Thingumajig’s favor.” * * * * * “But,” said I, “when you had met Mr. Thingumajig and became possessed of the plot, why didn’t you come back here and tell all about it, and clear up poor Silo?” [Illustration] The Doctor looked at me pityingly, almost contemptuously. “My dear fellow,” he said, as if he were talking to a child, “what was my word to those pink pants? I tried it on, until I found that people simply began to suspect me, and to think that I might be Silo’s accomplice in iniquity. There wasn’t the least use in it. If I talked to a man, he would hear me through; and then he would wag his head and say, ‘That’s all very well; but how about those pink pants? If there weren’t any pink pants how did they come to be mentioned?’ And that was the way everywhere. I could explain all about poor Silo’s foolish little lie, and they would say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s possible; a man might lie about a hank of wool if he had the kind of wife Silo’s got; but how about those pink pants?’ And when it wasn’t _those_ pink pants, it was _them_ pink pants. And after a while I gave it up. Silo had got to drinking pretty hard by that time, in order to drown his miseries; and of course that only confirmed the earlier scandal. Now, Silo never was a man that could drink; it never did agree with him, and he has got so wild recently that Mrs. Silo has her two brothers take turns to come out here and try to control him. Of course that makes him all the wilder.” At the end of Main Street I parted from my friend, the Doctor, and shortly I crossed the pathway of another citizen who had seen the two of us bidding good-by. “He’s a nice man, the Doctor is,” said the citizen; “but the trouble with him is, he’s altogether too credulous and sympathetic. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been making some defense to you of the goings on of that man Silo. He’s a sort of addled on that subject. May be it’s just pure charity, of course; and may be, equally, he was in with Silo when Silo wasn’t so openly disgraceful; but if you want to know what that man Silo is, I’ll tell you. The people around here, sir--the people who ought to know--do you know what they call him, sir? Well, sir, they call him, ‘The Man with the Pink Pants.’ And do you suppose for one minute, sir, that a man gets a name fixed on him like that without he’s deserved it? No, sir; your friend there is a good man, and a charitable man, but as for judgement of character, he ain’t got it. And if you’re a friend of his, you’ll tell him that the less he has to say about ‘The Man with the Pink Pants’--the better for _him_.” [Illustration] THE THIRD FIGURE IN THE COTILLION.