ter bequeathing the
bulk of her property to foreign missions, she had left me, whom she had
condescended to refer to as her "beloved nephew," nine hundred dollars in
cash and her favorite flower-piece in wax, a hideous thing which for
thirty years had occupied the corner of honor in the front spare chamber.

I do not know what Alice did with the wax-flowers. As for the nine
hundred dollars, I appropriated it to laudable purposes. Some of it went
for a new silk dress for Alice; the rest I spent for books, and I recall
my thrill of delight when I saw ensconced upon my shelves a splendid copy
of Audubon's "Birds" with its life-size pictures of turkeys, buzzards,
and other fowl done in impossible colors.

After that experience "our house" simmered and shrivelled down from the
Norman-Gothic to plain, everyday, fin-de-siecle architecture. We
concluded that we could get along with five rooms (although six would be
better), and we transferred our affections from that corner lot in the
avenue which had engaged our attention during the decadent-renaissance
phase of our enthusiasm to a modest point in Slocum's Addition, a
locality originally known as Slocum's Slough, but now advertised and
heralded by the press and rehabilitated in public opinion as Paradise
Park. This pleasing mania lasted about two years. Then it was forever
abated by the awful discovery that Paradise Park was the breeding spot of
typhoid fever, and, furthermore, that old man Slocum's title to the
property was defective in every essential particular.

Alice and I did not find it in our power either to overlook or to combat
these trifling objections; with unabated optimism we cast our eyes
elsewhere, and within a month we found another delectable biding
place--this time some distance from the city--in fact, in one of the new
and booming suburbs. Elmdale was then new to fame. I suppose they
called it Elmdale because it had neither an elm nor a dale. It was
fourteen miles from town, but its railroad transportation facilities were
unique. The five-o'clock milk-train took passengers in to business every
morning, and the eight-o'clock accommodation brought them home again
every evening; moreover, the noon freight stopped at Elmdale to take up
passengers every other Wednesday, and it was the practice of every other
train to whistle and to slack up in speed to thirty miles an hour while
passing through this promising suburb.

I did not care particularly for