PART ONE
I wonder—has any one ever made a psychoanalytical study of the habits of the Match-box family?
By Match-box family I mean the yellow and black, self-sufficient variety that arrive from the grocer in packages of a dozen and are at once torn apart and distributed (like kittens or missionaries) to every point of the compass.
Each box has its own special territory, and there it should stand, ready to the last match for any sudden emergency, such as the re-animation of the just-gone-out pipe, or the finding of the eyeglasses in the dark that their owner may be able to read the time on his radium-faced wrist-watch, or a thousand and one things.
There are indeed a thousand and one good and sufficient reasons (apart from its being its plain duty) why a match-box should always be on the job, and like the thousand and one cures for rheumatism not one of them (unless it be a horse-chestnut in the pocket) can be relied upon to work.
I sometimes think “a thousand and one” must be an unlucky number.
The greater the need of its services the less likely is the match-box to be in that particular place where any number of witnesses will testify upon oath they had seen it only a moment before.
What is the strikeology of it? Have match-boxes that perverted sense of humor that finds expression in practical jokes? No, it is nothing like that. Would that it were! It is something less easy to explain. It is something sinister—something rather frightening.
. . . .
I am a devout reader of detective stories and with much study of their methods have come to regard myself as something of a sleuth, in a purely theoretic way of course; nevertheless I have always hoped some day to put my theories to the test, and here was the chance. I would find out where the match-boxes go, I would follow their trail to the bitter end, even if it led to the door of the White House itself!
. . . .
First I made a careful blue-print plan of the flat in which I (and the match-boxes) live, marking plainly in red ink all the doors, windows, fire-escapes (fire-escapes are most important); dumbwaiters, closets, trapdoors (there weren’t any but I put them in to make it more professional); then—but why go into all the thousand and—there’s that unlucky number again—the thousand and two minute and uninteresting details? You would only skip them and turn to the last paragraph to end the horrible suspense and learn at once what I discovered. * * *