ZERUB Throop's Experiment; AN AMERICAN YARN.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 129, 18 August 1871, Page 6

ZERUB Throop's Experiment; AN AMERICAN YARN.

(Concluded from our last.)

" They can't eat shingles and timbers, though. 'Taint like little King Boggins." " She has got a roof over her head, however, and it is her own. She has several children." " More. She's got six." " All grown up ?" "Well, the everidge of'em is. Charlotte, she's eleven. Miles Whapshare died ten years ago, and didn't leave much of anything but the old house and the garding and the six children and a mess of old storebooks full of bad debts and tribulations." " Been to school ?" Children? Yes, an' meetin' an* Sunday school, right straight along. John, he's got a place in a store. They're nice folks enough. Mis' Whapshare ain't got much force to her, though." " I should think she had done pretty well under the circumstances." " That's just it. She's a woman that's alwer's been xinder a lot of 'em —clear down. What business do folks have to be under the circumstances, I wonder ? Why don't they get on top of 'em ? What is circumstances made for ?" "To stand round, Sarah," said Mr. Throop, in italics. "If you knew Latin, you'd see. That's what we've got to do do with 'em. Keep 'em in their places. Make 'em stand round !" " Or git" said Sarah, sententiously. Mr. Throop laughed. " Bring me a lemon," he said; and Sarah, having done that, understood that the conversation was at an end, and withdrew, like a circumstance, into the kitchen. The one course over, Zerub went, as was his custom, r up stairs to his wine, his dessert, and his cigar. He never ate pastry. A little fruit was set upon the round table, in his sanctum, also a basket of small sweet biscuits —these more espe- 1 cially for the benefit of the cat, to whom he fed them; besides these, a bottle with cap of tinfoil over the cork, his cigarholder, tray, and match-box. In this company Mr. Throop always read his papers after dinner for an hour. The sat, when she had got biscuits enough, dozed beside him on a soft square sofa-cushion, flung down, for her use, upon the floor. Zerub pulled her ears once in a while, and woke her up to tell her the news, and what he thought about it. j " She knows, and she don't contradict,' said he. To-day, he did not read long. " They'll get into a nice mess in Europe; won't they, Tophet? They've got to, sooner or later; that's what I told the Whapshare woman. The world's never safe from a muddle but when it's just out of one; and, if you can't be safe then for a while, what's the use of the muddle ? Hey, old cat ?"

Tophet rose lazily, stretched out her fore-legs to their farthest possible extent, stretched up her hind ones, lifting her back into a heap, and dropping her neck into a hollow; then gathered herself together again, with raised and vibrant tail, and rubbed and coiled herself round her master's ancles. ,

" I wonder how it would seem to do :t» old cat? I wonder what she would think herself, if I really did? See here now and Mr. Throop drew forth, hia great wallet, and therefrom took a sHp of white paper, such as he kept Teady for bills and receipts. He dipped a pen into an ink-

stand that stood upon the table, and wrote four lines. " That would do it." He was only thinking now, not soliloquising. Mr. Throop never did that foolish thing; he only talked out now and then, in scraps, to the cat. He sat holding that which he had from a queer impulse written, fancying queer what-ifs about it. " That would do it. Give that woman this slip of paper, and it turns her life right over for her, 'tother side up again—the side she hasn't seen for ten, twenty years, perhaps, by that time, no, nor ever; and it alters six lives after hers. "I don't suppose anybody ever wrote exactly such a note as that; couldn't be discounted. It would stand good, though, when the time came. Mrs. Whapshare, two things are between you and this slip of paper—my will, and my life. I can, and I can not. There comes in free agency, and all the rest of it. It is certain that I either shall or shall not turn this freak into fact. Certain somewhere. Where? In time, or Providence? Providence may meddle with such things ; but I never came across Providence amongst 'em, that's all. I have had my way to work up ; and I've been left pretty much to myself; and I've worked it. I'm left to myself now. Am I though ? How do I know ? " See here, what if I do neither ? What if I leave it to Providence to finish it, if it Will?" There was a small blank in one of the four lines. Zerub Throop dipped his pen again, and filled the space with two words. He turned it ovex - , and indorsed it with a date and a sentence. Then he laid down the pen, and sat folding and rolling the paper abstractedly several minutes until he held it in a tight round, like a very small Catherine-wheel, between his finger and his thumb. "Would it ever fire off?" he wondered.

In the same whimsical, half-voluntary way, as if letting his vagary, that he might stop at any point, run on with him, he tore a bit of tinfoil from the sheath that had covered his bottle, and rolled it again,; carefully and compactly, in that. He ! folded and pressed and smoothed the foil; around it, and welded it into a silveryl ball. j " Did you ever see a secret, Tophet P" j he said to the cat. " That's a secret, j That's the sort of thing it is, when you take it out of your mind, and look at it." Then he sat folding it again, amusing I himself so—playing passively, as it were, j with fate and possibility—others' fate that ■ he thought he held first in his own mind • and will, now that he had taken it out, • and looked at it, between his thumb and i finger. j But what was he to do next, or not to ; do, seeing he had given it up to Provi- j dence ? Providence would neither put it by, out of his thumb and finger, nor throw it away. " I won't destroy the thing," he said. " I'll go as far as that, and then it is out of my hands. 111 leave it loose on creation. Things have to go somewhere. What difference will it make to me ?" He laid it out of his fingers, on the table —anywhere, as it happened to fall. " That's all between you and me, Tophet," he said. " Wi —ai—o !" answered the cat. " And—the post, Tophet; you and me and the post. TVhat do people mean by the post ?" Then he took his hat and cane, and went off for his afternoon walk. Zerub Throop was not an ill-souled man; he was only a strange, solitary one grown selfish and one-brained through solitariness, and through having " worked his way up."

Sarah Hand came up stairs, found the | door hooked back that she might enter, earned off the empty bottle, the fruitbasket, and the torn bit of tinfoil that was evidently rubbish, beside it. She picked up the round bright ball, looked at it, turned it over, saw that it was folded, not crumpled, and laid it into the little grooved lid at the top of Mir. Throop's writingdesk, to keep company with an old knife, a bit of sealing-wax, some used pens, and a piece of india-rubber. Sarah Hand never " cleared up ' any thing that could by any possibility ever be called for or thought of again. There were old bits of paper, scribbled with temporary calculations, tucked between the leaves of his blottingbook, thrust into his match-box, and clasped among the notes and scraps in his little gilt finger-clip, that had been dusted over and replaced for month after month, even year after year. So, when Zerub came home, there the secret lay, taken care of by Providence and Sarah Hand. There it continued to lie for several weeks ; till, one day, when he lifted the grooved lid to find something that was underneath, the silvery ball rolled out at the end, and upon the table, and down to the floor. Zerub looked at it. " It's out of my keeping, said he: " I've nothing to do with it." And he let it lie. Sarah Hand picked it up when she swept next day, and dropped it into the bronze mafcli-box, where it fell to the bottom, among some stray tacks and screws and buttons, that were safe there from being lost or wasted, and also from ever being drafted to any earthly use. Zerub did not ask for it, or look for it. It had fairly got beyond his knowledge now, as when one wilfully loses count of some sound or motion one has pained one's self involuntarily in following, and is thankful to let go.

One night, months after, he upset his match-box in the dark. The dust that fell from it got brushed up in the morning, the tacks and screws and buttons put back again, and nobody, of course, thought of or recollected anything more ; until, that same afternoon, sitting with his wine and his paper and his cigar, Zerub saw the cat claw something from under the edge of the low, broad base of his round table, gire it a pat, to try if it had life and fun in it, and send it shining across the floor.

" Why, that s —said Zerub ; but before he came to the exclamation point at the end of his sentence, Tophet was after it again; and a second buffet drove it straight before his eyes to the one possible spot where it could get lost out of that room—down the open lips of the old-fashioned, brass»valved register. " That's all! said Zerub, with a deliberate period. " Nothing is lost while yotf kuow where it is. But it's none of our business ; is it» black cat ?" Thoy two knew; and they never told. Afterwards, Zerub Throop lived on for the space of two years and five months, and gathered to himself his interests and his dividends, and smoked his eigar daily j after his dinner, but he never spoke again | with Miles Wuapshare s widow, or put her name again to any paper that he wrote or caused to be written; and at the end of this time, suddenly, and in the midst of I his strength, he turned away from al* these things, as if he had never striven for or possessed them, and went, as we all go, to " work his way " up farther. After the funeral a strict search was made for old Zerub's will, but no such document could be found. Every hole | and corner, crevice, drawer, and recess in I the sanctum was ransacked, and at length

the little silvery ball was discovered and opened out. The written slip of paper inside made over and conveyed the sum of 28,000 dollars and odds to Widow Whapshare and her children, and thus Provi. dence or chance carried out the experiment of Zerub Throop in the alteration of six lives.