NINE
The Mariposa Bank Mystery
Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very
careful thought. It often involves serious consequences, and in some
cases brings pain to others than oneself.
I don't say that there is no justification for it. There often is.
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain
kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances upon the
concertina, will admit that there are some lives which ought not to
be continued, and that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
But to commit suicide on grounds of love is at the best a very
dubious experiment. I know that in this I am expressing an opinion
contrary to that of most true lovers who embrace suicide on the
slightest provocation as the only honourable termination of an
existence that never ought to have begun.
I quite admit that there is a glamour and a sensation about the thing
which has its charm, and that there is nothing like it for causing a
girl to realize the value of the heart that she has broken and which
breathed forgiveness upon her at the very moment when it held in its
hand the half-pint of prussic acid that was to terminate its beating
for ever.
But apart from the general merits of the question, I suppose there
are few people, outside of lovers, who know what it is to commit
suicide four times in five weeks.
Yet this was what happened to Mr. Pupkin, of the Exchange Bank of
Mariposa.
Ever since he had known Zena Pepperleigh he had realized that his
love for her was hopeless. She was too beautiful for him and too good
for him; her father hated him and her mother despised him; his salary
was too small and his own people were too rich.
If you add to all that that he came up to the judge's house one night
and found a poet reciting verses to Zena, you will understand the
suicide at once. It was one of those regular poets with a solemn
jackass face, and lank parted hair and eyes like puddles of molasses.
I don't know how he came there--up from the city, probably--but
there he was on the Pepperleighs' verandah that August evening. He
was reciting poetry--either Tennyson's or Shelley's, or his own, you
couldn't tell--and about him sat Zena with her hands clasped and Nora
Gallagher looking at the sky and Jocelyn Drone gazing into infinity,
and a little tubby woman looking at the poet with her head falling
over sideways--in fact, there was a whole group of them.
I don't know what it is about poets that draws women to them in this
way. But everybody knows that a poet has only to sit and saw the air
with his hands and recite verses in a deep stupid voice, and all the
women are crazy over him. Men despise him and would kick him off the
verandah if they dared, but the women simply rave over him.
So Pupkin sat there in the gloom and listened to this poet reciting
Browning and he realized that everybody understood it but him. He
could see Zena with her eyes fixed on the poet as if she were hanging
on to every syllable (she was; she needed to), and he stood it just
about fifteen minutes and then slid off the side of the verandah and
disappeared without even saying good-night.
He walked straight down Oneida Street and along the Main Street just
as hard as he could go. There was only one purpose in his
mind,--suicide. He was heading straight for Jim Eliot's drug store on
the main corner and his idea was to buy a drink of chloroform and
drink it and die right there on the spot.
As Pupkin walked down the street, the whole thing was so vivid in his
mind that he could picture it to the remotest detail. He could even
see it all in type, in big headings in the newspapers of the
following day:
APPALLING SUICIDE. PETER PUPKIN POISONED.
He perhaps hoped that the thing might lead to some kind of public
enquiry and that the question of Browning's poetry and whether it is
altogether fair to allow of its general circulation would be fully
ventilated in the newspapers.
Thinking of that, Pupkin came to the main corner.
On a warm August evening the drug store of Mariposa, as you know, is
all a blaze of lights. You can hear the hissing of the soda-water
fountain half a block away, and inside the store there are ever so
many people--boys and girls and old people too--all drinking
sarsaparilla and chocolate sundaes and lemon sours and foaming drinks
that you take out of long straws. There is such a laughing and a
talking as you never heard, and the girls are all in white and pink
and cambridge blue, and the soda fountain is of white marble with
silver taps, and it hisses and sputters, and Jim Eliot and his
assistant wear white coats with red geraniums in them, and it's just
as gay as gay.
The foyer of the opera in Paris may be a fine sight, but I doubt if
it can compare with the inside of Eliot's drug store in Mariposa--for
real gaiety and joy of living.
This night the store was especially crowded because it was a Saturday
and that meant early closing for all the hotels, except, of course,
Smith's. So as the hotels were shut, the people were all in the drug
store, drinking like fishes. It just shows the folly of Local Option
and the Temperance Movement and all that. Why, if you shut the hotels
you simply drive the people to the soda fountains and there's more
drinking than ever, and not only of the men, too, but the girls and
young boys and children. I've seen little things of eight and nine
that had to be lifted up on the high stools at Eliot's drug store,
drinking great goblets of lemon soda, enough to burst them--brought
there by their own fathers, and why? Simply because the hotel bars
were shut.
What's the use of thinking you can stop people drinking merely by
cutting off whiskey and brandy? The only effect is to drive them to
taking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and caroka
cordial and things they wouldn't have touched before. So in the long
run they drink more than ever. The point is that you can't prevent
people having a good time, no matter how hard you try. If they can't
have it with lager beer and brandy, they'll have it with plain soda
and lemon pop, and so the whole gloomy scheme of the temperance
people breaks down, anyway.
But I was only saying that Eliot's drug store in Mariposa on a
Saturday night is the gayest and brightest spot in the world.
And just imagine what a fool of a place to commit suicide in!
Just imagine going up to the soda-water fountain and asking for five
cents' worth of chloroform and soda! Well, you simply can't, that's
all.
That's the way Pupkin found it. You see, as soon as he came in,
somebody called out: "Hello, Pete!" and one or two others called:
"Hullo, Pup!" and some said: "How goes it?" and others: "How are you
toughing it?" and so on, because you see they had all been drinking
more or less and naturally they felt jolly and glad-hearted.
So the upshot of it was that instead of taking chloroform, Pupkin
stepped up to the counter of the fountain and he had a bromo-seltzer
with cherry soda, and after that he had one of those aerated
seltzers, and then a couple of lemon seltzers and a bromo-phizzer.
I don't know if you know the mental effect of a bromo-seltzer.
But it's a hard thing to commit suicide on.
You can't.
You feel so buoyant.
Anyway, what with the phizzing of the seltzer and the lights and the
girls, Pupkin began to feel so fine that he didn't care a cuss for
all the Browning in the world, and as for the poet--oh, to blazes
with him! What's poetry, anyway?--only rhymes.
So, would you believe it, in about ten minutes Peter Pupkin was off
again and heading straight for the Pepperleighs' house, poet or no
poet, and, what was more to the point, he carried with him three
great bricks of Eliot's ice cream--in green, pink and brown layers.
He struck the verandah just at the moment when Browning was getting
too stale and dreary for words. His brain was all sizzling and jolly
with the bromo-seltzer, and when he fetched out the ice cream bricks
and Zena ran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went
with her to help fetch them and they picked out the spoons together,
they were so laughing and happy that it was just a marvel. Girls, you
know, need no bromo-seltzer. They're full of it all the time.
And as for the poet--well, can you imagine how Pupkin felt when Zena
told him that the poet was married, and that the tubby little woman
with her head on sideways was his wife?
So they had the ice cream, and the poet ate it in bucketsful. Poets
always do. They need it. And after it the poet recited some stanzas
of his own and Pupkin saw that he had misjudged the man, because it
was dandy poetry, the very best. That night Pupkin walked home on air
and there was no thought of chloroform, and it turned out that he
hadn't committed suicide, but like all lovers he had commuted it.
I don't need to describe in full the later suicides of Mr. Pupkin,
because they were all conducted on the same plan and rested on
something the same reasons as above.
Sometimes he would go down at night to the offices of the bank below
his bedroom and bring up his bank revolver in order to make an end of
himself with it. This, too, he could see headed up in the newspapers
as:
BRILLIANT BOY BANKER BLOWS OUT BRAINS.
But blowing your brains out is a noisy, rackety performance, and
Pupkin soon found that only special kinds of brains are suited for
it. So he always sneaked back again later in the night and put the
revolver in its place, deciding to drown himself instead. Yet every
time that he walked down to the Trestle Bridge over the Ossawippi he
found it was quite unsuitable for drowning--too high, and the water
too swift and black, and the rushes too gruesome--in fact, not at
all the kind of place for a drowning.
Far better, he realized, to wait there on the railroad track and
throw himself under the wheels of the express and be done with it.
Yet, though Pupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was
never able to pick out a pair of wheels that suited him. Anyhow, it's
awfully hard to tell an express from a fast freight.
I wouldn't mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn't
finally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero and solving for him
the whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena
Pepperleigh. Incidentally it threw him into the very centre of one of
the most impenetrable bank mysteries that ever baffled the ingenuity
of some of the finest legal talent that ever adorned one of the most
enterprising communities in the country.
It happened one night, as I say, that Pupkin decided to go down into
the office of the bank and get his revolver and see if it would blow
his brains out. It was the night of the Firemen's Ball and Zena had
danced four times with a visitor from the city, a man who was in the
fourth year at the University and who knew everything. It was more
than Peter Pupkin could bear. Mallory Tompkins was away that night,
and when Pupkin came home he was all alone in the building, except
for Gillis, the caretaker, who lived in the extension at the back.
He sat in his room for hours brooding. Two or three times he picked
up a book--he remembered afterwards distinctly that it was Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason--and tried to read it, but it seemed
meaningless and trivial. Then with a sudden access of resolution he
started from his chair and made his way down the stairs and into the
office room of the bank, meaning to get a revolver and kill himself
on the spot and let them find his body lying on the floor.
It was then far on in the night and the empty building of the bank
was as still as death. Pupkin could hear the stairs creak under his
feet, and as he went he thought he heard another sound like the
opening or closing of a door. But it sounded not like the sharp
ordinary noise of a closing door but with a dull muffled noise as if
someone had shut the iron door of a safe in a room under the ground.
For a moment Pupkin stood and listened with his heart thumping
against his ribs. Then he kicked his slippers from his feet and
without a sound stole into the office on the ground floor and took
the revolver from his teller's desk. As he gripped it, he listened to
the sounds on the back-stairway and in the vaults below.
I should explain that in the Exchange Bank of Mariposa the offices
are on the ground floor level with the street. Below this is another
floor with low dark rooms paved with flagstones, with unused office
desks and with piles of papers stored in boxes. On this floor are the
vaults of the bank, and lying in them in the autumn--the grain
season--there is anything from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in
currency tied in bundles. There is no other light down there than the
dim reflection from the lights out on the street, that lies in
patches on the stone floor.
I think as Peter Pupkin stood, revolver in hand, in the office of the
bank, he had forgotten all about the maudlin purpose of his first
coming. He had forgotten for the moment all about heroes and love
affairs, and his whole mind was focussed, sharp and alert, with the
intensity of the night-time, on the sounds that he heard in the vault
and on the back-stairway of the bank.
Straight away, Pupkin knew what it meant as plainly as if it were
written in print. He had forgotten, I say, about being a hero and he
only knew that there was sixty thousand dollars in the vault of the
bank below, and that he was paid eight hundred dollars a year to look
after it.
As Peter Pupkin stood there listening to the sounds in his stockinged
feet, his faced showed grey as ashes in the light that fell through
the window from the street. His heart beat like a hammer against his
ribs. But behind its beatings was the blood of four generations of
Loyalists, and the robber who would take that sixty thousand dollars
from the Mariposa bank must take it over the dead body of Peter
Pupkin, teller.
Pupkin walked down the stairs to the lower room, the one below the
ground with the bank vault in it, with as fine a step as any of his
ancestors showed on parade. And if he had known it, as he came down
the stairway in the front of the vault room, there was a man crouched
in the shadow of the passage way by the stairs at the back. This man,
too, held a revolver in his hand, and, criminal or not, his face was
as resolute as Pupkin's own. As he heard the teller's step on the
stair, he turned and waited in the shadow of the doorway without a
sound.
There is no need really to mention all these details. They are only
of interest as showing how sometimes a bank teller in a corded
smoking jacket and stockinged feet may be turned into such a hero as
even the Mariposa girls might dream about.
All of this must have happened at about three o'clock in the night.
This much was established afterwards from the evidence of Gillis, the
caretaker. When he first heard the sounds he had looked at his watch
and noticed that it was half-past two; the watch he knew was
three-quarters of an hour slow three days before and had been gaining
since. The exact time at which Gillis heard footsteps in the bank
and started downstairs, pistol in hand, became a nice point
afterwards in the cross-examination.
But one must not anticipate. Pupkin reached the iron door of the bank
safe, and knelt in front of it, feeling in the dark to find the
fracture of the lock. As he knelt, he heard a sound behind him, and
swung round on his knees and saw the bank robber in the half light of
the passage way and the glitter of a pistol in his hand. The rest was
over in an instant. Pupkin heard a voice that was his own, but that
sounded strange and hollow, call out: "Drop that, or I'll fire!" and
then just as he raised his revolver, there came a blinding flash of
light before his eyes, and Peter Pupkin, junior teller of the bank,
fell forward on the floor and knew no more.
At that point, of course, I ought to close down a chapter, or volume,
or, at least, strike the reader over the head with a sandbag to force
him to stop and think. In common fairness one ought to stop here and
count a hundred or get up and walk round a block, or, at any rate,
picture to oneself Peter Pupkin lying on the floor of the bank,
motionless, his arms distended, the revolver still grasped in his
hand. But I must go on.
By half-past seven on the following morning it was known all over
Mariposa that Peter Pupkin the junior teller of the Exchange had been
shot dead by a bank robber in the vault of the building. It was known
also that Gillis, the caretaker, had been shot and killed at the foot
of the stairs, and that the robber had made off with fifty thousand
dollars in currency; that he had left a trail of blood on the
sidewalk and that the men were out tracking him with bloodhounds in
the great swamps to the north of the town.
This, I say, and it is important to note it, was what they knew at
half-past seven. Of course as each hour went past they learned more
and more. At eight o'clock it was known that Pupkin was not dead, but
dangerously wounded in the lungs. At eight-thirty it was known that
he was not shot in the lungs, but that the ball had traversed the pit
of his stomach.
At nine o'clock it was learned that the pit of Pupkin's stomach was
all right, but that the bullet had struck his right ear and carried
it away. Finally it was learned that his ear had not exactly been
carried away, that is, not precisely removed by the bullet, but that
it had grazed Pupkin's head in such a way that it had stunned him,
and if it had been an inch or two more to the left it might have
reached his brain. This, of course, was just as good as being killed
from the point of view of public interest.
Indeed, by nine o'clock Pupkin could be himself seen on the Main
Street with a great bandage sideways on his head, pointing out the
traces of the robber. Gillis, the caretaker, too, it was known by
eight, had not been killed. He had been shot through the brain, but
whether the injury was serious or not was only a matter of
conjecture. In fact, by ten o'clock it was understood that the bullet
from the robber's second shot had grazed the side of the caretaker's
head, but as far as could be known his brain was just as before. I
should add that the first report about the bloodstains and the swamp
and the bloodhounds turned out to be inaccurate. The stains may have
been blood, but as they led to the cellar way of Netley's store they
may have also been molasses, though it was argued, to be sure, that
the robber might well have poured molasses over the bloodstains from
sheer cunning.
It was remembered, too, that there were no bloodhounds in Mariposa,
although, mind you, there are any amount of dogs there.
So you see that by ten o'clock in the morning the whole affair was
settling into the impenetrable mystery which it ever since remained.
Not that there wasn't evidence enough. There was Pupkin's own story
and Gillis's story, and the stories of all the people who had heard
the shots and seen the robber (some said, the bunch of robbers) go
running past (others said, walking past), in the night. Apparently
the robber ran up and down half the streets of Mariposa before he
vanished.
But the stories of Pupkin and Gillis were plain enough. Pupkin
related that he heard sounds in the bank and came downstairs just in
time to see the robber crouching in the passage way, and that the
robber was a large, hulking, villainous looking man, wearing a heavy
coat. Gillis told exactly the same story, having heard the noises at
the same time, except that he first described the robber as a small
thin fellow (peculiarly villainous looking, however, even in the
dark), wearing a short jacket; but on thinking it over, Gillis
realized that he had been wrong about the size of the criminal, and
that he was even bigger, if anything, than what Mr: Pupkin thought.
Gillis had fired at the robber; just at the same moment had Mr.
Pupkin.
Beyond that, all was mystery, absolute and impenetrable.
By eleven o'clock the detectives had come up from the city under
orders from the head of the bank.
I wish you could have seen the two detectives as they moved to and
fro in Mariposa--fine looking, stern, impenetrable men that they
were. They seemed to take in the whole town by instinct and so
quietly. They found their way to Mr. Smith's Hotel just as quietly as
if it wasn't design at all and stood there at the bar, picking up
scraps of conversation--you know the way detectives do it.
Occasionally they allowed one or two bystanders--confederates,
perhaps,--to buy a drink for them, and you could see from the way
they drank it that they were still listening for a clue. If there had
been the faintest clue in Smith's Hotel or in the Mariposa House or
in the Continental, those fellows would have been at it like a flash.
To see them moving round the town that day--silent, massive,
imperturbable--gave one a great idea of their strange, dangerous
calling. They went about the town all day and yet in such a quiet
peculiar way that you couldn't have realized that they were working
at all. They ate their dinner together at Smith's cafe and took an
hour and a half over it to throw people off the scent. Then when they
got them off it, they sat and talked with Josh Smith in the back bar
to keep them off. Mr. Smith seemed to take to them right away. They
were men of his own size, or near it, and anyway hotel men and
detectives have a general affinity and share in the same impenetrable
silence and in their confidential knowledge of the weaknesses of the
public.
Mr. Smith, too, was of great use to the detectives. "Boys," he said,
"I wouldn't ask too close as to what folks was out late at night: in
this town it don't do."
When those two great brains finally left for the city on the
five-thirty, it was hard to realize that behind each grand,
impassible face a perfect vortex of clues was seething.
But if the detectives were heroes, what was Pupkin? Imagine him with
his bandage on his head standing in front of the bank and talking of
the midnight robbery with that peculiar false modesty that only
heroes are entitled to use.
I don't know whether you have ever been a hero, but for sheer
exhilaration there is nothing like it. And for Mr. Pupkin, who had
gone through life thinking himself no good, to be suddenly exalted
into the class of Napoleon Bonaparte and John Maynard and the Charge
of the Light Brigade--oh, it was wonderful. Because Pupkin was a
brave man now and he knew it and acquired with it all the brave man's
modesty. In fact, I believe he was heard to say that he had only done
his duty, and that what he did was what any other man would have
done: though when somebody else said: "That's so, when you come to
think of it," Pupkin turned on him that quiet look of the wounded
hero, bitterer than words.
And if Pupkin had known that all of the afternoon papers in the city
reported him dead, he would have felt more luxurious still.
That afternoon the Mariposa court sat in enquiry,--technically it
was summoned in inquest on the dead robber--though they hadn't found
the body--and it was wonderful to see them lining up the witnesses
and holding cross-examinations. There is something in the
cross-examination of great criminal lawyers like Nivens, of Mariposa,
and in the counter examinations of presiding judges like Pepperleigh
that thrills you to the core with the astuteness of it.
They had Henry Mullins, the manager, on the stand for an hour and a
half, and the excitement was so breathless that you could have heard
a pin drop. Nivens took him on first.
"What is your name?" he said.
"Henry August Mullins."
"What position do you hold?"
"I am manager of the Exchange Bank."
"When were you born?"
"December 30, 1869."
After that, Nivens stood looking quietly at Mullins. You could feel
that he was thinking pretty deeply before he shot the next question
at him.
"Where did you go to school?"
Mullins answered straight off: "The high school down home," and
Nivens thought again for a while and then asked:
"How many boys were at the school?"
"About sixty."
"How many masters?"
"About three."
After that Nivens paused a long while and seemed to be digesting the
evidence, but at last an idea seemed to strike him and he said:
"I understand you were not on the bank premises last night. Where
were you?"
"Down the lake duck shooting."
You should have seen the excitement in the court when Mullins said
this. The judge leaned forward in his chair and broke in at once.
"Did you get any, Harry?" he asked.
"Yes," Mullins said, "about six."
"Where did you get them? What? In the wild rice marsh past the
river? You don't say so! Did you get them on the sit or how?"
All of these questions were fired off at the witness from the court
in a single breath. In fact, it was the knowledge that the first
ducks of the season had been seen in the Ossawippi marsh that led to
the termination of the proceedings before the afternoon was a quarter
over. Mullins and George Duff and half the witnesses were off with
shotguns as soon as the court was cleared.
I may as well state at once that the full story of the robbery of the
bank of Mariposa never came to the light. A number of
arrests--mostly of vagrants and suspicious characters--were made, but
the guilt of the robbery was never brought home to them. One man was
arrested twenty miles away, at the other. end of Missinaba county,
who not only corresponded exactly with the description of the robber,
but, in addition to this, had a wooden leg. Vagrants with one leg
are always regarded with suspicion in places like Mariposa, and
whenever a robbery or a murder happens they are arrested in batches.
It was never even known just how much money was stolen from the bank.
Some people said ten thousand dollars, others more. The bank, no
doubt for business motives, claimed that the contents of the safe
were intact and that the robber had been foiled in his design.
But none of this matters to the exaltation of Mr. Pupkin. Good
fortune, like bad, never comes in small instalments. On that
wonderful day, every good thing happened to Peter Pupkin at once. The
morning saw him a hero. At the sitting of the court, the judge
publicly told him that his conduct was fit to rank among the annals
of the pioneers of Tecumseh Township, and asked him to his house for
supper. At five o'clock he received the telegram of promotion from
the head office that raised his salary to a thousand dollars, and
made him not only a hero but a marriageable man. At six o'clock he
started up to the judge's house with his resolution nerved to the
most momentous step of his life.
His mind was made up.
He would do a thing seldom if ever done in Mariposa. He would propose
to Zena Pepperleigh. In Mariposa this kind of step, I say, is seldom
taken. The course of love runs on and on through all its stages of
tennis playing and dancing and sleigh riding, till by sheer notoriety
of circumstance an understanding is reached. To propose straight out
would be thought priggish and affected and is supposed to belong only
to people in books.
But Pupkin felt that what ordinary people dare not do, heroes are
allowed to attempt. He would propose to Zena, and more than that, he
would tell her in a straight, manly way that he was rich and take the
consequences.
And he did it.
That night on the piazza, where the hammock hangs in the shadow of
the Virginia creeper, he did it. By sheer good luck the judge had
gone indoors to the library, and by a piece of rare good fortune Mrs.
Pepperleigh had gone indoors to the sewing room, and by a happy trick
of coincidence the servant was out and the dog was tied up--in fact,
no such chain of circumstances was ever offered in favour of mortal
man before.
What Zena said--beyond saying yes--I do not know. I am sure that when
Pupkin told her of the money, she bore up as bravely as so fine a
girl as Zena would, and when he spoke of diamonds she said she would
wear them for his sake.
They were saying these things and other things--ever so many other
things--when there was such a roar and a clatter up Oneida Street as
you never heard, and there came bounding up to the house one of the
most marvellous Limousine touring cars that ever drew up at the home
of a judge on a modest salary of three thousand dollars. When it
stopped there sprang from it an excited man in a long sealskin
coat--worn not for the luxury of it at all but from the sheer
chilliness of the autumn evening. And it was, as of course you know,
Pupkin's father. He had seen the news of his son's death in the
evening paper in the city. They drove the car through, so the
chauffeur said, in two hours and a quarter, and behind them there was
to follow a special trainload of detectives and emergency men, but
Pupkin senior had cancelled all that by telegram half way up when he
heard that Peter was still living.
For a moment as his eye rested on young Pupkin you would almost have
imagined, had you not known that he came from the Maritime Provinces,
that there were tears in them and that he was about to hug his son to
his heart. But if he didn't hug Peter to his heart, he certainly did
within a few moments clasp Zena to it, in that fine fatherly way in
which they clasp pretty girls in the Maritime Provinces. The
strangest thing is that Pupkin senior seemed to understand the whole
situation without any explanations at all.
Judge Pepperleigh, I think, would have shaken both of Pupkin senior's
arms off when he saw him; and when you heard them call one another
"Ned" and "Phillip" it made you feel that they were boys again
attending classes together at the old law school in the city.
If Pupkin thought that his father wouldn't make a hit in Mariposa, it
only showed his ignorance. Pupkin senior sat there on the judge's
verandah smoking a corn cob pipe as if he had never heard of Havana
cigars in his life. In the three days that he spent in Mariposa that
autumn, he went in and out of Jeff Thorpe's barber shop and Eliot's
drug store, shot black ducks in the marsh and played poker every
evening at a hundred matches for a cent as if he had never lived any
other life in all his days. They had to send him telegrams enough to
fill a satchel to make him come away.
So Pupkin and Zena in due course of time were married, and went to
live in one of the enchanted houses on the hillside in the newer part
of the town, where you may find them to this day.
You may see Pupkin there at any time cutting enchanted grass on a
little lawn in as gaudy a blazer as ever.
But if you step up to speak to him or walk with him into the
enchanted house, pray modulate your voice a little musical though it
is--for there is said to be an enchanted baby on the premises whose
sleep must not lightly be disturbed.
