Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/144

 He was especially so with the Ruggles family. It was a long way to their house, and he was forbidden to go there; but as it was always possible to say that he had been somewhere else and get himself believed, he went often. He went not only for the sake of being with Alice, but for the sake of hearing her father talk.

Ruggles was an extraordinary man. He had enough income to live on, and he shocked the community in which he lived by refusing to do even a day's work at anything remunerative. He spent about half of his time reading and remembering what he had read, and the rest of his time studying nature in all its phases—including the human ones.

His home stood in the midst of two acres of ground. But instead of planting these grounds so that his neighbors could see into them and even into the windows of his house, he had surrounded them, European fashion, with a high brick wall, massed his planting along the boundaries, and made himself as private as a mouse in its nest.

When you went to call upon the Ruggles family you did not ring the front door-bell. You rang the bell at the front gate. Then while you waited for the Chinaman to come and open the peep-hole in the gate and look to see who you were, you had a chance to look about you and were almost under compulsion to examine the gate itself. This was