“Not with a knife,” repeated Mr. Gooley. And a large cockroach, which had been crawling along the footpiece of the old-fashioned wooden bed, stopped crawling at the words as if it understood, and turned about and looked at him. Mr. Gooley wondered painfully, for it was a pain even to wonder about anything, why this cockroach should remind him of somebody who was somehow connected with a knife, and not unpleasantly connected with a knife. The cockroach stood up on the hindmost pair of his six legs, and seemed to put his head on one side and motion with his front legs at Mr. Gooley. “I get you,” said Mr. Gooley, conscious that his mind was wandering from the point, and willing to let it wander. “I know who you are! You were Old Man Archibald Hammil, the hardware merchant back in Mapletown, where I was a kid, before you dried up and turned into a cockroach.” And Mr. Gooley wept a few weak tears. For old Archibald Hammil, the village hardware merchant, had sold him the first knife he had ever owned. His father had taken him into Hammil's store to buy it on his seventh birthday, for a present, and it had had a buckhorn handle and two blades. Again he saw Old Man Hammil in his dingy brown clothes, looking at him, with his head on one side, as this cockroach was doing. Again he felt his father pat him on the head, and heard him say always to remember to whittle _away_ from himself, never _toward_ himself. And he saw himself, shy and flushed and eager, a freckle-faced boy as good and as bad as most boys, looking up at his father and wriggling and wanting to thank him, and not knowing how. That was nearly forty years ago--and here he was, a failure and starving and------ _Why_ had he wanted a knife? Yes, he remembered now! To kill himself with. “It's none of your damned business, Old Man Hammil,” he said to the cockroach, which was crawling back and forth on the footboard, and pausing every now and then to look at him with disapproval. Old Man Hammil had had ropes in his store, too, and guns and pistols, he remembered. He hadn't thought of Old Man Hammi's store in many years; but now he saw it, and the village street outside it, and the place where the stores left off on the street and the residences began, and berry bushes, and orchards, and clover in the grass--the random bloom, the little creek that bounded the town, and beyond the creek the open country with its waving fields of oats and rye and com. His head hurt him worse. He would go right back into Old Man Hammil's store and get a rope or a gun and end that pain. But _that_ was foolish, too. There wasn't any store. There was only Old Man Hammil here, shrunk to the size of a cockroach, in his rusty brown suit, looking at him from the footboard of the bed and telling him in pantomime not to kill himself. “I will too!” cried Mr. Gooley to Old Man Hammil. And he repeated, “It's none of _your_ damned business!”