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Thank Heaven, it is over now, and my face is turned the right way. A third little son was born to us. Alice was, oh! so very ill. When she was convalescing she said to me one day: “Hiram, I have been thinking it all over, and I’ve made up my mind that we must name the baby Trask Flail Bisland, after our three good friends.”

I did n’t make any answer, went out into the hall, and communed awhile with my own hideous, tormented self. How my soul revolted against the prospect of giving to that innocent babe a name that would serve simply to scourge me through the rest of my wicked life! No, I could not consent to that. I would be a coward no longer!

I went back into Alice’s room, and sat upon the bed beside her, and took one of Alice’s dear little white hands in mine, and told her everything, told Alice the whole truth,–all about my wickedness and perjuries and deceptions; told her what a selfish, cruel monster I had been; dispelled all the sinful delusion about Flail, Trask, and Bisland; threw myself, penitent and hopeless, upon my deceived, outraged little wife’s mercy. Was it a mean advantage to take of a sick woman?

I fancied she would reproach me, for I knew that her heart was set upon that new house she had talked of so often; I told her that the savings she had supposed were in bank, were in reality represented only by and in those stately folios and sumptuous quartos which the mythical Flail, Trask, and Bisland had presumably donated. “But,” I added, “I shall sell them now, and with the money I shall build the home in which we may be happy again,–a lovely home, sweetheart, with no library at all, but all nursery if you wish it so!”

“No,” said Alice, when I had ended my blubbering confession, “we shall not part with the books; they have caused you more suffering than they have me, and, moreover, their presence will have a beneficial effect upon you. Furthermore, I myself have become attached to them,–you know I thought they were given to you, and so I have learned to care for them. Poor Judge Trask and Colonel Flail and Mr. Bisland,–so they are only myths? Dear Hiram,” she added with a sigh, “I can forgive you for everything except for taking those three good men out of our lives!”

After all this I have indeed reformed. I have actually become prudent, and I have a bank-account that is constantly increasing. I do not hate books; I simply do not buy them. And I eschew that old sinner, Kinzie, and all the sinister influences he represents. As for our third little boy, we have named him Reform Meigs, after Alice’s mother’s grandfather, who built the first saw-mill in what is now the State of Ohio, and was killed by the Indians in 1796.