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asked.
    “Storm ketched ye, eh?” he greeted me. “Come right in the haouse an’ dry off. Don’t reckon the rain’ll last long naow.”
    I followed him into the inner room from which he had started away, though not before he had carefully bolted and locked the door behind us, a procedure which touched me with a faint unease. He must have seen my look of inquiry, for, once he had set the lamp down on a thick book which lay on a round table in the center of the room to which he led me, he turned and said with a dry chuckle, “This be Wentworth’s day. I thought yew might be Nahum.”
    His chuckle deepened into the ghost of a laugh.
    “No, sir. My name is Fred Hadley. I’m from Boston.”
    “Ain’t never been ta Boston,” said Stark. “Never been as fur as Arkham, even. Got my farm work ta keep me ta home.”
    “I hope you don’t mind. I took the liberty of driving my car into your barn.”
    “The caows won’t mind.” He cackled with laughter at his little joke, for he knew full well that no cow was in the barn. “Wouldn’t drive one a them new-fangled contraptions myself, but yew taown people are all alike. Got ta hev yer automobiles.”
    “I didn’t imagine I looked like a city slicker,” I said, in an attempt to meet his mood.
    “I kin tell a taown man right off—onct in a while we get one movin’ inta the deestrick but they move out suddent; guess they daon’t like it here. Ain’t never been ta no big taown; ain’t sure I want ta go.”
    He rambled on in this fashion for such an interminable time that I was able to look around me and make a kind of inventory of the room. In those years the time I did not spend on the road I put in at the warehouse in Boston, and there were few of us who could be counted better at inventory than myself; so it took me no time at all to see that Amos Stark’s living room was filled with all kinds of things that the antique collectors would pay well to get their hands on. There were pieces of furniture that went back close to two hundred years, if I were any judge, and fine bric-a-brac, whatnots, and some wonderful blown glass and Haviland china on the shelves and on the whatnots. And there were many of the old handiwork pieces of the New England farm of decades before—candle-snuffers, wooden-pegged cork inkwells, candle-molds, a book rest, a turkey-call of leather, pitchpine and tree gum, calabashes, samplers—so that it was plain to see that the house had stood there for many years.
    “Do you live alone, Mr. Stark?” I asked, when I could get a word in.
    “Naow I do, yes. Onct thar was Molly an’ Dewey. Abel went off when he war a boy, an’ Ella died with lung fever. I bin alone naow for nigh on ta seven years.”
    Even as he spoke, I observed about him a waiting, watchful air. He seemed constantly to be listening for some sound above the drumming of the rain. But there was none, save one small crepitant sound, where a mouse gnawed away somewhere in the old house—none but this and the ceaseless rune of the rain. Still he listened, his head cocked a little, his eyes narrowed as if against the glow of the lamp, and his head agleam at the bald crown which was ringed round by a thin, straggly tonsure of white hair. He might have been eighty years old, he might have been only sixty with his narrow, reclusive way of life having prematurely aged him.
    “Ye war alaone on the road?” he asked suddenly.
    “Never met a soul this side of Dunwich. Seventeen miles, I figure.”
    “Give or take a half,” he agreed. Then he began to cackle and chuckle, as with an outburst of mirth that could no longer be held within. “This be Wentworth’s day. Nahum Wentworth.” His eyes narrowed again for a moment. “Yew been a salesman in these parts long naow? Yew must a knowed Nahum Wentworth?”
    “No, sir. I never knew him. I sell mostly in the towns. Just once in a while in the country.”
    “Might’ near everybody knowed Nahum,” he went on. “But thar weren’t