practically no good. You simply have to scrap it.

"Who?" he inquired, in the same line of natural language.

"Old Crow."

Dick uttered the name in a low and hesitating tone. He seemed to offer
it unwillingly. Raven stared at him in a perfect surprise, now uncolored
by any expectation he might have had of what was coming.

"Old Crow?" he repeated. "What do you know about Old Crow?"

"Well," said Dick, defensively, "I know as much as you do. That is, I
suppose I do. I know as much as all Wake Hill does, anyway."

"Who told you?"

"Mother. I didn't suppose it was any secret."

"No," said Raven thoughtfully, "it's no secret. Only he was queer, he
was eccentric, and so I've always assumed he had a pretty bad time of
it. That's why I never've talked about him."

"Mother did," said Dick, in a sudden expansion. It seemed to ease him up
a little, this leading Raven to the source of his own apprehension.
Indeed, he had felt, since Raven's letter, that they must approach the
matter of his tired wits with clearness, from the scientific standpoint.
The more mental facts and theories they recognized the better. "She told
me once you looked just like him, that old daguerreotype."

"Had sister Amelia concluded from that," inquired Raven quietly, "that I
was bound to follow Old Crow, live in the woods and go missionarying
across the mountain?"

"No," said Dick, so absorbed in his line of argument that he was
innocently unaware of any intended irony. "She just happened to speak of
it one day when we found the daguerreotype. Uncle Jack, just what do you
know about him?"

Raven considered a moment. He was scanning his memory for old
impressions and also, in his mild surprise over the pertinency of
reviving them, wondering whether he had better pass them on. Or would
they knot another tangle in the snarl he and Dick seemed to be, almost
without their volition, making?

"Old Crow," he began slowly, "was my great-uncle. His name was John
Raven. He was poor, like all the rest of us of that generation and the
next, and did the usual things to advance himself, the things in
successful men's biographies. He studied by the kitchen fire, not by
pine knots, I fancy--that probably was the formula of a time just
earlier. Anyhow he fitted himself for the college of the day, for some
reason never went, but did go into a lawyer's office instead, was said
to have trotted round after a gypsy sort of girl the other side of the
mountain, f