ntment. I was willing to admit drink in the case of my
shoemaker, but I preferred it as a recourse instead of a cause. Why
had he pitched upon his perpetual, strange note of the Wandering
Jew? Why his unutterable grief during his aberration? I could not yet
accept whiskey as an explanation.

"Did Mike O'Bader ever have a great loss or trouble of any kind?" I
asked.

"Lemme see! About thirty year ago there was somethin' of the kind, I
recollect. Montopolis, sir, in them days used to be a mighty strict
place.

"Well, Mike O'Bader had a daughter then--a right pretty girl. She was
too gay a sort for Montopolis, so one day she slips off to another
town and runs away with a circus. It was two years before she comes
back, all fixed up in fine clothes and rings and jewellery, to see
Mike. He wouldn't have nothin' to do with her, so she stays around
town awhile, anyway. I reckon the men folks wouldn't have raised no
objections, but the women egged 'em on to order her to leave town. But
she had plenty of spunk, and told 'em to mind their own business.

"So one night they decided to run her away. A crowd of men and women
drove her out of her house, and chased her with sticks and stones. She
run to her father's door, callin' for help. Mike opens it, and when he
sees who it is he hits her with his fist and knocks her down and shuts
the door.

"And then the crowd kept on chunkin' her till she run clear out of
town. And the next day they finds her drowned dead in Hunter's mill
pond. I mind it all now. That was thirty year ago."

I leaned back in my non-rotary revolving chair and nodded gently, like
a mandarin, at my paste-pot.

"When old Mike has a spell," went on Uncle Abner, tepidly garrulous,
"he thinks he's the Wanderin' Jew."

"He is," said I, nodding away.

And Uncle Abner cackled insinuatingly at the editor's remark, for he
was expecting at least a "stickful" in the "Personal Notes" of the
_Bugle_.

XIII

THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES

When Major Pendleton Talbot, of Mobile, sir, and his daughter, Miss
Lydia Talbot, came to Washington to reside, they selected for a
boarding place a house that stood fifty yards back from one of the
quietest avenues. It was an old-fashioned brick building, with a
portico upheld by tall white pillars. The yard was shaded by stately
locusts and elms, and a catalpa tree in season rained its pink and
white blossoms upon the grass. Rows of high box bushes lined the fence
and wal