e only persons whose acquaintance
we had made at that time, for we were travelling under fictitious names,
and people who wear aliases are not given to seeking society and
bringing themselves under suspicion. But at this point in our talk we
encountered an obstruction: we could not recall the landlady's name. We
hunted all around through our minds for that name, using all the
customary methods of research, but without success; the name was gone
from us, apparently permanently. We finally gave the matter up, and fell
to talking about something else. The talk wandered from one subject to
another, and finally arrived at Twichell's school-days in Hartford--the
Hartford of something more than half a century ago--and he mentioned
several of his schoolmasters, dwelling with special interest upon the
peculiarities of an aged one named Olney. He remarked that Olney, humble
village schoolmaster as he was, was yet a man of superior parts, and had
published text-books which had enjoyed a wide currency in America in
their day. I said I remembered those books, and had studied Olney's
Geography in school when I was a boy. Then Twichell said,

"That reminds me--our landlady's name was a name that was associated
with school-books of some kind or other fifty or sixty years ago. I
wonder what it was. I believe it began with K."

Association did the rest, and did it instantly. I said,

"Kirkham's Grammar!"

That settled it. Kirkham was the name; and we went out to seek for the
owner of it. There was no trouble about that, for Bermuda is not large,
and is like the earlier Garden of Eden, in that everybody in it knows
everybody else, just as it was in the serpent's headquarters in Adam's
time. We easily found Miss Kirkham--she that had been the blooming girl
of a generation before--and she was still keeping boarders; but her
mother had passed from this life. She settled the date for us, and did
it with certainty, by help of a couple of uncommon circumstances, events
of that ancient time. She said we had sailed from Bermuda on the 24th of
May, 1877, which was the day on which her only nephew was born--and he
is now thirty years of age. The other unusual circumstance--she called
it an unusual circumstance, and I didn't say anything--was that on that
day the Rev. Mr. Twichell (bearing the assumed name of Peters) had made
a statement to her which she regarded as a fiction. I remembered the
circumstance very well. We had bidden the young girl