“When you know that the things you remember aren’t there, and other things are, it’s best not to go back. Now, Dr. Russell, tell me, should I tell my girls, and the men that will want to marry them some day, the story that I’ve told you? What do you think?”
“I think,” said father, standing up so that they stood face to face, “that you are a gentleman; that being said is all, and there is my hand upon it. Nine o’clock already; we must be going.”
Tom Scott picked up his ratting bag that held some of his famous traps, and, taking the old card from the shelf, was about to throw it into the fire, then hesitated, and put it back in the case facing his mother’s picture, saying with a smile, half sad, half humorous, “I’m afraid, sir, there’s that about the old business that would make me lonely if I forgot.”
A month later a paragraph appeared in the local papers that read as follows: “Mr. Thomas Scott of our town has made good his promise of ending the scourge of rats, and has turned over the sum of two hundred dollars, he having doubled the amount of the reward offered, to the Bridgeton Hospital.
“There is a pretty little incident connected with this work. Mr. Scott, who has made a fortune in real estate, got his first start by inventing and patenting a particularly clever rat-trap, and it was with some of these traps, put by and almost forgotten, that he has been of so much use to his fellow-townsmen, for which they now take this way of expressing their thanks.”
XII
TRANSITION
DECEMBER—THE MOON OF SNOWSHOES
I
“Good King Wenceslas looked out,