saying in effect:

"Doctor, you're a college professor--I want to ask you a scientific
question and see if you can give me a scientific answer."

"Pray proceed," I said, smiling gently in Miss Hamm's direction.

"Why," he said, "is a mouse that spins?"

He then paused as though awaiting my reply, and when I confessed myself
unable to hazard an answer, or even to understand so peculiar a
problem, with a great discordant guffaw he said:

"Why, the higher, the fewer!"

Upon coming here I cogitated the matter deeply, but I am as yet far from
a solution. Why is a mouse that spins? And if so, what does it spin?
Patently the query is incomplete. And what possible bearing can
comparative altitude as contrasted with the comparative infrequency of a
species have upon the peculiarities of a mouse addicted to spinning?

I shall now to bed, dismissing all thoughts of a certain boorish
individual from my mind.

* * * * *

MAY THE TWENTY-FOURTH.--He lingers on--the person Pomeroy. It developed
this forenoon that he had succeeded in extorting from Miss Hamm a
promise to permit him to call this evening. I can only assume that
through goodness of heart and a desire to avoid wounding any one she
again consented to receive him at her home.

This afternoon, in thoughtful mood not untinged with vague repinings, my
footsteps carried me, unwittingly as it were, to that beetling
promontory from which our peaceful hamlet derives its name. For long I
stood upon the crest of that craggy eminence wherefrom, so tradition
tells us, a noble young chieftain of the aborigines who once populated
this locality, being despairful of winning the hand of a fair maid of a
neighbouring but hostile tribe, flung himself in suicidal frenzy adown
the cliff to be dashed into minute fragments upon the cruel rocks below.
Meditating upon the fate of this ill-starred red man, I communed with
mine own inner consciousness. I asked myself the question: "Did you,
Fibble, emulate the example of that despondent Indian youth and leap
headlong from this peak, who in all this careless world other than your
Great-Aunt Paulina would bemoan your piteous end? Who would come to
place with reverent, sorrowing hands the tribute of a floral design such
as a Broken Column or a Gate Ajar upon your lowly bier? Ah, who indeed?"

It was with difficulty that I tore myself away from a spot whose history
so well accorded with the dismal trend of my th