us winks, declared in a muzzy voice that I might trust
_him_, and that I needn't say that my cousin was in New York, when he
and him had been a-ridin' around together to the bay and back ag'in only
the day before. And then he went off into a rambling account of this
expedition, which in its main features resembled the expedition that
we all three had taken together, but which displayed certain curious
details as it advanced that I could not at all account for. By all odds
the most curious of these details was that they had taken along with
them a large tin vessel, Old Jacob's description of which tallied
strangely closely with that of the churn-wash-boiler, and that they had
left it behind them when they returned. But as he mixed this up with
a lot of stuff about having shown my cousin the course of an old creek
that a storm had filled with sand fifty years and more before, I could
not make head nor tail of it.

Yet somehow there really did seem to be more than mere drunken fancy in
what he was telling me; for in spite of his muzzy way of telling it, his
story had about it a curious air of truth; and yet it all was so utterly
preposterous that belief in it was quite out of the question. To
make matters worse, when I begged the old man to try to remember very
carefully whether or not he really had made a second trip to the bay,
or only was telling me about the trip that the three of us had made
together, he suddenly got very angry, and said that he supposed I
thought he was drunk, and if anybody was drunk I was, and he'd fight me
for five cents any time. And then he began to shake his old fists at
me, and to go on in such a boisterous way that, in order to avoid a very
unpleasant scene upon the public streets, I had to leave him and come
home.

When I told Susan the queer story that Old Jacob bad told me she was
as much perplexed and disturbed by it as I was. To think of Gregory
Wilkinson driving around the lower part of the State of Delaware in this
secret sort of way, in company with Old Jacob and the churn-wash-boiler,
as she very truly said, was like a horrible dream; and she asked me to
pinch her to make sure that it wasn't.

"But even pinching me don't prove anything," she said, when I had
performed that office for her. "For--don't you see?--I might dream that
I was dreaming, and asked you to pinch me, and that you did it; and I
suppose," she went on, meditatively, "that I might even dream that I
woke up when yo