This circumstance, slight in itself, seemed to point to the existence of
a certain humor in the man, which might eventually get into literature,
although his wife's lover--a man of quick discernment, whose leg was
broken by the fall--took other views. It was some weeks later, that,
while dining with certain other friends of his wife, he excused
himself from the table to quietly re-appear at the front-window with a
three-quarter inch hydraulic pipe, and a stream of water projected at
the assembled company. An attempt was made to take public cognizance of
this; but a majority of the citizens of Red Dog, who were not at dinner,
decided that a man had a right to choose his own methods of diverting
his company. Nevertheless, there were some hints of his insanity; his
wife recalled other acts clearly attributable to dementia; the crippled
lover argued from his own experience that the integrity of her limbs
could only be secured by leaving her husband's house; and the mortgagee,
fearing a further damage to his property, foreclosed. But here the cause
of all this anxiety took matters into his own hands, and disappeared.

When we next heard from him, he had, in some mysterious way, been
relieved alike of his wife and property, and was living alone
at Rockville fifty miles away, and editing a newspaper. But that
originality he had displayed when dealing with the problems of his own
private life, when applied to politics in the columns of "The Rockville
Vanguard" was singularly unsuccessful. An amusing exaggeration,
purporting to be an exact account of the manner in which the opposing
candidate had murdered his Chinese laundryman, was, I regret to
say, answered only by assault and battery. A gratuitous and purely
imaginative description of a great religious revival in Calaveras, in
which the sheriff of the county--a notoriously profane sceptic--was
alleged to have been the chief exhorter, resulted only in the withdrawal
of the county advertising from the paper. In the midst of this practical