him ask many questions of his mother, but none of her answers brought death any closer to his mind.  After all, the old lady had been nothing to him, and if the parties should cease as he heard was likely, the loss did not seem great to him.  The only thing that made a real difference to him was his discovery that there would be no more of those ball-shaped gingersnaps that the old lady used to bake herself and keep in an earthen jar almost as tall as Keith.

The front part of the ground floor was used as an office of some kind in those early days, but the middle part facing the long row of outhouses was a human habitation.  The rooms were so dark that a lamp had to be used most of the day, and the principal entrance was direct from the courtyard.  An old workman and his wife lived there until the office in front was changed into a coffee-house and those rooms toward the courtyard became the kitchen.  When it happened, some one told Keith’s mother a story which she in her turn conveyed to the boy.

History repeated itself, she said, and Keith already knew that history was something that had happened before he was born.  One hundred years ago, when Gustavus III was king of Sweden and things were more exciting than in these later days of outward and inward peace, there used also to be a coffee-house on the ground floor, and a widely known one at that.  It occupied the floor above too, but this floor was in reality used as a club, and the club was political and the men who frequented it were conspiring against the government.  This the police knew, and every so often a lot of armed and uniformed men would surround the house and make prisoners of those caught in the clubrooms on the second floor.  But as a rule no one was found there but a couple of sleepy and grouchy attendants who cursed their luck at having to spend their lives in such a dull place.

“But,” Keith interrupted when the story got that far “you just told me that the rooms had a lot of conspirators in them.”

“So they had.”

“And yet they were empty when the police came there?  Do you really mean that the people could make themselves invisible?”

“That’s where the real story comes in,” his mother explained.  “You know there is a long passageway between the front rooms of the Fernbloms and their kitchen in the rear.  It runs back of the stairs.  The next time you go through it, stamp your foot very hard, and you will hear that it sounds hollow in one place.  At that spot there used to be a trap door in the floor.  Now it is nailed down hard, but in the old days it could be opened any time, and then you found a stairway below.  It led into our part of the cellar, where you still can find a couple of stone steps at one end.  Then the conspirators went down into the main cellar, and at the back of it there was a tunnel leading under the rear part of the house and the lane beyond to a house on the other side.  That’s the way they escaped, and that’s why the police never found anybody in the club.”