of human being. Nowadays most of
us whisper the term crazy, realizing that we ourselves are liable to
be caught up and incarcerated under that head. Nevertheless within
ourselves we know that some of those about us--and we could point them
out if we were asked--are trying to pass off cracked brains for sound
ones.

Before Steve and Nannie had been domiciled more than a fortnight in
their new abode, where they had fancied that their living was to be of
the best, a fly appeared in the ointment, a fly which directly proved
to be out of its mind--in other words, they discovered that they had
crazy neighbors. Let no one understand me to signify by this the kind
of crazy person who seizes you by the hair and brandishes his fist in
your face, declaring that your hour has come. That is one variety, to
be sure, an unpleasant variety, too; but there are others. If it came
to a matter of weeding out all those whose brains were slightly out of
gear, most of us could appear in court with a batch of crazy
neighbors, thereby depriving a city of some of its principal men and
society of some of its chief ornaments.

No one would like to do this, but when the crack in a neighbor's
brains widens so as to seriously upset his notions of other people's
rights, then he is bound to become not dangerous necessarily, but
certainly troublesome, and some step must be taken in self-defense.

As Steve learned too late, he stood upon contested ground. The former
owner being now in the insane asylum, and having, before she became
unbalanced, deeded the property to her husband (who had subsequently
sold it to Steve), she was temporarily out of the way, but it seemed
that by some oversight she had left outside a mother and a brother,
whom she should have taken in with her.

These relatives, as far as Steve was able to learn, never claimed that
the transfer of property to the husband was invalid because the owner
was at that time insane. Their claim was that she had not gone insane
at all, and that she had, in a manner, been forced into deeding her
property away, and consequently the transaction was null and void and
she still owned it. A written document to this effect was posted on
one of the largest trees near the house soon after the newly wedded
pair moved out there, but Steve found upon investigation that this was
but one of many threads forming a cobweb of prodigious size within the
brains of these peculiar folk whose relative had outrun them