocution during vacation,” we suggested, “and you will not fail again.”

He bolted the rest of the green apple, threw his bare feet up in the air, and walked around on his hands in little circles. “Don’t have no speakin’ in vacation,” he said.

And we knew that, boy-like, he was going to let the days and the morrow take care each of its own evils, and we wondered as we came away how many fathers would recognize their own boys in the hero of this sketch, and if dear old Fitch, the oldest boy, with the clearest head and the tenderest heart we ever knew, would remember him.

MR. OLENDORF’S COMPLAINT.

Young Mr. Olendorf used to board at a nice boarding-house out on North Hill, a little this side of the North Pole. It was a good way out; but Mr. Olendorf always was fond of pure air and pedestrian exercise, and as his business hours were easy, he preferred the comforts of a home in the suburbs to the excitement and clamor of a down-town hotel. A mild-looking, meek-faced, soft-voiced young man was Mr. Olendorf, as ever you could wish to see. He rarely complained about anything, and he never spoke harshly of any one. He would sit on his trunk, when the family had carried his chair down to the parlor for the convenience of invited guests; and he would patiently sew on his shirt buttons with a darning-needle and carpet thread, rather than intimate to his washer-lady that it wasn’t just the thing to run fine shirts through a corn-sheller to wash them. Many a time he crawled into a bed that looked like the crater of an extinct volcano, rather than report the hired girl for neglecting to make it up. And six times a week he cleaned his grimy lamp chimney with his fingers, as far as they would reach, because, he said, in the fullness of his charitable soul, the girl had so much to do she hadn’t got round to it. And the seventh night in the week, the lamp being empty and dry as a flat bottle on a hunting expedition, he would undress by the dim religious light of a match. He used to wash with a piece of soap four inches long and two inches thick, as brown as varnish, and so hard it chipped the edges of the washstand when it was carelessly dropped; and often and often, when his eyes were full of soap, and he reached out his imploring hands, groping for the short, thin towel that was seldom there, he had to feel his way to the bed, abrading his shins against things that he couldn’t see and didn’t know the names of, and dry his face and hair on the pillow-slips. But he never murmured. He used to find bright streaks of red by the dozen in his pomade, and go down to the breakfast table with his own coal-black locks as dry as good advice, and marvel at the exceeding glossiness and slickness of the hired girl’s bright auburn cranium. But he said never a word. And the drouth used to strike his perfumery bottles once in a while, and leave them as empty as a lecturer’s head; and he would wind his modest nasal horn in a handkerchief that smelled like a wash-tub, and when his landlady’s daughters sailed scornfully past him, perfumed for all the world like the ghosts of his toilet bottles up stairs, he never looked suspicious, but only smiled apologetically, as though it was wrong in him to leave temptation in their way. And once, when he had an attack of cholera morbus, and sent out for a quart of brandy, and took a tablespoonful of it, and came back at night to find the bottle very empty, and the landlady’s husband very full, and lying in Mr. Olendorf’s bed with his boots on, young Mr. Olendorf only agreed with the landlady that it was very singular, and that the old man must be ill. So you see Mr. Olendorf was inclined to be rather peaceable and meek, and when he did complain there must be some reason for it.

One evening Mrs. McKerrel, his landlady, approached the young man for the purpose of securing the weekly dole which he paid for the comforts of a home, and bracing himself up by a desperate effort, Mr. Olendorf, for the first time in his life, complained.

“It’s the hash, Mrs. McKerrel,” he said plaintively. “It’s too monotonous. It’s good hash. I can’t say that it isn’t good. It is more nutritious than chopped straw, and a prize candy package doesn’t equal it for variety. But I want change. I like hash for breakfast. But when you give us baked hash for dinner and put boned hash on for supper, and give us plain hash again for breakfast, and serve stuffed hash again for dinner, it isn’t a square deal. I believe you impose on us. I never heard of ‘stuffed hash’ before I came here, and the only difference between it and the common kind is that it is thinner. The last ‘stuffed hash’ you gave us you made us eat with steel forks, and it was as thin as soup, and how is a strong man going to make out a dinner when he has only twenty-five minutes in which to eat soup with a three-tined fork? And I don’t think you do the fair thing by us on what you call ‘boned hash.’ It’s hardly right, Mrs. McKerrel, to make a hash of sardines and herrings and then call it ‘boned.’ It’s just like eating a shoe brush. Now there ought to be, once in a while, a change. Not too often, you know; I don’t expect you to keep a French restaurant for seven dollars a week, but just often enough to keep the bill of fare from growing tiresome. Say once every seven years. For instance, you may have ‘boned hash’ to-morrow for dinner, which, it being Sunday, you will. Well, then, you might have ‘boned hash’ every day until 1882, and then give us a roast, or a car-spring chicken. And so with ‘stuffed hash,’ and ‘hash a la mode,’ and ‘hash a la Mayonnais,’ ‘Lady Washington hash,’ ‘hash on toast,’ ‘spring hash, with mint sauce,’ and ‘hash a la mortar,’ and the other hashes on your bill of fare. By serving them up once every seven years, you have enough kinds to run clear into a Centennial.”

The landlady, looking aghast, made an effort to speak, but young Mr. Olendorf motioned her to silence.

“And if you would speak to Mrs. Muldoon, dear Mrs. McKerrel,” he went on, “and tell her that, while I am not proud, I do not consider the hickory shirts which the estimable Mr. Muldoon wears while he is developing the railroad resources of the United States exactly the things to wear to church; and even if I had no other scruples against attending public worship in a section hand’s shirt, torn all the way across the shoulders and fastened at the neck and cuffs with horn buttons, Mr. Muldoon’s are five sizes too large for me, and I would rather she would send me my own. And if you can bribe her to put the starch in my collars instead of my handkerchiefs, I feel that it will improve the appearance of my neck, and spare the feelings of a lacerated and tender nose. No man, Mrs. McKerrel, can wipe his nose on a sheet of tin and do the matter justice.”

Mrs. McKerrel placed her hands on her hips and stood up, but Mr. Olendorf begged her to be patient just a moment, while he went on:

“And do you think, if I made a chalk mark on them, that your domestic could learn the difference between my hair brush and my shoe brush? And if I made her a little present, might she not be induced to look up something else to black the stoves with instead of my shoe brush? It is dreadfully mortifying, Mrs. McKerrel, to black your shoes after night and get clear in church the next morning before discovering that your feet are glistening in all the glory of ‘Plumbago’s New Silver Gray Luster,’ and everybody is laughing at you. And then, Mrs. McKerrel, I don’t know how my things get so full of snuff. I never use snuff, and I don’t want to complain, but----”

Here the exasperated matron could restrain herself no longer. Hastily thrusting her snuff-box back in her pocket, she bade Mr. Olendorf pack. What he wanted, she said, was a Fifth Avenue hotel for seven dollars a week, and he couldn’t have it in her house. He was too particular for such a plain woman as her; if he didn’t like the ways of plain people, he would have to go where they were nicer. He was too stuck up and fussy to live in her house. Boarders she had kept, of the very best people in the highest classes in society, and this was the first time she had ever heard a word of complaint in her house.

And that is the way Mr. Olendorf happened to call around at the Gorham and ask Andrews for a nice room, a long ways up. And Andrews gave him a key and told him to climb till he knew he was lost, and then crawl into the first bed he saw.

RURAL FELICITY.

Mr. Philetus R. Throop is a well-known insurance agent of Burlington. He is a perfect steam engine to work, and every Summer, when he feels about worn out by his labors, he goes out to the farm of his Uncle George and rests a couple of weeks. He went out last Summer, as usual, but he only remained a couple of days, and on his return he was heard to say that he would never, never, never, go into the country again if he died for a breath of fresh air. The causes which led to this determination were as follows:

You see, he got a late start on his last trip out into the country, so that when he reached his Uncle George’s farm it was about nine o’clock in the evening, and the family, after the good old-fashioned custom, had gone to bed; not a light was visible about the house. Mr. Throop got out of the wagon in which a neighboring farmer had brought him, before they reached the house, so that the noisy wheels would not apprise any waking member of the fact that a visitor had come. Then he climbed over the fence and skipped briskly across lots to reach the house, and give Uncle George and the family a good surprise. Mr. Throop was not so familiar with the farm as he ought to have been to attempt such a nocturnal expedition. He had not gone twenty steps before he stepped into a great ditch, and had time to say all he could remember of the child’s prayer, “Now I lay me,” before he reached the bottom, and then had plenty of time to compose and repeat a much more appropriate and longer one before he crawled out again. After that he went more slowly, picking his steps with the greatest care, and straining his eyes as he peered into the darkness to distinguish noxious objects. But it was very dark, and of course appearances were unusually deceitful. He would walk around a patch of young clover or luxuriant turf, his heart standing still the while with the terror of having so narrowly escaped walking into a great well, and the next minute he would, after peering ahead of him until his eyes ached and sparks of fire danced before them, walk with the greatest confidence and composure into a pile of last year’s peabrush seven feet high, knocking off his hat, scratching his face and tearing his clothes. And then such a time as he would have hunting for his hat, and all the imaginable and unimaginable things that he would pick up in mistake for that useful article of apparel, can be far better imagined than described. And once he ran into a fence and nearly put his eye out on the end of a great stake that was standing out like the point of a _chevaux de frise_. And just before he got to the barn-yard he was amazed to discern a creek flowing between him and the fence, and after vainly hunting in the dark for a bridge, he pulled off his boots and trousers, and, holding the bundle of clothes high in his arms, waded across a stubblefield! so dry, every foot of it, that he might have lighted a match on it anywhere. He thought every tooth he had would chatter out of his head before he could get into his clothes again. Then he got into the barn-yard. He knew it was the barn-yard after he got into it, because in less than a minute after he had climbed the fence, he fell over a slumbering cow, and before he could get up, the frightened animal rose to her feet and bucked Mr. Throop over her head. Then he heard a cow get up just before him, and another just behind him, and two or three to the right and left, and when a cow with a bell that could be heard two miles got up and began galloping around the yard stirring up the rest of the cows, Mr. Throop would have willingly given up the best risk he had ever taken for a lantern. It wasn’t safe to stand still, so he took his hat in his hand and went along, swooping it around him in great circles, shouting “Swoosh! Hi! Hooey! Scat! Whish! Whoosh! Ste-boy!” as he went along. He only hit one cow with his hat, however, and the animal thus rudely assailed reached out and kicked him in the groin and doubled him up, and with a farewell flourish hit him on the side of the face with the end of a tail so full of cockle burs that it weighed twenty-seven pounds and knocked him so flat he thought he never would want to get up again. Then he saw what he supposed was the house, looming up black and quiet before him, and he thought his troubles were over. They had just begun.

The next minute he stepped under an open shed where the agricultural implements had been stored during the Winter. The first intimation he had of this was by falling over a plow. He scraped both shins, from the instep to the knee, across the edge of the share, and one of the handles caught him under the chin and jabbed his head up and back so suddenly that he heard his neck crack, and the other hunched him in the floating ribs and knocked enough breath out of him to start a tornado, in a small way but on a safe basis. He thought he never would get away from that plow, for he no sooner got one leg out of one entanglement of draught-irons, coulter, share and handles, than he got the other one snarled up in a still more hopeless maze of mould-board, clevis, sole-plate and beam, besides several other parts that he didn’t know the names of. And when at last he vanquished the plow he lost himself in a cultivator, and wore himself out trying to crawl through the gang of coulters. When he got clear of that he fell in with a reaper and mower, and after prodding his instep into indescribable agony by thrusting it against the sickle guards as he fell, he caught hold of the reel, which, of course, immediately whirled with his weight. But it chanced that quite a large colony of barn-yard fowls had used the reel as their roosting place during the Winter, and as it whirled round the amazed and bewildered Mr. Throop rained down upon himself a terrific tempest of hens and roosters, Brahmas, light Cochins, ungainly Shanghais, and a variety of other breeds in such a tumult of squawkings and cacklings, and flappings of wings, and vague but vigorous clawings of feet, that he didn’t care whether he got out alive or not, and, indeed, before he got through with the reel he knocked himself down with its vindictive slats seven times. Then he got away from that and impaled himself on a horse rake, and fell over the handle of a fanning mill, and nearly killed himself in the horse-power of a thrashing machine, and finally got into the house yard, felt his way to the house, and fell exhausted and speechless against the front door with a diamond-shaped harrow hanging around his neck. And Uncle George, awakened by the thump at the door, opened an up-stairs window and demanded who was there, and receiving no answer shot twice at the recumbent form of Mr. Throop with his revolver. And when they came down with lights and opened the door, they were as greatly surprised as Mr. Throop could have wished.

THE GARDEN OF THE GODS.

The people around Barnes Street well remember when Mr. Middlerib planted the “garden of the gods.” He bought cartloads of rich earth for it, and loaded it with patent fertilizers, and ground and stirred and raked it until the soil was fine as corn meal. The seeds were received by express, and there wasn’t a package that didn’t have a full college course of Latin printed on the back, and Mr. Middlerib grew bald trying to pronounce the fearful and wonderful names of the seed, that were to make the garden of the gods the wonder of South Hill. When these germs of magnificent flora were planted the neighbors hung over the fence in silent admiration and listened to Mr. Middlerib’s botanical lectures, delivered over every package that was opened. Where the _abolutus haciedendus microbulus_ was imbedded, he erected a large trestle immediately, for that impetuous climber to ascend and ramble over. And where he implanted the _diocantanean psyttachineliensis psoddium_, he reared a tall, straight stick for that towering mass of blossom and foliage to shape itself against. He refused the most penetrating hints for a few seeds of the _bianthus geridian psottoliensis giasticus, floridens bilthus_, and the care and great gravity with which he earthed the germs of the _bibulus Burlingtoniensis giganteus_ brought tears to the eyes of the women. And when the seeds were all planted, how zealously Mr. Middlerib watched and wrought and fought for their protection. He would get up in the night to chase the neighbors’ cows around the house two or three times, and across the garden of the gods four or five times, and out of the front gate once, and return to his virtuous couch with profanity in his heart and mud on his feet, and one slipper down by the cistern and the other in the verbena bed.

All the cut-worms in the State of Iowa appeared to be attending a mass convention in the garden of the gods. When the tinner came to fix the spout, he stuck the ladder by which he ascended to the roof in that sacred ground, and the carpenter who patched the cornice set one of his trestles in the same place. Every tramp who came to beg, selected that one favored locality as the only spot in the world where he might assume the usual humble and respectful position, and rehearse the stereotyped application for provender. Mr. Middlerib nearly wore out his voice shouting at people and cows, and railing at cut-worms, and one Sunday morning he fell asleep in church, and Mrs. M. prodded him with her parasol just as the minister said, in impressive accents, “And here we are treading on sacred ground.” “Git off of it!” yelled Mr. Middlerib, dreaming of the grocer’s boy standing on the g. o. g., and using his oft-repeated phrase, “Scatter, or I’ll bury ye in it!” And it raised such a church scandal that Mr. Middlerib was obliged to double his subscription to keep in good fellowship.

But after manifold troubles, the garden came along beautifully, only the plants acted a little queer. The climber refused to climb, save in a horizontal position, but after its own way; and in all general directions on a horizontal plane it manifested a disposition to crowd all over that part of South Hill. The _diocantanean psyttachineliensis psoddium_ scorned the straight stick by which it was expected to brace itself, and grew out in crooked branches like a garden oak. But the tender care it received, and the rich earth in which it was planted, showed what wonders cultivation will do, and when, at last, Mr. Middlerib, after long and manfully holding out against the declarations of the envious neighbors and the hints of his wife and daughter, was obliged to sit down on the porch, one lovely Summer evening, and admit that he had wasted enough breath to make a tornado, and filled the air with vociferous and murderous threats and vituperations, and quarreled with three-quarters of his acquaintances, all for the sake of raising a jimson weed, it was nevertheless a jimson weed nine feet high, with blossoms as big as inflated sun-flowers. So he let the jimson weed stand, and argued with every one who came to the house that, with sufficient care and proper cultivation, it could be developed into a fruit-bearing tree. As for the _abolutos haciedendus microbulos_, as soon as he was morally and botanically certain that it was just chickweed, Mr. Middlerib one night secretly pulled it up and threw it away, and ever afterward professed to be heart-broken because some rascally, envious florist had come up from Keokuk and stolen the choicest climber in the Mississippi Valley. The _bianthus geridian psottoliensis giasticus, floridens bilthus_ never showed itself until toward the latter part of June. Then it thrust up a delicate, fragile little sprout, drank in a little of the glad free air and pure sunlight, heard itself called by its full name, and drooped under the burden and died. The _bibulus Burlingtoniensis giganteus_ came up and did well. It did not flower very abundantly; but it developed very marked qualities. The chickens came up and pecked at it, and then laid them down under the currant bushes and closed their eyes upon this world of sorrow and mysterious plants. The pigs got into the yard and rooted a little of it up, and their sudden demise gave rise to the rumor of the hog cholera, and the air of the hill was vocal for the next five days with the protests of healthy porkers against the popular modes of treating the hog cholera, such as boring holes along the spine with a red hot iron and splitting the ears and tail and rubbing in salt and cayenne pepper. And after Master Middlerib fooled with it and got some of it on his face, which immediately swelled up so that nothing was visible to his eyes, and his eyes were visible to nobody, for nearly a week, the wonderful plant was pulled up with the kitchen tongs and thrown into the alley, where the geese of South Hill found it, ate it, grew fat on it; and came around and asked for more. Nothing that grows under the heavens can kill a South Hill goose.

There were other plants in the garden of the gods that came up and grew to maturity and brought forth blossoms each after his kind, but as they turned out to be various species of rag-weed and dog-fennel, they were not considered worthy of mention by Mr. Middlerib. But he is disheartened with scientific gardening, and he only lives now for one object: to ascertain whether these Latin names are really the scientific names of those plants which they set forth, or he was swindled by the traveling seed agent.

A TRYING SITUATION.

There was a time when Mr. Bilderback was almost persuaded to cut off his pew rent, renounce his religious convictions, and become an atheist or a pagan, he wasn’t very particular which. He was for many weeks in great distress of mind, and professed the greatest hatred of all churches, on general principles. This state of affairs, which fortunately was not permanent, was brought about by a very annoying, though perfectly innocent occurrence. One beautiful but rather warm Sunday morning he was dozing comfortably in his pew, in the church of which he is one of the main sleepers, when he became aware of an apparition gliding solemnly down the aisle with a collection basket in its hand. Mr. Bilderback braced up into an erect posture, cleared his throat in a ponderous tone of Roman firmness, as one who should say, “Who’s been asleep?” And as the basket was extended toward him, he felt in his trousers pocket for his wallet. It wasn’t there, and as he withdrew his hand, and felt in the other pocket, he felt that the eyes of the congregation were upon him, and that was all he felt, for he certainly didn’t feel any pocket-book. He nodded the basket man to wait a second, and leaned over to the left while he felt in the right inside pocket of his coat, from which in his growing nervousness he drew half a dozen chestnuts which rolled over the floor with a rattle that sounded in his hot ears like the thunders of the Apocalypse, and made him warmer and more nervous than ever. Then he leaned over the end of the pew and felt in the other inside coat pocket and drew out a bundle of letters, a lot of postal cards, a circus ticket, a photograph of an actress, a funny story printed on a card, a pocket-comb and a long string, and his face grew so warm his breath felt like a hot air blast. Then he squared his elbows and went for his vest pockets, and strewed the pew cushion with quill toothpicks, newspaper scraps, street car checks, a shoe buttoner, some lead pencil stubs, and crumbling indications of chewing tobacco, a bit of sealing wax, a piece of licorice root about an inch long, and three or four matches. Then he leaned forward and, stung to madness by the smiles which were breaking out all around that church worse than the measles in a primary school room, dived into his coat tail pockets, and drew forth a red silk handkerchief, two apples, a spectacle case, a pair of dog skin gloves, an overcoat button, and a fine assortment of bits of dried orange peel and lint. Then he stood up, devoutly praying that an earthquake might come along and swallow up either him or the rest of the congregation, he didn’t much care which, and went down into his hip pockets, from which he evolved a revolver, a corkscrew, a cigar case, a piece of string, a memorandum book, and a pocket knife. By this time Mr. Bilderback’s face was scarlet clear down to his waist, and he was so nervous and worked up that he nearly shook his clothes off, while the man with the basket couldn’t have moved away, if he had died for staying. And when Mr. Bilderback, in forlorn despair, once more rammed his hand into the trousers pocket where he began the search, the congregation held its breath, and when Mr. Bilderback drew forth the very pocket-book which he had missed in his first careless search, and had since all but stripped to find, there was a sigh of relief went up from every devout heart in that house. But Mr. Bilderback only dropped into his seat with an abruptness that made the windows rattle, and registered a mental vow that he wasn’t going to come out to church again to be made a fool of by a man with a long handled darning basket.

MR. BILDERBACK LOSES HIS HAT.

“No,” Mr. Bilderback said, “it wasn’t.” He put it there last night, the last thing before he went to bed, he remembered most distinctly. It wasn’t there now, and he didn’t know who had any business to move it. Somebody had done it, and he hoped to gracious that it would be the last time. Somebody was always meddling with his things.

Mrs. Bilderback, coming down stairs with a weary air, asked if he had looked in the closets?

“Closets?” Mr. Bilderback snarled, “Kingdom of Ireland! Does any sane man put his hat in the closets when he wants it every time he goes out? No. I hung it up right here, on this very hook of this particular rack, and if it had been left alone, it would be there now. Some of you must have moved it. It hasn’t got legs and couldn’t get away alone.”

Master Bilderback suggested that it wouldn’t be very surprising if it felt its way along fur a little ways, for which atrocities he was rewarded with a wild glare and a vicious cuff from his unappreciative parent. Then Mr. Bilderback said, “Well, I suppose I can walk down town bareheaded.”

Well, that was the usual formula. Every body knew just what it meant, and as soon as it was said the family scattered for the regular morning search. Mrs. Bilderback looked in all the closets with the air of John Rogers going to the stake, and then she went into an old chest, that had the furs and things put away in it, and was only opened twice a year, except when Mr. Bilderback’s hat was lost, which occurred on an average three times a day. She shook pepper or fine cut tobacco or camphor out of everything she picked up, and varied her search by the most extraordinary sneezes that ever issued from human throat, while ever and anon she paused to wipe her weeping eyes and say that “well, she never.” Mrs. Bilderback’s search for the lost hat never got beyond that chest. She would kneel down before it and take the things out one by one, and put them back, and take them out, and sneeze and sigh, and wonder occasionally “where the hat could be,” but her search never went beyond that old moth proof chest.

Miss Bilderback confined her search to the uncut pages of the last _Scribner_, which she carefully cut and looked into, with an eager scrutiny that told how intensely interested she was in finding that hat. She never varied her method of search, save when the approaching footsteps of her father warned her that he was swinging on his erratic eccentric in that direction, when she hid the magazine, and picking up the corner of the piano cover looked under that article with a sweet air of zealous interest, exclaiming in tones of pretty vexation, “I wonder where it can be?” And it was noticeable that this action and remark, both of which she never failed to repeat every time her father came into the room, had the effect of throwing that estimable but irascible old gentleman into paroxysms of the most violent passion, each one growing worse than its predecessors, until they would culminate in a grand burst of wrath in which he ordered her to quit looking for his hat. Then she would retire with an injured air and tell her mother, between that indefatigable searcher’s sneezes, that “one might wear one’s self out slaving and looking for pa’s hat in every conceivable place, and all the thanks one got for it was to be scolded.” Master Bilderback, he helped hunt, too. His system of conducting a search was to go around into the back yard and play “toss ball” up against the end of the house, making mysterious disappearances, with marvelous celerity, behind the wood-pile or under a large store box, so oft as he heard the mutterings of the tempest that invariably preceded and announced his father’s approach.

But Mr. Bilderback. His was a regular old composite system of investigation; it combined and took in everything. He raged through the sitting-room like a hurricane; he looked under every chair in that room, and then upset them all to see if he mightn’t possibly have overlooked the hat. Then he looked on all the brackets in the parlor, and behind the window curtains, and kicked over the ottoman to look for a hat that he couldn’t have squeezed under a wash-tub. And he kept up a running commentary all the time, which served no purpose except to warn his family when he was coming and give them time to prepare. He looked into the clock and left it stopped and standing crooked. And he would like to know who touched that hat. He looked into his daughter’s work-box, a sweet little shell that “George” gave her, and he emptied it out on the table and wondered what such trumpery was for, and who in thunder hid his hat. “It must be hid,” he said. Peering down with a dark, suspicious look into an odor bottle somewhat larger than a thimble, “for it couldn’t have got so completely out of sight by accident.” If people wouldn’t meddle with his things, he howled, for the benefit of Mrs. Bilderback, whom he heard sneezing as he went past the closet door, he would always know just where to find them, because (looking gloomily behind the kitchen wood-box) he always had one place to put all his things (and he took off the lid of the spice-box), and kept them there. He glared savagely out of the door, in hopes of seeing his hopeful son, but that youthful strategist was out of sight behind his intrenchments. Mr. Bilderback wrathfully resumed his search, and roared, for his daughter’s benefit, that he would spend every cent he had intended to lay out for winter bonnets, in new hats for himself, and then maybe he might be able to find one when he wanted it. Then he opened the door of the oven and looked darkly in, turned all the clothes out of the wash-basket, and strewed them around, wondering “_who_ had hid that hat?” And he pulled the clothes-line off its nail, and got down on his hands and knees to look behind the refrigerator, and wondered “who _had_ hid that hat;” and then he climbed on the back of a chair to look on the top shelf of the cupboard, and sneezed around among old wide-mouthed bottles and pungent paper parcels, and wondered in muffled wrath “who had _hid_ that hat?” And he went down into the cellar and roamed around among rows of stone jars covered with plates and tied up with brown paper, and smelling of pickles and things in all stages of progress; every one of which he looked into, and how he did wonder “who had hid _that_ hat.” And he looked into dark corners and swore when he jammed his head against the corners of swinging shelves, and felt along those shelves and run his fingers into all sorts of bowls, containing all sorts of greasy and sticky stuff, and thumped his head against hams hanging from the rafters, at which he swore anew, and he peered into and felt around in barrels which seemed to have nothing in them but cobwebs and nails; shook boxes which were prolific in dust and startling in rats, and he wondered “who had hid that _hat_?”

And just then loud whoops and shouts came from up stairs, announcing that “here it was.” And old Bilderback went up stairs growling, because the person who hid it hadn’t brought it out before, and saw the entire family pointing out into the back yard, where the hat surmounted Mr. Bilderback’s cane, which was leaning against the fence, “just where you left it, pa,” Miss Bilderback explained, “when we called you into supper, and it has been out there all night.” And Mr. Bilderback, evidently restraining, by a violent effort, an intense desire to bless his daughter with the cane, remarked with a mysterious manner, that “it was mighty singular,” and putting on the hat, he strode away with great dignity; leaving his wife and daughter to re-arrange the house.

MIND READING.

One morning, about the middle of the Spring term, Master Bilderback made his appearance at school with a subdued manner apparent in all his actions, while a cast of sadness mingled with traces of pleasant memories overspread his countenance. It was, in short, that general expression of penitence which people assume after a holiday of more than usual hilarity. His quiet manner astonished the scholars and alarmed his teacher, who feared that it was a portent of some unusual mischief, and kept her eye upon the lad in consequence. He did not appear to be conscious of the surveillance under which he was placed. He bent no pins, he chewed no gum, he fired at the adjacent scholars no projectiles of masticated paper during the morning; no dismal but subdued cat-calls were heard from the vicinity of his seat; no grotesque grimaces made his neighbors laugh with uncounterfeited glee; restful were his feet, and quiet the fingers which were wont to drum on the desk four minutes out of every five. Master Bilderback was either in some deep affliction or he was ill. There was something wrong about him.

It transpired, along toward noon, when Master Bilderback’s spirits began to rise a little, that he had indeed passed under the rod, with his father at the other end of it, during the evening previous. The waters of affliction had gone over his soul, and his back had gone under the sole of his mother’s slipper. It seems they had company at Mr. Bilderback’s that evening, quite a large party, in fact, and the conversation turned on mind reading. The discussion became very spirited, Mr. Bilderback being the leader of the party which avowed its belief in mesmeric influences. The usual arguments of learned length and thundering sound were hurled back and forth, Mr. Bilderback winning especial distinction by the clearness with which he proved that, in certain esthetic conditions of the mental and physical systems, the peculiar psychic forces which always existed in a latent state, were roused into an active condition; and the action of the intellect upon the cerebrum was felt in the cerebellum, and transmitted by mesmeric condition to the candelebra, where the psychomatic transfusion of the occipital parietis made the Ego as cognizant of the mutation and genuflexions of the non-Ego, as though the psychic modifications really impinged upon the same ganglion; and the nerve waves along the ganglia of the two systems, transmuted by a touch of the hand, were, and could only be, identical. And Mr. Bilderback’s party said, “Yes; what could you say to that, now?” And the other party shook their heads and said, “Yes; but that was only a theory, after all; they would like to see the hypothesis demonstrated.” And at that critical juncture, Master Bilderback, who had been an attentive listener, spoke up, in his rough, horrid style, and declared that “that wasn’t nauthin’;” that they tried it at school, an’ he could let the boys hide things and then lead them right to the place where they were hid. The excitement ran high for a few moments, and Master B. was closely catechised, but he never varied from his original story; and they finally determined to try him.

Mr. Tweesdle, a young fellow who dotes on poetry and Miss Bilderback, was the first subject. He announced that he was thinking of a certain object, and by the way he looked at the mind-reader’s sister, everybody thought they knew what it was. But Master Bilderback seized him by the hand, led him out in the hall and up to the hat-rack, followed by the entire company, and reaching his hand into Mr. Tweesdle’s overcoat pocket, drew forth a paper bag containing a pound of sausages, half a dozen eggs, and a couple of rusks, remarking, “There, that’s what you’re thinking of.” And just at that moment he certainly was, although he shook his head in an idiotic manner and laughed feebly, while all the rest of the people never smiled, but only looked at each other and said, “Why, how funny!”

This sad affair cast a gloom over the entire community for a few moments, but the people rallied and demanded another test. There was a general reluctance on the part of the visitors to take a hand in it, and so Mrs. Bilderback was prevailed upon to be a subject in the course of scientific experiments. As soon as she had assumed a pensive expression and announced that her mind was wholly occupied with one subject, to the exclusion of all other terrestrial things, the boy grasped her by the hand, and away they went, sailing up stairs, followed by the entire congregation. The mind-reader marshaled them into a room, and leading his subject straight to the bureau, drew from a small drawer a set of false teeth and a bottle of hair dye. Mrs. Bilderback shrieked, the company looked grave, and some of the ladies declared to each other that well now, they never did.

There was another brief season of gloom, which was dissipated by Mr. Bilderback declaring that as neither of the subjects in the two experiments they had just witnessed had denied the accuracy of the mind-reader’s judgment, he would submit to the test himself. Great applause greeted this determination, and as Mr. Bilderback, with a glance that threatened a massacre if there were any tricks played on him, placed his hand in that of his son, the congregation rose en masse to follow where the mind-reader might lead. Master Bilderback placed his hand against his father’s forehead for a moment; then he placed it against his own and remained for several seconds in a thoughtful posture, and then led his reluctant parent, followed by the company, out of doors, and calling for a lantern, which was provided, they went into the woodshed, where the mind-reader, despite several stealthy nudges from his parent, reached his arm behind a pile of hickory knots, and drew forth a whisky bottle nearly a foot long, flat as a board, and about half full. Then a shadow fell upon the community that not even the cordial good nights that were exchanged at the door could dissipate, and after the footsteps of the last reveler had died away in the distance, Master Bilderback held two separate private seances with his parents, the remarkable manifestations of which occasioned the subdued state of mind and unusual depression of spirits which were so painfully apparent in the young man the following day.

A SAFE BET.