mal person, Mr. Bennett! What you really need is a good
hard jar! Every morning you know exactly what you're going to do every
hour of the day. It's routine that kills! Now just suppose when you're
out on one of your walks you were to overpower the chauffeur of, we will
say, the British ambassador, and drive the car bearing his Excellency
into some lonely fastness of the Virginia hills, and hold him for a
ransom, and collect the money in twenty-dollar gold pieces and escape
with it and then come back to Washington and spend it all on a big party
with the ambassador as the guest of honor. There would be a real
achievement--something that would make you famous in two hemispheres."

"And incidentally lock me up for life if I escaped being shot! Such an
escapade would very likely spoil our cordial relations with England and
cause no end of trouble."

"There you are!" she exclaimed, "thinking always of the cost, never of
the fun! Of course you would never do any such thing. Let me try again!
Suppose you were to hold up a bank messenger in Wall Street and skip
with a satchelful of negotiable securities and then, after the papers
were through ragging the police for their inefficiency, you would drive
up to the bank in a taxi, walk in and return the money, saying you had
found it in the old family pew at Trinity when you went in to say your
prayers! Here would be an opportunity to break the force of habit and
awaken your self-confidence."

"Am I to understand that you practice what you preach? I don't mean to
be impertinent, but really,--"

"Oh, I'm perfectly capable of doing anything I've suggested. I'm merely
biding my time. Parents are pardonably fussy about the sort of person
they turn their children over to, so I must have a care. I mean to dig
for buried treasure this summer, realizing the dream of a lifetime."

"That appeals to me strongly. Perhaps you'd let me assist in that
undertaking?"

"Impossible! I want all the glory and eke the gold if I find the hidden
chests. Talk about romance being dead! My grandfather was a planter in
Mississippi before the Civil War. In about 1860 he saw trouble ahead,
and as he was opposed to secession he turned everything he had into
gold, bought several tracts of land in Michigan and New York and
secretly planted his money. His wife and children refused to share his
lonely exile and he sent them to England but clung to America himself,
and died suddenly and alone the second year of