As for myself, I never go away from home that I do not take a trunkful of books with me, for experience has taught me that there is no companionship better than that of these friends, who, however much all things else may vary, always give the same response to my demand upon their solace and their cheer.  My sister, Miss Susan, has often inveighed against this practice of mine, and it was only yesterday that she informed me that I was the most exasperating man in the world.

However, as Miss Susan’s experience with men during the sixty-seven hot summers and sixty-eight hard winters of her life has been somewhat limited, I think I should bear her criticism without a murmur.  Miss Susan is really one of the kindest creatures in all the world.  It is her misfortune that she has had all her life an insane passion for collecting crockery, old pewter, old brass, old glass, old furniture and other trumpery of that character; a passion with which I have little sympathy.  I do not know that Miss Susan is prouder of her collection of all this folderol than she is of the fact that she is a spinster.

This latter peculiarity asserts itself upon every occasion possible.  I recall an unpleasant scene in the omnibus last winter, when the obsequious conductor, taking advantage of my sister’s white hair and furrowed cheeks, addressed that estimable lady as ``Madam.’’ I’d have you know that my sister gave the fellow to understand very shortly and in very vigorous English (emphasized with her blue silk umbrella) that she was Miss Susan, and that she did not intend to be Madamed by anybody, under any condition.

IV

THE MANIA OF COLLECTING SEIZES ME

Captivity Waite never approved of my fondness for fairy literature.  She shared the enthusiasm which I expressed whenever ``Robinson Crusoe’’ was mentioned; there was just enough seriousness in De Foe’s romance, just enough piety to appeal for sympathy to one of Captivity Waite’s religious turn of mind.  When it came to fiction involving witches, ogres, and flubdubs, that was too much for Captivity, and the spirit of the little Puritan revolted.

Yet I have the documentary evidence to prove that Captivity’s ancestors (both paternal and maternal) were, in the palmy colonial times, as abject slaves to superstition as could well be imagined.  The Waites of Salem were famous persecutors of witches, and Sinai Higginbotham (Captivity’s great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side of the family) was Cotton Mather’s boon companion, and rode around the gallows with that zealous theologian on that memorable occasion when five young women were hanged at Danvers upon the charge of having tormented little children with their damnable arts of witchcraft.  Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum:  it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.  Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.