The prisoner protested that the carpenter was mistaken, that he was, indeed, the night watchman, and that he was entitled to "the kind lady's protection."
The fellow's voice sounded familiar and I recognized his form and face. Yes, there could be no mistake; I had seen and dealt with this person before.
"My friends," said I, addressing Alice and her carpenter and the crowd of neighbors that had assembled, "you are right, and yet you are wrong. I know this man, and I identify him as the base ingrate who stole my new wheelbarrow and my garden utensils. Your name, sir," I continued, sternly, transfixing the quaking wretch with a glance of commingled anger and scorn, "your name is Percival Wax!"
XXIV
DRIVEWAYS AND WALL-PAPERS
Had we been so disposed we could have given the wretched Percival Wax a great deal of trouble. Lawyer Miles was anxious to prosecute the fellow, and I dare say he felt that he had missed the greatest opportunity of his life when Alice and I concluded to let the matter drop. We were moved to this decision by the consideration that, while we owed Percival Wax only our resentment and vengeance, a prosecution of him for his numerous misdemeanors would put us to no end of trouble. The exposure and punishment of vice would doubtless prove much more popular among the virtuous, did not these proceedings involve so great an expenditure both of time and of labor. Alice and I were not long in making up our minds that we had plenty of other unavoidable troubles to engage our attention; so we let the tramp go, but not, however, until I had lectured him seriously upon the propriety of his abandoning his evil ways and until Alice had given him a clean shirt and an old pair of shoes with which to start out afresh upon the pathway of reform, which he solemnly promised to follow.
If you have ever passed the old Schmittheimer place—and doubtless you have, for it is the pride and ornament of a most aristocratic section—you must have noticed the roadway that leads from the street to the residence that looms up majestically two hundred feet back from the street. Perhaps you have wondered why grounds in other respects so attractive should be defaced by a feature so unsightly and so impracticable as this identical roadway.
And yet, as I told Alice, this roadway was actually the most natural feature of the place; there was absolutely no touch of artificiality about it; it was originally a stretch of sand, and such it had remained from time immemorial, by which I mean from that remote date—presumably eighteen centuries ago—when the receding waters of Lake Michigan left the spot subsequently to be known as the old Schmittheimer place high and dry in section 5, range 16, township 3. The genius of man had wrought wondrous and beautiful changes elsewhere, converting marshes into boulevards and transforming sandy wastes into blooming gardens; but never had it expended a touch or a thought upon that bald prehistoric streak which served as a driveway for all vehicles that dared invade the old Schmittheimer place.
How many vehicles had in the lapse of years been hopelessly maimed or totally wrecked while trying to traverse that roadway I shall not presume to say, for as a man of science I glory in exactness and I eschew surmise. This much I know, for I have seen it time and again during the last four months: nothing that moves on wheels has ventured upon that roadway that it did not sink slowly but surely up to the hubs of its wheels in the unresisting sand. The Pusheck grocery cart broke a spring the first time it drove in, and the wagon that hauled the steam fixtures was stalled for three hours in one of those treacherous depressions in which the roadway abounds, depressions which, as I am told, are known to dwellers in hilly country places as "thank-ye-marms."