of Chippendale, is still unsolved in Grand Rapids, and it
probably will remain unsolved to the end of time, unless Eden should
be found again, where the hat-tree is the least of the arboreal
troubles.

[Illustration]

_The Shrinking of Kingman's Field_

"It was rats," said I.

"It was warts," said Old Hundred.

"I know it was rats, I tell you," I continued, "because my uncle Eben
knew a man who did it. His house was full of rats, so he wrote a very
polite note to them, setting forth that, much as he enjoyed their
excellent society, the house was too crowded for comfort, and telling
them to go over to the house of a certain neighbor, who had more room
and no children nor cats. And the rats all went."

Old Hundred listened patiently. "That's precisely right," said he,
"except it must have been warts. You have to be polite, and also tell
them where to go. You rub the warts with a bean, wrap the bean up in
the note, and burn both, or else throw them in the well. In a few days
the warts will leave you and appear on the other fellow. My
grandfather, when he was a boy, got warts that way, so he licked the
other boy."

"Rats!" said I.

"No, warts," persisted Old Hundred.

So that was how we two aging and urbanized codgers came to leave the
comfortable club for the Grand Central Station, whence we sent
telegrams to our families and took train for the rural regions
north-eastward. The point had to be settled. Besides, I stumped Old
Hundred to go, and he never could refuse a stump.

But Old Hundred was fretful on the journey. We called him Old Hundred
years ago, because he always proposed that tune at Sunday evening
meetings, when the leader "called for hymns." I address him as Old
Hundred still, though he is a learned lawyer in line for a judgeship.
He was fretful, he said, because we were sure to be terribly
disillusioned. But he is not a man accustomed in these later years to
act on impulse, and the prospect of a night on a sleeping car, without
pajamas, did not, I fancy, appeal to him, now that he faced it from
the badly ventilated car aisle, instead of the club easy-chair. Yet
perhaps he did dread the disillusionment, too. It was always I, even
when we were boys, who loved an adventure for its own sake, quite
apart from the pleasure or pain of it--taking a supreme delight, in
fact, in melancholy. I have still a copy of Moore's poems, stained
with tears and g