hot water--I always take a cup of hot
water with a pinch of salt, before I get up. It tones the stomach.

"Liddy Allen," I said, "stop combing that switch and tell me what is
wrong with you."

Liddy heaved a sigh.

"Girl and woman," she said, "I've been with you twenty-five years, Miss
Rachel, through good temper and bad--" the idea! and what I have taken
from her in the way of sulks!--"but I guess I can't stand it any
longer. My trunk's packed."

"Who packed it?" I asked, expecting from her tone to be told she had
wakened to find it done by some ghostly hand.

"I did; Miss Rachel, you won't believe me when I tell you this house is
haunted. Who was it fell down the clothes chute? Who was it scared
Miss Louise almost into her grave?"

"I'm doing my best to find out," I said. "What in the world are you
driving at?" She drew a long breath.

"There is a hole in the trunk-room wall, dug out since last night.
It's big enough to put your head in, and the plaster's all over the
place."

"Nonsense!" I said. "Plaster is always falling."

But Liddy clenched that.

"Just ask Alex," she said. "When he put the new cook's trunk there
last night the wall was as smooth as this. This morning it's dug out,
and there's plaster on the cook's trunk. Miss Rachel, you can get a
dozen detectives and put one on every stair in the house, and you'll
never catch anything. There's some things you can't handcuff."

Liddy was right. As soon as I could, I went up to the trunk-room,
which was directly over my bedroom. The plan of the upper story of the
house was like that of the second floor, in the main. One end,
however, over the east wing, had been left only roughly finished, the
intention having been to convert it into a ball-room at some future
time. The maids' rooms, trunk-room, and various store-rooms, including
a large airy linen-room, opened from a long corridor, like that on the
second floor. And in the trunk-room, as Liddy had said, was a fresh
break in the plaster.

Not only in the plaster, but through the lathing, the aperture
extended. I reached into the opening, and three feet away, perhaps, I
could touch the bricks of the partition wall. For some reason, the
architect, in building the house, had left a space there that struck
me, even in the surprise of the discovery, as an excellent place for a
conflagration to gain headway.

"You are sure the hole was not here yesterday?" I asked Liddy, whose
express