Father and son still owned the Berners merchandising establishment although they seemed to give it little attention. What a place it was! Some ten years before I made his acquaintance the younger Berners, named Alonzo, had gone to Chicago where he had got quite hopelessly drunk. During his whole life the man had been a sufferer from some obscure nervous disease and was never without pain. The sprees he sometimes went on were but a kind of desperate attempt to free himself for a short time from the presence of pain. After the drunken time he was dreadfully ill and seemed about to die and then there came a time of weakness and a kind of physical peace. The tense nerves of his slender body relaxed, he slept at night and spent the days talking with a few friends, reading books or riding about town in a buggy. On the sprees, of ten years before, sprees indulged in twice a year at regular intervals outside his own town, when he had stolen away without warning to his father or to an older sister of the household, young Alonzo had been picked up in the city of Chicago by an English deep-sea sailor. The sailor had been working for a time on a lake steamer but had tired of the place and had left his ship at Chicago and had also gone on a drunk. He rescued Alonzo Berners from the men into whose hands he had fallen and brought him home and later became attached to the Berners establishment, staying in the Illinois town at first as clerk in the store and later as the store’s manager. He was a heavily built man of fifty-five when I saw him and had a white scar, evidently from an old knife wound, on his brown cheek and a peculiar waddling gait. As he hustled about the store one thought of a fat duck trying to make its way rapidly along on land. In the Berners establishment were sold hardware, agricultural implements, house and barn paints, jack-knives and a thousand other things and there was also a harness shop in the main building facing the town’s principal street. Back of the main building there was an alleyway and across the alleyway half a dozen large frame buildings in which were kept hides bought from the farmers, coal, lumber, bins of corn, wheat and oats in bags and hay in bales.