"Of course; let us hear it."
"I'm going to call it 'The Fate of Young Chubb.' I expect it'll make old Cooley mad as fury when he sees it. It is founded upon the catastrophe of which his boy was the victim."
The Fate of Young Chubb.
When Mr. Chubb, the elder, returned from Europe, he brought with him from Geneva a miniature musical box, long and very narrow, and altogether of hardly greater dimensions, say, than a large pocket-knife. The instrument played four cheerful little tunes for the benefit of the Chubb family, and they enjoyed it. Young Henry Chubb enjoyed it to such an extent that, one day, just after the machine had been wound up ready for action, he got to sucking the end of it, and in a moment of inadvertence it slipped, and he swallowed it. The only immediate consequence of the accident was that a harmonic stomach-ache was organized upon the interior of Henry Chubb, and he experienced a restlessness which he well knew would defy peppermint and paregoric.
Henry Chubb kept his secret in his own soul, and in his stomach also, determined to hide his misery from his father, and to spare the rod to the spoiled child—spoiled, at any rate, as far as his digestive apparatus was concerned.
But that evening, at the supper-table, Henry had eaten but one mouthful of bread when strains of wild, mysterious music were suddenly wafted from under the table. The family immediately made an effort to discover whence the sounds came, although Henry Chubb sat there filled with agony and remorse and bread and tunes, and desperately asserted his belief that the music came from the cellar, where the servant-girl was concealed with a harp. He well knew that Mary Ann was unfamiliar with the harp. But he was frantic with anxiety to hide his guilt. Thus it is that one crime leads to another.
