of my household effects," he said, briskly. Then he trudged up the
hill.

Sure enough, the packers appeared "bright and early" Monday morning,
just as Buckley had said they would. By nine o'clock the house was
upside down and by noon it was full of excelsior, tar paper, and
crating materials. The rasp of the saw and the bang of the hammer
resounded throughout the little cottage. Burly men dragged helpless
and unresisting articles of furniture about as if they had a personal
grudge against each separate piece, and pounded them, and drove nails
into them, and mutilated them, and scratched them, and splintered
them, and after they were completely conquered marked their pine board
coffins with the name "Nellie Duluth," after which they were ready for
the fireproof graveyard in Harlem.

Dazed and unsteady, Harvey watched the proceedings with the air of one
who superintends. He gave a few instructions, offered one or two
suggestions--principally as to the state of the weather--and was on
the jump all day long to keep out of the way of the energetic workmen.
He had seen Marceline at the Hippodrome on one memorable occasion.
Somehow he reminded himself of the futile but nimble clown, who was
always in the way and whose good intentions invariably were attended
by disaster.

The foreman of the gang, doubtless with a shrewd purpose in mind,
opened half the windows in the house, thus forcing his men to work
fast and furiously or freeze. Harvey almost perished in the icy
draughts. He shut the front door fifty times or more, and was
beginning to sniffle and sneeze when Bridget took pity on him and
invited him into the kitchen. He hugged the cook stove for several
hours, mutely watching the two servants through the open door of their
joint bedroom off the kitchen while they stuffed their meagre
belongings into a couple of trunks.

At last it occurred to him that it would be well to go upstairs and
pack his own trunk before the workmen got to asking questions. He
carried his set of Dickens upstairs, not without interrogation, and
stored the volumes away at the bottom of his trunk. So few were his
individual belongings that he was hard put to fill the trays compactly
enough to prevent the shifting of the contents. When the job was done
he locked the trunk, tied a rope around it and then sat down upon it
to think. Had he left anything out? He remembered something. He untied
the knots, unlocked the trunk, shifted half of the contents