This resolution Alderwood opposed with all his might, being concerned lest such an enterprise as writing a book should divert my mind from the labours of the farm, and, indeed, seduce me again into habits of idleness. Besides, he was afraid the strangeness of my adventures would cause them to be received with incredulity, whereby I might suffer in reputation, and be looked upon only as a dreamer and teller of falsehoods. His chief reasons, however, I doubt not, were the two first mentioned; for he was anxious I should now think of nothing but my farm. His dislike to my design was, in truth, so great, that, having exhausted all the arguments he could muster in the vain design to overcome it, he had resort to a new mode of opposition, an expedient highly ingenious, but not a little ridiculous. He endeavoured to shake my own faith in my story!--to convince me that I had imagined all I have related, and that, in a word, I had never encountered any adventures at all. I protest I am diverted to this day when I think of the mingled anxiety and address which he displayed on the occasion. He assured me, and that quite plumply, that during the whole two years (to speak strictly, it was only twenty months) of my wanderings, I had never once been off the forty-acre farm; that I had never been in any body besides my own; and that the whole source of the notion on my part lay in a hallucination of mind which had suddenly attacked me, filling me with ridiculous conceits of various transformations, such as never had happened, and never could happen, to any human being. And this absurd account he persisted in as long as he could with any decency, giving me repeated hints that my mother had died insane, and that it was not therefore strange _I_ should have been a little odd once in my life. I showed him the place where I had been digging under the beech-tree (where, by-the-way, I was weak enough afterward to make Jim Jumble sink a pit twelve feet deep, to satisfy myself that Captain Kid's money really did _not_ lie there); which place, however, he averred was as great a proof of the truth of his story as of mine: "For," said he, "none but a madman would dig for Captain Kid's money." I led him to the willow-bushes, and the old worm fence in the marsh, where I had found Squire Higginson's body; which he allowed I might have done, but protested that other persons had found it also; and that instead of going home alive in Squire Higginson's barouche, it had been carried to Philadelphia in a coffin; and as for Higginson's being clapped into prison for my murder, it was _I_, he said who had been confined on suspicion of having been concerned in _his_, until, as he said, it was found that I was out of my wits, and that Higginson had died of an apoplexy.