had been a more or less stationary inhabitant of Tinkletown for
about three years. He had taken up his residence there without really
having had the slightest intention or desire to do so. In fact, he would
have been safely out of the village in another ten minutes if Mrs. Abbie
Nixon hadn't missed the blackberry pie from the kitchen window sill,
where she had set it out to cool,--and even then he might have got away
if he had had a handkerchief or something with which to remove the
damning stains from his lips and chin. But, in his haste, he used the
back of his hand, and--well, Justice of the Peace Robb sent him to the
calaboose for thirty days,--and that's how Jake became a resident of
Tinkletown.

At the trial he was so shamelessly complimentary about Mrs. Nixon's pie
that the prosecuting witness came very near to perjuring herself in
order to show her appreciation. The dignity of the law was preserved
only by Jake's unshaken resolution to plead guilty to the charge of
feloniously eating one blackberry pie with never-to-be-forgotten relish.
Mrs. Nixon was so impressed by Jake's honesty that she made a practice
of sending a pie to him every baking-day during the period of his
incarceration. But when approached by two or three citizens with the
proposal that she join with them in providing the fellow with work as a
sort of community "handy-man," she refused to consider the matter at all
because most of her silver had come down from her grandmother and she
wouldn't part with it for anything in the world.

[Illustration: _At the trial he was shamelessly complimentary about Mrs.
Nixon's pie_]

For one who had never laid eyes on the village of Tinkletown up to the
day of his arrival, Jake Miller revealed the most astonishing sense of
civic pride. The first thing he did after being safely locked up was to
whitewash the interior of his residence. (The town board furnished a
rather thin mixture of slaked lime and water, borrowed a whitewash brush
from Ebenezer January, and got off with a total cost of about
eighty-five cents.) He also repaired several windows in the calaboose by
stuffing newspapers into the broken panes, remodeled the entire heating
system with a little stove polish, put two or three locks in order, and
once, on finding that it was possible to remove a grating from one of
the windows, crawled out of his place of confinement and mowed the grass
plot in front of the jail.

It was then that the people of Ti