"But I haven't got any money," said the ghost.
"Can't help that," said the boy. "You give me fifty cents, or else take your umbrella back again. We don't do any work in our office for nothing."
Well, the end of it all was that the ghost left the umbrella with the boy, and the next night he came back with the money, though where he got it nobody will ever know. The boy kept the money, and threw the umbrella away, for he was a real bad boy, and only made believe that he was going to find the owner, and the ghost was never seen again.
But I haven't told about the trouble with Aunt Eliza yet. The day she came to our house mother bought a lot of live crabs from a man, and put them in a pail in the kitchen. Tom McGinnis was spending the day with me, and I said to him what fun it would be to have crab races, such as we used to have down at the sea-shore last summer. He said wouldn't it, though; so each of us took three crabs, and went up-stairs into the spare bedroom, where we could be sure of not being disturbed. We had a splendid time with the crabs, and I won more than half the races. All of a sudden I heard mother calling me, and Tom and I just dropped the crabs into an empty work-basket, and pushed it under the sofa out of sight, and then went down-stairs.
I meant to get the crabs and take them back to the kitchen again, but I forgot all about it, for Aunt Eliza came just after mother had called me, and everybody was busy talking to her. Of course she was put into the spare room, and as she was very tired, she said she'd lie down on the sofa until dinner-time and take her hair down.
HE PINCHED JUST AS HARD AS HE COULD PINCH.
About an hour afterwards we heard the most dreadful cries from Aunt Eliza's room, and everybody rushed up-stairs, because they thought she must certainly be dead. Mother opened the door, and we all went in. Aunt Eliza was standing in the middle of the floor, and jumping up and down, and crying and shrieking at the top of her voice. One crab was hanging on to one of her fingers, and he pinched just as hard as he could pinch, and there were two more hanging on to the ends of her hair. You see, the crabs had got out of the work-basket, and some of them had climbed up the sofa while Aunt Eliza was asleep.