r!
It isn't safe to take one false step.

"For the next minute the inside door from the dining-room springs open
and a man jumps out and grabs me and says: 'I've got thee at last, have
I!' He was a Quaker, sir; a big man and with a grip like iron. I never
knowed a man with a grip like that. Did you ever, sir, have your fingers
in the crack of a door and somebody a-leaning hard on the door? That was
the way this Quaker held me. Then he calls out 'Amelia! Amelia!' and in
a minute a sweet old Quaker lady comes out with a candle, and he says to
her: I've caught that burglar, Amelia; thee get the clothes line.'"

"So the lady she gets the clothes line and that man he ties my hands and
my arms behind my back, good and tight, and then he made me set down
and he ties me to the chair, and at last he gives the rope two or three
turns around the leg of the kitchen table and says to me: 'Friend, thee
can just set there while I go to get an officer!' Gave me no chance to
explain. Took it all for granted; whereas if he would have listened to
me I could have cleared up the whole mystery in two minutes.

"So then, sir, out he goes for a policeman, and the old lady sets down
in a chair not far from me and said she was sorry I was so wicked and
asked me about my mother, and if I ever went to First-Day school, and
a whole lot of things. Then a thought seemed to strike her and she went
into the next room and came back with a book in her hand, and she said
she would read a good book to me while we waited for justice to take its
course.

"She was lovely to look at, sir, with her tidy brown frock and the crape
handkerchief folded acrost her bosom and her cap and the smile on her
face; a sweet face, sir; an angel face; yes, sir, but sweet faces often
has cruel dispositions behind them. For then she told me that the book
was called Barclay's Apology for the People called Quakers, or something
like that, and she begun to read it to me.

"Have you ever read that book, sir? It is dedicated, I think, to Charles
the Second, and it begins with Fifteen Propositions, and she read every
one of them Propositions from first to last. Then she turned to the
section, sir, about Salutations and Recreations, and she read and read
and read until, sir, actually it made my head swim.

"Do you know, sir, is Barclay still alive--the man who wrote that book?
Is there no way of getting even with him?

"I couldn't get away. I might have walked out somehow with