in the night and prowl about with a pistol in one hand, seeking to
eliminate the life of a burglar, and some men may like it; but I am of
a very excitable nature, and I am sure that if I did find a burglar and
succeeded in shooting him, I should be in such an excited state that
I could not sleep again that night--and no man can afford to lose his
night's rest.

There are other objections to shooting a burglar in the house, and these
objections apply with double force when the house and its furnishings
are entirely new. Although some of the rugs in our house were red, not
all of them were; and I had no guarantee that if I shot a burglar
he would lie down on a red rug to bleed to death. A burglar does not
consider one's feelings, and would be quite as apt to bleed on a green
rug, and spoil it, as not. Until burglarizing is properly regulated and
burglars are educated, as they should be, in technical burglary schools,
we cannot hope that a shot burglar will staunch his wound until he can
find a red rug to lie down on.

And there are still other objections to shooting a burglar. If all
burglars were fat, one of these would be removed; but perhaps a thin
burglar might get in front of my revolver, and in that case the bullet
would be likely to go right through him and continue on its way, and
perhaps break a mirror or a cut-glass dish. I am a thin man myself, and
if a burglar shot at me he might damage things in the same way.

I thought all these things over when we decided to build in the suburbs,
for Sarah is very nervous about burglars, and makes me get up at the
slightest noise and go poking about. Only the fact that no burglar had
ever entered our flat at night had prevented what might have been a
serious accident to a burglar, for I made it a rule, when Sarah wakened
me on such occasions, to waste no time, but to go through the rooms as
hastily as possible and get back to bed; and at the speed I travelled I
might have bumped into a burglar in the dark and knocked him over, and
his head might have struck some hard object, causing concussion of the
brain; and as a burglar has a small brain a small amount of concussion
might have ruined it entirely. But as I am a slight man it might have
been my brain that got concussed. A father of a family has to think of
these things.

The nervousness of Sarah regarding burglars had led me in this way to
study the subject carefully, and my adoption of jet-black pajamas as
nightwear