play. I cannot bring myself to believe
that Guy was aware of my hiding place, but even if he was, I would be
loath to blame him for his setting fire to the leaves, causing the
destruction of my new suit of clothes, and nearly cremating a parent.

Soon my own children began to shun me as a pest. Often, when I was
creeping upon them like a melancholy ghoul, I would hear them say to
each other: "Here comes papa," and they would gather their toys and
scurry away to some safer hiding place. Miserable wretch that I was!

And yet I was doing well financially. Before the first year had passed
I had saved a thousand dollars, and we had lived in comfort.

But at what a cost! I am not quite clear as to what a pariah is, but I
was everything that it sounds like. I had no friends, no amusements,
no enjoyment of life. The happiness of my family had been sacrificed.
I was a bee, sucking sordid honey from life's fairest flowers, dreaded
and shunned on account of my stingo.

One day a man spoke to me, with a pleasant and friendly smile. Not in
months had the thing happened. I was passing the undertaking
establishment of Peter Heffelbower. Peter stood in the door and
saluted me. I stopped, strangely wrung in my heart by his greeting. He
asked me inside.

The day was chill and rainy. We went into the back room, where a fire
burned, in a little stove. A customer came, and Peter left me alone
for a while. Presently I felt a new feeling stealing over me--a sense
of beautiful calm and content, I looked around the place. There were
rows of shining rosewood caskets, black palls, trestles, hearse plumes,
mourning streamers, and all the paraphernalia of the solemn trade.
Here was peace, order, silence, the abode of grave and dignified
reflections. Here, on the brink of life, was a little niche pervaded
by the spirit of eternal rest.

When I entered it, the follies of the world abandoned me at the door. I
felt no inclination to wrest a humorous idea from those sombre and
stately trappings. My mind seemed to stretch itself to grateful repose
upon a couch draped with gentle thoughts.

A quarter of an hour ago I was an abandoned humorist. Now I was a
philosopher, full of serenity and ease. I had found a refuge from
humor, from the hot chase of the shy quip, from the degrading pursuit
of the panting joke, from the restless reach after the nimble repartee.

I had not known Heffelbower well. When he came back, I let him talk,