life that key had led in pockets. For many years it had slept under Miss
Orra White's maidenly black alpacas, and had been the token of confinement
and of release to scores of Miss Orra's unruly pupils; then it had had an
interval of dignified leisure, lifted to the level of the Odd Fellows
regalia, and only used by them on rare occasions. For the last ten years,
however, it had done miscellaneous duty as warder of Old Man Wheeler's
lumber-room. If a key could be supposed to peep through a keyhole, and
speculate on the nature of the service it was rendering to humanity, in
keeping safe the contents of the room into which it gazed, this key might
have indulged in fine conjectures, and have passed its lifetime in a state
of chronic bewilderment. Each time that the door of this old storehouse
opened, it opened to admit some new, strange, nondescript article, bearing
no relation to any thing that had preceded it. "Old Man Wheeler" added to
all his other eccentricities a most eccentric way of collecting his debts.
He had dealings of one sort or another with everybody. He drove hard
bargains, and was inexorable as to dates. When a debtor came, pleading for
a short delay on a payment, the old man had but one reply,--

"No, no, no! What yer got? what yer got? Gie me somethin', gie me
somethin'. Settle, settle, settle! Gie me any thin' yer got. Settle,
settle, settle!" The consequences of twenty years' such traffic as this
can more easily be imagined than described. The room was piled from floor
to roof with its miscellaneous collections: junk-shops, pawnbrokers'
cellars, and old women's garrets seemed all to have disgorged themselves
here. A huge stack of calico comforters, their tufts gray with dust and
cobwebs, lay on top of two old ploughs, in one corner: kegs of nails,
boxes of soap, rolls of leather, harnesses stiff and cracking with age,
piles of books, chairs, bedsteads, andirons, tubs, stone ware, crockery
ware, carpets, files of old newspapers, casks, feather-beds, jars of
druggists' medicines, old signboards, rakes, spades, school-desks,--in