n taffying up to them, or doing the dreadful
humble. Get them spitting mad, and they will love you ever after, or
at least for quite a while.

CHAPTER X

THE BROM-WATER MYSTERY

It is wonderful how soon a thing is forgotten, or at least put on a
shelf in people's memories. Poor Harry Foster, for example! There was
a man now--a man murdered in the discharge of his duty, if ever a man
was. And after a month or two another man was travelling the same road
with a new mail cart and new sacks of letters, as quiet as water going
down a mill-lade. The only difference was that he started a while
later in the morning than poor Harry, after it was daylight, in fact,
so that the Bewick people had to wait, often till midday, before they
got their letters.

And when they made complaint to the Postmaster-General, or some other
big-wig, he up and said to them, "You Bewickers, it is open to you to
choose one of yourselves to bring up the mails from Breckonside,
running the risk of Harry Foster's fate and providing a sufficient
guarantee for any loss the post office run by Her Royal High Majesty
may sustain."

Something like that he said. But no Bewicker offered. Of course
not--why, they had skin creeps at the very thought.

"So," says the post official big-wig, "you Bewick cowards, be good
enough to shut up and take your letters when they are sent out to you."

Still there were people who kept thinking about poor Harry for all
that. And I was one of them. Elsie did not seem to care so much, or
at least so long. Did you never observe that you can't keep a girl
long interested in the same thing, unless you keep on telling her all
the time how much prettier she is getting to look? But I did not know
even that much, not then. I was just mortal green--green as father's
spare pasture field after three days' steady rain and one of May
sunshine. And, indeed, to tell the truth outright, I thought
altogether too much at that time about people, and too little about my
Latin and Greek prose, as Mr. Mustard, who was a good classic himself,
often told me. He said I should rue it. But I can't say I have ever
gone as far as that. Not to date, anyway. Perhaps I may some day,
when I start reading Latin to pass the time.

The adventure grew more interesting to me after the policeman and
detectives had one by one all cleared off. The affair was "classed,"
as the French say in their crime books--I learned my French out of