attention was directed to the
new joke on the wheat king. It was turned over and over, forward and back,
and refurbished and made to do duty again and again, after the fashion of
rustic jokes. This one had the additional advantage of lining the pockets
of the perpetrators. They egged one another on to fresh inventions and
variations, until even the children, not to be left out, began to have
exploits of their own to tell. The grocers raised the price of kerosene,
groaning all the time at the extortions of the oil trust, till the
guileless guardian of Mr. Camden's funds was paying fifty cents a gallon
for it. The boys charged a quarter for every bouquet of pine-boughs they
brought to decorate the cold, empty reading-room. The washer-woman charged
five dollars for "doing-up" the lace sash-curtains. As spring came on, and
the damages wrought by the winter winds must be repaired, the carpenters
asked wages which made the sellers of firewood tear their hair at wasted
opportunities. They might have raised the price per cord! The new janitor,
hearing the talk about town, demanded a raise in salary and threatened to
leave without warning if it were not granted.

It was on the fifth of June, a year to a day after the arrival of Mr.
Camden in his automobile, that Miss Martin yielded to this last extortion,
and her action made the day as memorable as that of the year before. The
janitor, carried away by his victory, celebrated his good fortune in so
many glasses of hard cider that he was finally carried home and deposited
limply on the veranda of his boarding-house. Here he slept till the cold
of dawn awoke him to a knowledge of his whereabouts, so inverted and tipsy
that he rose, staggered to the library, cursing the intolerable length of
these damn Vermont winters, and proceeded to build a roaring fire on the
floor of the reading-room. As the varnished wood of the beautiful fittings
took light like a well-constructed bonfire, realization of his act came to
him, and he ran down the valley road, screaming and giving the alarm at
the top of his lungs, and so passed out of Hillsboro forever.

The village looked out of its windows, saw the wooden building blazing
like a great torch, hurried on its clothes and collected around the fire.
No effort was made to save the library. People stood around in the chilly
morning air, looking silently at the mountain of flame which burned as
though it would never stop. They thought of a great many