s own and Pupkin saw that he had misjudged the man, because it was
dandy poetry, the very best. That night Pupkin walked home on air and
there was no thought of chloroform, and it turned out that he hadn't
committed suicide, but like all lovers he had commuted it.

I don't need to describe in full the later suicides of Mr. Pupkin,
because they were all conducted on the same plan and rested on something
the same reasons as above.

Sometimes he would go down at night to the offices of the bank below
his bedroom and bring up his bank revolver in order to make an end of
himself with it. This, too, he could see headed up in the newspapers as:

BRILLIANT BOY BANKER BLOWS OUT BRAINS.

But blowing your brains out is a noisy, rackety performance, and Pupkin
soon found that only special kinds of brains are suited for it. So he
always sneaked back again later in the night and put the revolver in its
place, deciding to drown himself instead. Yet every time that he walked
down to the Trestle Bridge over the Ossawippi he found it was quite
unsuitable for drowning--too high, and the water too swift and black,
and the rushes too gruesome--in fact, not at all the kind of place for a
drowning.

Far better, he realized, to wait there on the railroad track and throw
himself under the wheels of the express and be done with it. Yet, though
Pupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was never able to pick
out a pair of wheels that suited him. Anyhow, it's awfully hard to tell
an express from a fast freight.

I wouldn't mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn't
finally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him the
whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperleigh.
Incidentally it threw him into the very centre of one of the most
impenetrable bank mysteries that ever baffled the ingenuity of some of
the finest legal talent that ever adorned one of the most enterprising
communities in the country.

It happened one night, as I say, that Pupkin decided to go down into
the office of the bank and get his revolver and see if it would blow his
brains out. It was the night of the Firemen's Ball and Zena had danced
four times with a visitor from the city, a man who was in the fourth
year at the University and who knew everything. It was more than Peter
Pupkin could bear. Mallory Tompkins was away that night, and when Pupkin
came home he was all alone in the building, except for Gillis,