About two weeks afterward my gas bill came.  It accused me of burning during the quarter about one million five hundred thousand feet of gas, and it called on me to settle to the extent of nearly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  I put on my hat and went down to the gas-office.  I addressed one of the clerks: 

“How much gas did you make at the Blank works last quarter?”

“I dunno; about a million feet, I reckon.”

“Well, you have charged me in my bill for burning half a million more than you made; I want you to correct it.”

“Less see the bill.  Hm—­m—­m! this is all right.  It’s taken off of the meter.  That’s what the meter says.”

“S’pose’n it does; I couldn’t have burned more’n you made.”

“Can’t help that; the meter can’t lie.”

“Well, but how d’you account for the difference?”

“Dunno; ’tain’t our business to go nosing and poking around after scientific truth.  We depend on the meter.  If that says you burned six million feet, why, you must have burned it, even if we never made a foot of gas out at the works.”

“To tell you the honest truth,” said I, “the meter was frozen, and I stirred it up with a poker and set it whizzing around.”

“Price just the same,” said the clerk.  “We charge for pokers just as we do for gas.”

“You are not actually going to have the audacity to ask me to pay three hundred and fifty thousand dollars on account of that poker?”

“If it was seven hundred thousand dollars, I’d take it with a calmness that would surprise you.  Pay up, or we’ll turn off your gas.”

“Turn it off and be hanged,” I exclaimed as I emerged from the office, tearing the bill to fragments.  Then I went home; and grasping that too lavish poker, I approached the meter.  It had registered another million feet since the bill was made out; it was running up a score of a hundred feet a minute; in a month I would have owed the gas company more than the United States Government owes its creditors.  So I beat the meter into a shapeless mass, tossed it into the street and turned off the gas inside the cellar.

Then I went down to the Patriot office to persuade Major Slott to denounce the fraud practiced by the company.  While I was in the editorial room two or three visitors came in.  The first one behaved in a violent and somewhat mysterious manner.  He saluted the major by throwing a chair at him.  Then he seized the editor by the hair, bumped his head against the table three or four times and kicked him.  When this exhilarating exercise was over, the visitor shook his fist very close to the major’s nose and said, “You idiot and outcast, if you don’t put that notice in to-morrow, I’ll come round here and murder you!  Do you hear me?” Then he cuffed the major’s ears a couple of times, kicked him some more, emptied the ink-stand over his head, poured the sand from the sand-box in the same place, knocked over the table and went out.  During all this time the major sat still with a sickly kind of a smile upon his face and never uttered a word.  When the man left, the major picked up the table, wiped the ink and sand from his face, and turning to me said,