In the house adjoining the one in which he resided, there lived a stout little man, a shoemaker, famous in the village for his great wit and his very considerable knavery. His jokes were mostly practical, and some of the best of them exceedingly akin to felonies. Poor Wood could not understand his wit, but, in his simplicity of heart, he deemed him honest, and would fain have prevailed on the neighbours to think so too. He knew it, he said, by his very look. Their gardens, like their houses, lay contiguous, and were separated from each other, not by a fence, but by four undressed stones laid in a line. Year after year was the garden of Wood becoming less productive; and he had a strange misgiving, but the thing was too absurd to be spoken of, that it was growing smaller every season by the breadth of a whole row of cabbages. On the one side, however, were the back walls of his own and his neighbour’s tenements; the four large stones stretched along the other; and nothing, surely, could be less likely than that either the stones or the houses should take it into their heads to rob him of his property. But the more he strove to exclude the idea the more it pressed upon him. He measured and remeasured to convince himself that it was a false one, and found that he had fallen on just the means of establishing its truth. The garden was actually growing smaller. But how? Just because it was bewitched! It was shrinking into itself under the force of some potent enchantment, like a piece of plaiding in the fulling-mill. No hypothesis could be more congenial; and he would have held by it, perhaps, until his dying day, had it not been struck down by one of those chance discoveries which destroy so many beautiful systems and spoil so much ingenious philosophy, quite in the way that Newton’s apple struck down the vortices of Descartes.