he did cook is a mystery to me. And yet I never saw him stagger greatly, and his speech, though thick, was al- ways rational. "Through that time the jug remained in the woodbox in his living-room. Every time I came into his house I looked at it, but it always appeared pretty inanimate to me. I mentioned this several times. " 'He's gone back to sleep,' Fother- gill, on these occasions, told me impa- tiently. 'The only thing that really seems to wake him up is a good scorch- ing. Then he jigs around for five or six hours before he quiets down. I've been leaving him alone.' " 'You'd better leave him alone for good,' I suggested. "You'd better bury him out in the lot and forget about him.' " 'Yes, I guess I'll do just that,' Fothergill assented. But the days passed, and the jug still remained where it was.

Then one day — it was the tenth of August — he abruptly announced that he'd decided to return immediately to England. 'If I stay around here any longer I'll degenerate into a common drunkard,' he told me, and I agreed with him. 'Now, look,' he proposed, 'I'm sailing at midnight on the twelfth. I've a case of champagne home — no bootleg stuff; you come over around seven tomorrow night and we'll have a real bang-up farewell party.' "I accepted, with genuine pleasure and considerable relief. I couldn't re- sist asking him, though, 'What are you going to do with that jug of yours?' "He laughed. 'I've already dug a six-foot hole out behind the barn, and tomorrow morning I'm going to plant the damned thing and forget about it.* '-After a little while he went home. "I never saw him alive again. . . . "I puttered around until after mid- night that night, and after I finally did get to bed I slept like a log. It seemed as though I'd only been asleep an in- stant when the telephone's ringing woke me. I switched on the bed-lamp and looked at the clock. It was almost half- past two. I came wide awake at once; I was certain that it was New York calling. "But it wasn't New York; it was Fothergill, drunker than a lord, so drunk that his voice kept alternately roaring in my ears and then fading away as he fumbled with the tele- phone. He was in a mood of crazy exuberance. "'Hups! — you old sawbones!' he bellowed — 'did I wake y'up? Shorry — Hip! — Hip! — get your clothes on an' come over an' see th' show ! I've got ol' typhoon in his jug wired up — urrupp ! — Pardon me — -in the fire- place, an' I'm toastin' the livin' day- lights out of him ! I'll show him who's king! Right now the plug's drippin' out of his jug like maple syrup out of a spigot!' " 'You crazy drunk!' I yelled into the phone — and I was so angry at him that I was practically inarticulate. 'You cut out your monkey business and get into bed before you have an embolism and maybe die right there !" "The telephone was silent for a moment, and I could picture Fother- gill in my mind's eye — sitting swaying back and forth in his big chair before his fireplace (the fire blazing there be- fore his liquor-inflamed eyes) with the telephone held loosely in his fum- bling hands. Then he chuckled drunk- enly. " —— drippin' out of his jug like — aahhnnnnn !' "That sob — his sob — came totally