Again I experienced the usual relief, and the rosebuds which had so long been covered with dust, opened with blooming freshness. Flanders wrote to me from Pekin. Then my pen fell again. I could not write if he and I were in the same world. I replied to his letter: "Flanders," said I, "come home at once."
I waited two weary months. One night, just as I had lighted my lamp and sat down to dream with De Quincy, Flanders shoved open the door and entered the room. I threw my arms about him and pressed him to me for I loved him.
"Are you glad to see me, Flanders?" I asked, shoving him into an easy seat.
"Delighted," he replied. "What is it you would have me do?"
He looked at me with affection. His eyes were soft and glowing. I reached into my desk and took out a sharp paper-cutter, and, as Flanders was beaming upon me, I stabbed him. He sprang to his feet and threw his arms about me, but I stabbed him again and again. He sank to the floor and I sat down to my work. Oh, how my thoughts flew. With wings that were feathered with silvery down and tipped with gold, they soared higher and higher. I----
"Hold on," said the judge. "I would not have permitted this statement had I not from the first been interested in its very curiousness. You are not charged with the murder of anyone named Flanders. You found a little boy playing among the flowers in a park and slew him."
The prisoner pressed his hands to his head. "Oh," he cried, "if Flanders be not dead I can not write. He would not deprive me of the fame----"
Jasper Hendricks, old man Blue, Abe Stallcup, and several other men, farmers in the neighborhood, sat, one rainy day, about the fireplace in a Tennessee crossroads store. Autumn had just begun to enforce its principles--that is, a lingering mildness of atmosphere had just turned cool enough to shiver a little when the sun had sunk behind the distant timber line. The "evangelist" had made his annual fall visit to the neighborhood, and, assisted by local talent, was holding a revival in Round Pound meeting-house.
The party of men in the store had been discussing the main features of the meeting, and in their crude way had been speculating upon religion in general, when old man Blue, a deacon and an ultra-religionist, remarked: