Yes, Mr. Keesler told me the story, virtually in confession. It is a queer story, and I was somewhat at loss as to the counsel I was to give him. So I take the gentle reader into my confidence and his. I may as well say, as I begin, that it was not in Boston or in Brooklyn or in New York that this happened. The place was a sea-board town, where most of the people lived in a pretty suburb, but came into the old compact city for their work and for their amusements. CHAPTER I. THE PAINT-SHOP. "It all began with the paint-shop," he said. I knew that "the dumb man's borders still increase," so I asked no question what the paint-shop was, and by listening I learned. "The paint-shop was in the garden of the little house Bertha and I had hired just after Elaine was born. When the agent gave me the keys, he said, 'There is a paint-shop in the garden, but you can make that useful for something.'" So, indeed, it proved. Max Keesler and Bertha Keesler did make the paint-shop good for something, as you shall see, if you dare keep on with the story. But he never thought of it at the beginning. Max had married Bertha, prudently or imprudently, as you may think--prudently, I think--just because he loved her and she loved him. They were not quite penniless; they were not at all penniless. He had two or three thousand dollars in the savings-bank, and she had rather more in bonds. Max had a good berth, the day he was married, in a piano-forte factory. He earned his twenty-five dollars a week, with a good chance to earn more. I do not think they were imprudent at all. But while they were on their wedding journey a panic began. Max always remembered afterward that he read of the first gust of misfortune in a Tribune which he bought in the train as they came from Niagara. That was the first gust, but by no means the last. The last? I should think not. Gusts, blasts, hurricanes, and typhoons came. Half the business establishments of the country went to the bottom of the oceans they were cruising on, and among the rest poor Max's own piano-forte factory. Nay, it seemed to Max that every other piano factory he ever heard of had gone under, or was likely to. So that when the little Elaine was born, and they wanted to leave the boarding-house, which they hated, Max was out of work, and they were as economical as they could be. Still they determined that they would hire rooms somewhere, and keep house. Bertha knew she could manage better than that odious Mrs. Odonto, who polished their teeth so with her horrid steaks. And it ended in their hiring--dog-cheap, because times were so bad--this tumble-down old house on the corner of Madison Avenue and Sprigg Court, which, as you know, had a paint-shop in the garden.