out back one night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned.”  Next I searched around and found old Aunt Patsy and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were around, and said, “They went out back one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got drowned.”  I was going to drown some others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway.

Still the story was unsatisfactory.  Here was a set of new characters who were become inordinately prominent and who persisted in remaining so to the end; and back yonder was an older set who made a large noise and a great to-do for a little while and then suddenly played out utterly and fell down the well.  There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must search it out and cure it.

The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of—­two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy.  So I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy.  This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as characters.  Their prominence was wholly gone; they were not even worth drowning; so I removed that detail.  Also I took the twins apart and made two separate men of them.  They had no occasion to have foreign names now, but it was too much trouble to remove them all through, so I left them christened as they were and made no explanation.