ntage of the Widow
Schmittheimer or of anybody else, I recognized the propriety of
conserving our own interests to the extent of suffering no rights of
our own to be either lost or jeoparded. So while Mr. Denslow and Alice
went upon their business mission I remained with Mrs. Denslow and her
interesting children and elucidated my theory of the ice-caps of the
planet Mars. In less than an hour Mr. Denslow and Alice returned and
exhibited with delight a receipt signed by Katherine Elizabeth
Schmittheimer, which receipt, I was glad to see, was practically a
contract to sell the property upon the terms specified in her original
talk with Alice.

"The terms are certainly exceptionally advantageous!" said Mr. Denslow.
"It will take some time--perhaps a week or ten days--to investigate the
title; when this detail is satisfactorily disposed of you can pay down
your one thousand dollars and take possession of the premises."

Pay down one thousand dollars? Ah, I had quite forgotten about that.
In my enthusiasm over the prospect of a home of our own, and in the
delirium induced by the delightful chatter about the paradise into
which that front lawn and that old rookery (as Adah called it) were to
be transformed, I had suffered all thought of the essential and
inevitable first payment of one thousand dollars to slip quite out of
my mind. Now this awful consideration, from which there could be no
escape, took complete and exclusive possession of me. Where in the
wide, wide world was I to get the one thousand dollars?

This was the question I put to Alice on the way home from the Denslows'
that memorable evening. Alice knew as well as I did that my salary was
sufficient only to cover the current expenses of the family. She knew
as well as I did that the royalties from my books the last year were as
follows:

"The Star Gamma in Leo and Its Satellite" . . . . . $1.60
"Mars and Its Ice-Caps" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75
"Probable Depth of the Bottle-Neck Seas as
Indicated by the Spectroscope" . . . . . . . . . .30
"Logarithms for the Nursery" . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.15
"Alphabetical Catalogue of Binary Stars" . . . . . . .65
-----
Total $4.45

Alice knew, too, as well as I did, that the whole amount of money I
received from my lectures before the West Side Society for the
Diffusion of Know