failed to hand out of his window his bootjack, attached to a cord tied to his wrist, by pulling which a neighboring boy, the son of his father's step-brother and his own great crony, was to arouse him at an early hour the following morning to go and examine the traps they had set for minks. So into the depths of the long and narrow closet plunged young Sammy, regarding nothing until reaching the end of the wall of the closet, which unlike the rest of it consisted of upright planks instead of being smoothly plastered.
Here, as he reached up for the bootjack, he discerned a thin streak of light between the planks. He had always supposed that this end wall of the closet was the side of the chimney and that the planks covered the rough stones of the latter. Therefore a light seen behind them at this time of night, after the fires had long been banked, would mean that the chimney was on fire. Rushing down stairs to the kitchen he found that fireplace dark and cheerless. Gazing up the white throat of the open chimney he could look upon a brilliantly star-lit sky. There was neither sight, sound nor smell of fire, and the boy, glad in his heart that he had not made an outcry and aroused his family, tiptoed back to his own room to find that the light had disappeared from the place where he had seen it, but the voices he was sure he still heard at intervals.
After that for many nights he saw and heard nothing. Then came a night when he both saw the light and heard the murmuring voices, and lay and shivered until the morning family came and he found opportunity to question his mother, who could ridicule him into silence but not into distrusting his own senses. After this, not a night passed that Sammy did not examine the closet, and several time he heard a noise as of something passing up and down behind the boards. Finding that there was a knot in one of these, he succeeded in working it out of place and looked, — not into the chimney flue or against its stone, as he expected, but into a closet about two feet square. Peering though a door on one side of this new closet was the silhouetted head of an old man with long white locks. Both of the old man's hands were occupied in pulling up a laden basket, which he presently drew in toward himself, and, closing a door, shut off the light and rendered useless any further prying.
Apparently the children of those days were not only instructed that it was their duty to be seen and not heard, but also were taught to see and hear what they must, but to tell nothing of either, for, with a heart full of mystery he could not explain, little Sammy did not whisper a word of it even to his young crony. But night after night he kept watch, and at last was rewarded by hearing words he could distinguish in a voice which he knew. It was his father who was talking from below with the old man above.
The first thought of a modern boy when he saw the old many pulling up the basket would probably have been of thieves, but with the exception of an occasional hen-roost robbery, or the theft of an ox-chain, or some equally prized utensil, nothing in Hadley had ever been stolen, and Sammy had not once suspected anything so commonplace as thieves. Now he certainly could not do so, because his own father was concerned in whatever the transaction might be.
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