he bar and were inventing new combinations of their own.
And Mrs. Sam had gone to bed with a nervous headache.

Senator Biggs brought the mail down to the spring-house at four, but
there was nothing for me except a note from Mr. Sam, rather shaky, which
said he'd no word yet and that Mr. Stitt had mixed all the cordials in
the bar in a beer glass and had had to go to bed.

At half past four Mr. Thoburn came out for a minute. He said there was
only one other train from town that night and the chances were it would
be snowed up at the junction.

"Better get on the band wagon before the parade's gone past," he said in
an undertone. But I went into my pantry and shut the door with a slam,
and when I came out he was gone.

I nearly went crazy that afternoon. I put salt in Miss Cobb's glass when
she always drank the water plain. Once I put the broom in the fire and
started to sweep the porch with a fire log Luckily they were busy with
their letters and it went unnoticed, the smell of burning straw not
rising, so to speak, above the sulphur in the spring.

Senator Biggs went from one table to another telling how well he felt
since he stopped eating, and trying to coax the other men to starve with
him.

It's funny how a man with a theory about his stomach isn't happy until
he has made some other fellow swallow it.

"Well," he said, standing in front of the fire with a glass of water in
his hand, "it's worth while to feel like this. My head's as clear as
a bell. I don't care to eat; I don't want to eat. The 'fast' is the
solution."

"Two stages to that solution, Senator," said the bishop; "first,
resolution; last, dissolution."

Then they all began at once. If you have ever heard twenty people airing
their theories on diet you know all about it. One shouts for Horace
Fletcher, and another one swears by the scraped-beef treatment, and
somebody else never touches a thing but raw eggs and milk, and pretty
soon there is a riot of calories and carbohydrates. It always ends the
same way: the man with the loudest voice wins, and the defeated ones
limp over to the spring and tell their theories to me. They know I'm
being paid to listen.

On this particular afternoon the bishop stopped the riot by rising and
holding up his hand. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "let us not be
rancorous. If each of us has a theory, and that theory works out to his
satisfaction, then--why are we all here?"

"Merely to tell one another the goo