.
Don't he scare the twins?"

"Frighten Jack and Jill?" says Pinckney. "Not if he had horns and a
tail! They seem to take him as a joke. But he does make all the rest
of us feel creepy."

"Why don't you write him his release?" says I.

"Can't," says Pinckney. "He is one of the conditions in the
contract--he and the urns."

"The urns?" says I.

"Yes," says Pinckney, sighin' deep. "We are coming to them now. There
they are."

With that we steps into one of the front rooms, and he lines me up
before a white marble mantel that is just as cheerful and tasty as some
of them pieces in Greenwood Cemetery. On either end was what looks to
be a bronze flower pot.

"To your right," says Pinckney, "is Grandfather; to your left, Aunt
Sabina."

"What's the josh?" says I.

"Shorty," says he, heavin' up another sigh, "you are now in the
presence of sacred dust. These urns contain the sad fragments of two
great Van Rusters."

"Fragments is good," says I. "Couldn't find many to keep, could they?
Did they go up with a powder mill, or fall into a stone crusher?"

"Cremated," says Pinckney.

Then I gets the whole story of the two old maids that Pinckney rented
the place from. They were the last of the clan. In their day the Van
Rusters had headed the Westchester battin' list, ownin' about half the
county and gettin' their names in the paper reg'lar. But they'd been
peterin' out for the last hundred years or so, and when it got down to
the Misses Van Rusters, a pair of thin edged, old battle axes that had
never wore anything but crape and jet bonnets, there wa'n't much left
of the estate except the mortgages and the urns.

Rentin' the place furnished was the last card in the box, and Pinckney
turns up as the willin' victim. When he comes to size up what he's
drawn, and has read over the lease, he finds he's put his name to a lot
he didn't dream about. Keepin' Snivens on the pay roll, promisin' not
to disturb the urns, usin' the furniture careful, and havin' the grass
cut in the private buryin' lot was only a few that he could think of
off hand.

"You ain't a tenant, Pinckney," says I; "you're a philanthropist."

"I feel that way," says he. "At first, I didn't know which was worse,
Snivens or the urns. But I know now--it is the urns. They are driving
me to distraction."

"Ah, do a lap!" says I. "Course, I give in that there might be better
parlour ornaments than potted ancestors, specially when they bel