the chair
fastened to me; but I couldn't go, could I, sir, with the table tied to
my leg, and particularly if I had to climb the fence? So I had to set
there and be regarded as a burglar.

"But at last I _would_ be heard, and I told her I was no burglar but an
innercent man; and then she looked in the index to find if Barclay had
anything interesting to say about the wickedness of telling falsehoods.
And then I said I was a member of the Baptist Society, and she said at
once she would read Barclay on the errors of that sect; but I insisted
on being heard, and I explained to her that I got into this trouble by
trying to cure William Jones by frictional electricity, and she said:
'Thee has an ingenious and fruitful mind to invent such a story. Oh,
that it had been turned to better devices than following a life of
evil!'

"'And it seems hard, too,' I said, 'that a perfectly respectable Baptist
plumber should be arrested as a burglar simply because he tried to
relieve the pain of William Jones by a scientific method invented by the
Huxley Institute.'

"Where is thy friend William Jones?' she asked.

"Do you know, sir, at that very moment you could hear through the
partition William Jones and Bella Dougherty laughing next door! It
seemed like mockery to me, a-setting there in chains, so to speak.

"'He is next door, ma'am,' I said, 'a-courting the hired girl.'

"'I will prove if thee is telling the truth,' she said, and she got up
and moved toward the door.

"'No, ma'am, no!' I said; 'please don't do that! William mustn't know
that I am here'; and so she comes back and sets down again, and picks up
Barclay, and looks sorrerful at me, and says:

"'It is wicked for thee to have such vain imaginations. Why does thee
persist in pretending that there is a William Jones?' And then she
started to look through Barclay to find if he had anything that would
fit the William Jones part of the case.

"What could I do? I daresn't call in William Jones to prove my
innercence; he was mad all over at me and a bigger man, too, and here
I was tied; and I couldn't call Bella Dougherty without William Jones
knowing it. It was hard, sir, for a man as innercent as a little babe
to set there with that sweet and smooth old lady considering him a
shameless story-teller and firing Barclay at him, now wasn't it,
sir? Would you have called William Jones, sir, under them there
circumstances, and his laughter and Bella Dougherty's still a-resou