not hesitate to introduce the story at every tavern and
country-store along the road, expending a whole bunch of Spanish
wrappers among at least twenty horrified audiences. He found himself
invariably the first bearer of the intelligence, and was so pestered
with questions that he could not avoid filling up the outline till it
became quite a respectable narrative. He met with one piece of
corroborative evidence. Mr. Higginbotham was a trader, and a former
clerk of his to whom Dominicus related the facts testified that the
old gentleman was accustomed to return home through the orchard about
nightfall with the money and valuable papers of the store in his
pocket. The clerk manifested but little grief at Mr. Higginbotham's
catastrophe, hinting--what the pedler had discovered in his own
dealings with him--that he was a crusty old fellow as close as a vise.
His property would descend to a pretty niece who was now keeping
school in Kimballton.

What with telling the news for the public good and driving bargains
for his own, Dominicus was so much delayed on the road that he chose
to put up at a tavern about five miles short of Parker's Falls. After
supper, lighting one of his prime cigars, he seated himself in the
bar-room and went through the story of the murder, which had grown so
fast that it took him half an hour to tell. There were as many as
twenty people in the room, nineteen of whom received it all for
gospel. But the twentieth was an elderly farmer who had arrived on
horseback a short time before and was now seated in a corner, smoking
his pipe. When the story was concluded, he rose up very deliberately,
brought his chair right in front of Dominicus and stared him full in
the face, puffing out the vilest tobacco-smoke the pedler had ever
smelt.

"Will you make affidavit," demanded he, in the tone of a
country-justice taking an examination, "that old Squire Higginbotham
of Kimballton was murdered in his orchard the night before last and
found hanging on his great pear tree yesterday morning?"

"I tell the story as I heard it, mister," answered Dominicus, dropping
his half-burnt cigar. "I don't say that I saw the thing done, so I
can't take my oath that he was murdered exactly in that way."

"But I can take mine," said the farmer, "that if Squire Higginbotham
was murdered night before last I drank a glass of bitters with his
ghost this morning. Being a neighbor of mine, he called me into his
store as I was riding