time or another. Once, in
stress of circumstances, I ate part of a barrel of sardines, there being
nothing else at hand, but since then I have always been able to get
along without sardines.

THE McWILLIAMSES AND THE BURGLAR ALARM

The conversation drifted smoothly and pleasantly along from weather
to crops, from crops to literature, from literature to scandal, from
scandal to religion; then took a random jump, and landed on the subject
of burglar alarms. And now for the first time Mr. McWilliams showed
feeling. Whenever I perceive this sign on this man's dial, I comprehend
it, and lapse into silence, and give him opportunity to unload his
heart. Said he, with but ill-controlled emotion:

"I do not go one single cent on burglar alarms, Mr. Twain--not a single
cent--and I will tell you why. When we were finishing our house, we
found we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not
knowing it. I was for enlightening the heathen with it, for I was always
unaccountably down on the heathen somehow; but Mrs. McWilliams said no,
let's have a burglar alarm. I agreed to this compromise. I will explain
that whenever I want a thing, and Mrs. McWilliams wants another thing,
and we decide upon the thing that Mrs. McWilliams wants--as we always
do--she calls that a compromise. Very well: the man came up from New
York and put in the alarm, and charged three hundred and twenty-five
dollars for it, and said we could sleep without uneasiness now. So we
did for awhile--say a month. Then one night we smelled smoke, and I
was advised to get up and see what the matter was. I lit a candle, and
started toward the stairs, and met a burglar coming out of a room with
a basket of tinware, which he had mistaken for solid silver in the dark.
He was smoking a pipe. I said, 'My friend, we do not allow smoking in
this room.' He said he was a stranger, and could not be expected to know
the rules of the house: said he had been in many houses just as good as
this one, and it had never been objected to before. He added that as far
as his experience went, such rules had never been considered to apply to
burglars, anyway.

"I said: 'Smoke along, then, if it is the custom, though I think that
the conceding of a privilege to a burglar which is denied to a bishop is
a conspicuous sign of the looseness of the times. But waiving all that,
what business have you to be entering this house in this furtive and
clandestine way, without ringi