overshoes, but he ignored them utterly. I often wonder on
looking back what Douglas Bogtoe would have been had he but possessed
one half of Puffwater's concentrated repose. That celebrated appeal for
the Louisiana Canal installation would have been worded very differently
and as for his world-famed piscatorial argument with Olaf Campbell in
the Brooke Club--that would have probably been approached from an
entirely opposite angle.

To analyse and compare Bogtoe's electrical psychology with the
phlegmatic determination and boyish zeal of Puffwater would take, alas,
too long; so I will not seek to say more than that had the two widely
differentiated spirits but been combined within the same material
tissues--that a quainter nor a more peculiar juxtaposition of entities
it would have been hard to find, search where you may.

I try occasionally to picture to myself the lonely horror-stricken
nights Jabez Puffwater must have endured with that appalling fear always
crouching within him, egging him on towards the culminating tragedy of
his sad career.

There had been talk of a lynching in New Orleans and of a shooting in
Old Virginia and there were even whispers of a slapping in Alabama.

Jabez was priming his pistol one morning while he hastily scanned the
elevating disclosures--social and otherwise--of the New York American,
when a breathless woman rode up to the store on a tricycle. She
delivered a note to Jabez and waited while he read it.

"Come at once--am exceedingly ill--Aunt Topsy."

Jabez thought for a moment--then crushing down his rising apprehensions
he mounted his mare Buffalo Babs and made for the hills.

Ten miles there and ten miles back, and the fear always with him--the
fear of the Black Rising.

Many psychoanalysts have endeavoured to discover the exact motive for
Jabez Puffwater's sudden and unexpected slaying of his old Aunt
Topsy--whose coal-black arms had fondled him as a baby. Many theories
have been put forward, but none of them--with the exception, perhaps, of
Herman Pipper--possess the ring of truth. Pipper's deduction of the
circumstantial evidence is that it was all the outcome of a naughty
practical joke played by little Michael Drisher who appeared suddenly
during Jabez's interview with his Aunt and burst the awful news upon
them that there had been a fearful Black Rising in Oggsville, Ken. and
that debauch--murder--and worse were going on all over the globe.

"With a great cry," Pippe