MR. BILDERBACK LOSES HIS HAT.

“NO,” Mr. Bilderback said, “it wasn’t.” He put it there last night, the last thing before he went to bed, he remembered most distinctly. It wasn’t there now, and he didn’t know who had any business to move it. Somebody had done it, and he hoped to gracious that it would be the last time. Somebody was always meddling with his things.

Mrs. Bilderback, coming down stairs with a weary air, asked if he had looked in the closets?

“Closets?” Mr. Bilderback snarled, “Kingdom of Ireland! Does any sane man put his hat in the closets when he wants it every time he goes out? No. I hung it up right here, on this very hook of this particular rack, and if it had been left alone, it would be there now. Some of you must have moved it. It hasn’t got legs and couldn’t get away alone.”

Master Bilderback suggested that it wouldn’t be very surprising if it felt its way along fur a little ways, for which atrocities he was rewarded with a wild glare and a vicious cuff from his unappreciative parent. Then Mr. Bilderback said, “Well, I suppose I can walk down town bareheaded.”

Well, that was the usual formula. Every body knew just what it meant, and as soon as it was said the family scattered for the regular morning search. Mrs. Bilderback looked in all the closets with the air of John Rogers going to the stake, and then she went into an old chest, that had the furs and things put away in it, and was only opened twice a year, except when Mr. Bilderback’s hat was lost, which occurred on an average three times a day. She shook pepper or fine cut tobacco or camphor out of everything she picked up, and varied her search by the most extraordinary sneezes that ever issued from human throat, while ever and anon she paused to wipe her weeping eyes and say that “well, she never.” Mrs. Bilderback’s search for the lost hat never got beyond that chest. She would kneel down before it and take the things out one by one, and put them back, and take them out, and sneeze and sigh, and wonder occasionally “where the hat could be,” but her search never went beyond that old moth proof chest.

Miss Bilderback confined her search to the uncut pages of the last Scribner, which she carefully cut and looked into, with an eager scrutiny that told how intensely interested she was in finding that hat. She never varied her method of search, save when the approaching footsteps of her father warned her that he was swinging on his erratic eccentric in that direction, when she hid the magazine, and picking up the corner of the piano cover looked under that article with a sweet air of zealous interest, exclaiming in tones of pretty vexation, “I wonder where it can be?” And it was noticeable that this action and remark, both of which she never failed to repeat every time her father came into the room, had the effect of throwing that estimable but irascible old gentleman into paroxysms of the most violent passion, each one growing worse than its predecessors, until they would culminate in a grand burst of wrath in which he ordered her to quit looking for his hat. Then she would retire with an injured air and tell her mother, between that indefatigable searcher’s sneezes, that “one might wear one’s self out slaving and looking for pa’s hat in every conceivable place, and all the thanks one got for it was to be scolded.” Master Bilderback, he helped hunt, too. His system of conducting a search was to go around into the back yard and play “toss ball” up against the end of the house, making mysterious disappearances, with marvelous celerity, behind the wood-pile or under a large store box, so oft as he heard the mutterings of the tempest that invariably preceded and announced his father’s approach.

But Mr. Bilderback. His was a regular old composite system of investigation; it combined and took in everything. He raged through the sitting-room like a hurricane; he looked under every chair in that room, and then upset them all to see if he mightn’t possibly have overlooked the hat. Then he looked on all the brackets in the parlor, and behind the window curtains, and kicked over the ottoman to look for a hat that he couldn’t have squeezed under a wash-tub. And he kept up a running commentary all the time, which served no purpose except to warn his family when he was coming and give them time to prepare. He looked into the clock and left it stopped and standing crooked. And he would like to know who touched that hat. He looked into his daughter’s work-box, a sweet little shell that “George” gave her, and he emptied it out on the table and wondered what such trumpery was for, and who in thunder hid his hat. “It must be hid,” he said. Peering down with a dark, suspicious look into an odor bottle somewhat larger than a thimble, “for it couldn’t have got so completely out of sight by accident.” If people wouldn’t meddle with his things, he howled, for the benefit of Mrs. Bilderback, whom he heard sneezing as he went past the closet door, he would always know just where to find them, because (looking gloomily behind the kitchen wood-box) he always had one place to put all his things (and he took off the lid of the spice-box), and kept them there. He glared savagely out of the door, in hopes of seeing his hopeful son, but that youthful strategist was out of sight behind his intrenchments. Mr. Bilderback wrathfully resumed his search, and roared, for his daughter’s benefit, that he would spend every cent he had intended to lay out for winter bonnets, in new hats for himself, and then maybe he might be able to find one when he wanted it. Then he opened the door of the oven and looked darkly in, turned all the clothes out of the wash-basket, and strewed them around, wondering “who had hid that hat?” And he pulled the clothes-line off its nail, and got down on his hands and knees to look behind the refrigerator, and wondered “who had hid that hat;” and then he climbed on the back of a chair to look on the top shelf of the cupboard, and sneezed around among old wide-mouthed bottles and pungent paper parcels, and wondered in muffled wrath “who had hid that hat?” And he went down into the cellar and roamed around among rows of stone jars covered with plates and tied up with brown paper, and smelling of pickles and things in all stages of progress; every one of which he looked into, and how he did wonder “who had hid that hat.” And he looked into dark corners and swore when he jammed his head against the corners of swinging shelves, and felt along those shelves and run his fingers into all sorts of bowls, containing all sorts of greasy and sticky stuff, and thumped his head against hams hanging from the rafters, at which he swore anew, and he peered into and felt around in barrels which seemed to have nothing in them but cobwebs and nails; shook boxes which were prolific in dust and startling in rats, and he wondered “who had hid that hat?”

And just then loud whoops and shouts came from up stairs, announcing that “here it was.” And old Bilderback went up stairs growling, because the person who hid it hadn’t brought it out before, and saw the entire family pointing out into the back yard, where the hat surmounted Mr. Bilderback’s cane, which was leaning against the fence, “just where you left it, pa,” Miss Bilderback explained, “when we called you into supper, and it has been out there all night.” And Mr. Bilderback, evidently restraining, by a violent effort, an intense desire to bless his daughter with the cane, remarked with a mysterious manner, that “it was mighty singular,” and putting on the hat, he strode away with great dignity; leaving his wife and daughter to re-arrange the house.