of Scotland. It was our janitress,
and she had returned us the empty bottle.

V.

_A Boarding House for a Change._

Our new janitor was not altogether unworthy, but she drowned her sorrows
too deeply and too often, and her praiseworthy attributes were
incidentally submerged in the process. She was naturally kind-hearted,
and meant to be industrious, but the demon of the still had laid its
blight heavily upon her. We often found her grim and harsh, even to the
point of malevolence, and she did not sweep the stairs.

We attempted diplomacy at first, and affected a deep sympathy with her
wrongs. Then we tried bribery, and in this moral decline I descended to
things that I wish now neither to confess nor remember.

In desperation, at last, we complained to the agent, whereupon she
promptly inundated her griefs even more deeply than usual, and sat upon
the stairs outside our door to denounce us. She declared that a widow's
curse was upon us, and that we would never prosper. It sounded gruesome
at the time, but we have wondered since whether a grass widow's is as
effective, for we learned presently that her spouse, though absent, was
still in the flesh.

It was at the end of the second month that we agreed upon boarding. We
said that after all housekeeping on a small scale was less agreeable and
more expensive than one might suppose, viewing it at long range.

We looked over the papers again and found the inducements attractive. We
figured out that we could get two handsome rooms and board for no more,
and perhaps even a trifle less, than we had been expending on the
doubtful luxury of apartment life. Then, too, there would be a freedom
from the responsibility of marketing, and the preparation of food. We
looked forward to being able to come down to the dining-room without
knowing beforehand just what we were going to have.

It was well that we enjoyed this pleasure in anticipation. Viewed in the
retrospective it is wanting. We did know exactly what we were going to
have after the first week. We learned the combination perfectly in that
time, and solved the system of deductive boarding-house economy within
the month so correctly that given the Sunday bill of fare we could have
supplied in minute detail the daily program for the remainder of any
week in the year.

Of course there is a satisfaction in working out a problem like that,
and we did take a grim pleasure on Sunday afternoons in figuring just
what