I had my first hint that all was not well when we passed the hole-in-the-wall that had, during my childhood, been a combined tobacco and sweet shop. It had an already weather-beaten sign over the door--"HOBBS--FLORIST"--and busy about the front of the shop was a familiar figure in the normal costume of a respectable upstate female. Jim cast a glance over his shoulder at my question. "Her? That's Abigail Jones; tends for old Hobbs." He spat accurately at the iron hitching post in front of the First National Bank. Now I know Jim Selford. The boys I cronied with had spent a good deal of their time around his livery stable, and our own yard had backed up on his. There had been certain disagreements about the uses to which his pears should be put, if I remember. At any rate, I knew he was holding something back. "How is Professor Hobbs?" I inquired innocently. "I suppose he's one of the city fathers by now." * * * * * Jim looked at me with suspicion, but I kept an impassive face. He uncrossed his legs, crossed them again, picked up the whip and gave the bay mare a cut across the rump that made her jump. "Geeup!" he answered. I recognized the gambit. I must give before I would get. "Has he had any luck with the plants I sent him from abroad?" I asked. "There were some very rare ones that you won't find in any of the big botanical gardens. If he can grow them here, it ought to put Springville on the map." That did it. Jim planted both feet with a clump and twisted the reins around the whip. He spat his quid into the gutter, dusted off the plug, and cut a new chaw. Then he turned on me. "You're into it too, are you? Might of knowed! If there was ever a worse show an' hullabaloo than that old fool has raised I never seen it. If I was the Widder Jones I'd starve afore I'd leave my daughter tend shop for the kind he is. Batty--that's what's wrong with him! Crazy as a coot! And dangerous! Them damn flowers! Ptah!" Then he closed up like a clam. I got not one word more out of him until we pulled up in front of my uncle's house, now mine. Then: "Go on up there," he said. "See for yourself. Giddap!" Which, of course, is exactly what I did. Of all my old friends and cronies, Melchizedek Hobbs was the one to whom I had been closest. Jeremiah Jones had written me a few times from Chicago, where he was with some firm of chemists, and I gathered that Sydney Smythe was enjoying the spoils of aristocracy as cashier of his father's bank, but I was not anxious to see Sydney. The others had scattered or married and settled down, and I doubted that they would have much in common with footloose Jamie Abercrombie, who had too much money for his own good and had just inherited another slice that he hadn't earned.