Villages as well as houses have their skeleton cupboards. The Gaylord place was Cyrus' cupboard. Built in the middle of the eighteenth century, it had been inhabited by one generation after another of Gaylords; all people of the same stripe as their neighbors, gentle, cultivated, a little passive, a little inclined to smile and let the world go by. They farmed their wide acres; they loved their books, they caught trout at one season and shot woodcock at another, they spent certain weeks or months in the City. So things went for a hundred years and more. Then one Gaylord, more enterprising than his forebears, made money: copper, I think it was, in the early Calumet days. The money did him no special harm. He refurnished the house rather more splendidly than Cyrus thought in quite good taste, but his wife came from the City, and what could one expect? He bought a good many books, and some pictures, and enjoyed himself immensely: then he died, a few weeks after his City wife, and their son inherited. Kitty and I were babies when Russell Gaylord was running his race to perdition. In our childhood we used to hear a good deal about him; never from our parents, nor from Sarepta Darwin, but I am afraid we did listen to Cissy Sharpe, who knew all about it, or thought she did. He threw the money right and left. He drove four-in-hand through Cyrus streets with his college mates, to the scandal of the community; he held revels in the old house, with a hundred wax candles in each room, and flowers and music such as had never been dreamed of in the quiet village. People shook their heads, but indulgently: they were proud of the handsome, open-hearted boy. He had such pleasant ways! He loved to put a dime in the contribution box at church, and then slyly, after service, to pile it high with anonymous gold pieces. He loved to send preposterous Christmas boxes to everybody he knew, and to pile up loads of wood by night in lean woodsheds. People said he would learn in time; his heart was in the right place. He was the most brilliant scholar in his class, could stand at the head if he would only study; when he had sown his wild oats, he would settle down in Cyrus and be a credit to all. Even when he ran over their dogs and in a tipsy frolic smashed the post office windows, they forgave him and loved him. He was a Gaylord, and could not really do anything much out of the way. Then came the crash. A riotous houseparty of men from the City (poor City! it had to bear the sins of many a village like Cyrus!); a quarrel over the gaming table; an insult; a blow, a knife-thrust; a young man slain in his folly, and blood on Russell Gaylord's white hands.