nry involving the latter, though both acknowledged facts,
were alike preposterous on any other supposition than the secret closet.

But all this time I was quietly thinking to myself: Could it be hidden
from me that my credulity in this instance would operate very favorably
to a certain plan of theirs? How to get to the secret closet, or how to
have any certainty about it at all, without making such fell work with
my chimney as to render its set destruction superfluous? That my wife
wished to get rid of the chimney, it needed no reflection to show;
and that Mr. Scribe, for all his pretended disinterestedness, was not
opposed to pocketing five hundred dollars by the operation, seemed
equally evident. That my wife had, in secret, laid heads together with
Mr. Scribe, I at present refrain from affirming. But when I consider her
enmity against my chimney, and the steadiness with which at the last
she is wont to carry out her schemes, if by hook or crook she can,
especially after having been once baffled, why, I scarcely knew at what
step of hers to be surprised.

Of one thing only was I resolved, that I and my chimney should not
budge.

In vain all protests. Next morning I went out into the road, where I had
noticed a diabolical-looking old gander, that, for its doughty exploits
in the way of scratching into forbidden enclosures, had been rewarded
by its master with a portentous, four-pronged, wooden decoration, in the
shape of a collar of the Order of the Garotte. This gander I cornered
and rummaging out its stiffest quill, plucked it, took it home, and
making a stiff pen, inscribed the following stiff note:

CHIMNEY SIDE, April 2.
MR. SCRIBE
Sir:-For your conjecture, we return you our joint thanks and
compliments, and beg leave to assure you, that we shall remain,
Very faithfully,
The same,
I AND MY CHIMNEY.

Of course, for this epistle we had to endure some pretty sharp raps. But
having at last explicitly understood from me that Mr. Scribe's note had
not altered my mind one jot, my wife, to move me, among other things
said, that if she remembered aright, there was a statute placing the
keeping in private of secret closets on the same unlawful footing with
the keeping of gunpowder. But it had no effect.

A few days after, my spouse changed her key.

It was nearly midnight, and all were in bed but ourselves, who sat up,
one in each chimney-corner; she, needles in hand, indefatigably knitting