f
Chicago, one visiting at that hospitable abode might imagine himself
in the country. From no part of the enclosure could you, during the
leafy season, see another human habitation. A quarter of a mile down
the road to the east, the electric cars for Calumet could be seen
flitting by, but except at the intervals of their passing, there was
seldom anything to suggest that the location was part of a great city.
A quarter of a mile to the west, on the edge of a marsh--a situation
well suited to such culture--lived a person engaged in the raising of
African geese. As it is probable that you may never have heard of
African geese, I will tell you that they are the largest of their
tribe and that specimens of them often weigh as high as seventy
pounds.

The person engaged in the culture of African geese was Wilhelm
Klingenspiel, a man of German ancestry, but born in this country. Miss
Sullivan had often heard of him, she had even partaken of the left leg
of an African goose, which leg he had given Mr. Sullivan for the
Sunday dinner, but she had never seen him. As Wilhelm Klingenspiel was
young and single and as no other man of any description lived in the
vicinity, it is not strange that Nora, who was also young and single,
should sometimes fall to thinking of Mr. Klingenspiel and wonder what
manner of man he was.

On this evening so attuned to romantic reveries, when the flowers, the
birds, and all nature spoke of love, more than ever did Nora
Sullivan's thoughts turn toward the large grove of trees to the
westward in the midst of which Wilhelm Klingenspiel had his home and
carried on his pleasant and harmless vocation of raising African
geese. The evening song of the geese, tempered and sweetened by
distance, came to her, accompanied by the most extraordinary booming
and racketing of frogs which is to be heard outside of the tropical
zone; for not only did Klingenspiel raise the largest geese on this
terraqueous globe, but having, as a means of cheapening the cost of
their production, devoted himself to the increasing of their natural
food, by principles well known to all breeders he had developed a
breed of frogs as monstrous among their kind as African geese are
among theirs. By these huge batrachians was an extensive marsh
inhabited, and battening upon the succulent nutriment thus afforded,
the African geese gained a size and flavor which was rapidly making
the fortune of Wilhelm Klingenspiel.

Nora had often medita