on to the next with a
worse character and in a more developed state of mess. His early boyhood
was the sort of mess that copy-books and dictionaries spell with a big
"M," and his babyhood--ugh! was the embodiment of howling, yowling,
screaming mess.

At the age of forty, however, there came a change in his troubled life,
when he met a girl with half a million in her own right, who consented
to marry him, and who very soon succeeded in reducing his most messy
existence into a state of comparative order and system.

Certain incidents, important and otherwise, of Jim's life would never
have come to be told here but for the fact that in getting into his
"messes" and out of them again he succeeded in drawing himself into the
atmosphere of peculiar circumstances and strange happenings. He
attracted to his path the curious adventures of life as unfailingly as
meat attracts flies, and jam wasps. It is to the meat and jam of his
life, so to speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all
pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the
interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became
regular as the sun's instead of erratic as a comet's.

The first experience in order of time that he related to me shows that
somewhere latent behind his disarranged nervous system there lay psychic
perceptions of an uncommon order. About the age of twenty-two--I think
after his second rustication--his father's purse and patience had
equally given out, and Jim found himself stranded high and dry in a
large American city. High and dry! And the only clothes that had no
holes in them safely in the keeping of his uncle's wardrobe.

Careful reflection on a bench in one of the city parks led him to the
conclusion that the only thing to do was to persuade the city editor of
one of the daily journals that he possessed an observant mind and a
ready pen, and that he could "do good work for your paper, sir, as a
reporter." This, then, he did, standing at a most unnatural angle
between the editor and the window to conceal the whereabouts of the
holes.

"Guess we'll have to give you a week's trial," said the editor, who,
ever on the lookout for good chance material, took on shoals of men in
that way and retained on the average one man per shoal. Anyhow it gave
Jim Shorthouse the wherewithal to sew up the holes and relieve his
uncle's wardrobe of its burden.

Then he went to find living quarters; and