And now, as I breakfasted, my attention was invited anew to that fateful, never ending extension of the Potts-made ripples in our little pool.  I was threatened with the loss of my domestic stay; again might I be forced to the City Hotel’s refectory of a thousand blended smells and spotty table-linen; or even to irksome adventure at the board of the self-lauded Budd.

There was selfish wonder in my heart as I listened to Clem, who, now that my second cup of coffee competed with the May blossoms, stood by to tell me of his worldly advancement and the nearing of a time when Miss Caroline should come among us to be independent.

His stubborn industry had counted.  The vegetable and melon crop of the year before had been abundant and well sold, despite sundry raids upon the latter by nameless boys, who, he assured me, “hain’t had no raght raisin’.”  And he had further swelled that hoard of “reglah gole money” in Bundy’s bank by his performances of house-cleaning, catering, and his work as janitor; not a little, too, by sales of the fish he caught.  He was believed to possess a secret charm that made his fish-bait irresistible.  Certainly his fortune in this matter was superior to that of any other frequenter of the bass nooks below the dam.

And now he had waxed so heavy of purse that a woman could come between us,—­a selfish woman, I made no doubt, pampered survival of a pernicious and now happily destroyed system, who would not only unsettle my domestic tranquillity, but would, in all likelihood, fetch another alien ferment into our already sorely tried existence as a town needing elevation.  It seemed, indeed, that we were never to be done with these consequences.

Separated from my house by a stretch of weedy lawn was a shambling structure built years before by one Azariah Prouse, who believed among other strange matters that the earth is flat and that houses are built higher than one story only at great peril, because of the earth’s proneness to tip if overbalanced.  Prouse had compromised with this belief, however, and made his house a story and a half high, in what I conceive to have been a dare-devil spirit.  The reckless upper rooms were thus cut off untimely by ceilings of sudden slope, and might not be walked in uprightly save by persons of an inconsiderable stature.

In a fulness of years Azariah had died and been chested, like Joseph of old, his soul to be gathered, as he believed, to another horizontal plane, exalted far above this, as would befit an abode for spirits of the departed good.

His earthly home, now long vacant, had been rented by Clem for a monthly sum not particularly cheap in view of its surprising limitations above stairs.  It was of this new home that he chiefly talked to me, of the persistence required to have it newly painted by the inheriting Prouse, and repairs made to doors, windows, and the blinds that hung awry from them.