I wonder—has any one ever made a psychoanalytical study of the habits of the Match-box family?

By Match-box family I mean the yellow and black, self-sufficient variety that arrive from the grocer in packages of a dozen and are at once torn apart and distributed (like kittens or missionaries) to every point of the compass.

Each box has its own special territory, and there it should stand, ready to the last match for any sudden emergency, such as the re-animation of the just-gone-out pipe, or the finding of the eyeglasses in the dark that their owner may be able to read the time on his radium-faced wrist-watch, or a thousand and one things.

There are indeed a thousand and one good and sufficient reasons (apart from its being its plain duty) why a match-box should always be on the job, and like the thousand and one cures for rheumatism not one of them (unless it be a horse-chestnut in the pocket) can be relied upon to work.

I sometimes think “a thousand and one” must be an unlucky number.

The greater the need of its services the less likely is the match-box to be in that particular place where any number of witnesses will testify upon oath they had seen it only a moment before.

What is the strikeology of it? Have match-boxes that perverted sense of humor that finds expression in practical jokes? No, it is nothing like that. Would that it were! It is something less easy to explain. It is something sinister—something rather frightening.

I am a devout reader of detective stories and with much study of their methods have come to regard myself as something of a sleuth, in a purely theoretic way of course; nevertheless I have always hoped some day to put my theories to the test, and here was the chance. I would find out where the match-boxes go, I would follow their trail to the bitter end, even if it led to the door of the White House itself!

First I made a careful blue-print plan of the flat in which I (and the match-boxes) live, marking plainly in red ink all the doors, windows, fire-escapes (fire-escapes are most important); dumbwaiters, closets, trapdoors (there weren’t any but I put them in to make it more professional); then—but why go into all the thousand and—there’s that unlucky number again—the thousand and two minute and uninteresting details? You would only skip them and turn to the last paragraph to end the horrible suspense and learn at once what I discovered. * * *

PART TWO

What can have become of them! I have searched every corner of every room in the house—Stay! There is one room I have overlooked—the Haunted Room in the West Corridor, haunted by the ghosts of dead cigarettes, unfinished poems and murdered ideas. It is my study (or studio, as the occasion may be). With trembling hand on the porcelain door-knob, I pause to recall the secret combination.

In vain I rack my brain to remember the secret combination of my study door. Then suddenly it flashes upon me that long ago I wrote it down in the address book I carried in my pocket.

There are twelve pockets in the suit I am wearing. Fearfully I go through the twelve pockets and many are the lost treasures and forgotten-to-mail letters I find, but no Address Book! Wait! there is still another pocket! One I never use—THE THIRTEENTH POCKET!

With the deliberation of despair I empty the Thirteenth Pocket of its contents—a broken cigarette, two amalgamated postage stamps, a device for cleaning pipe bowls, some box-checks for The Famous Mrs. Fair, four rubber bands, a fragment of an Erie time-table and—the Address Book!

On the last page of the Address Book is the Combination, written in a pale Greek cipher, but still legible, grasping the porcelain door-knob firmly between my thumb and four fingers I scan the cipher eagerly. De-coded, it reads as follows—Twist knob to the right as far as possible and push door.

With heart beating like a typewriter I obeyed the directions to the letter, and to my intense relief the door yielded and in another moment I was in the room!

And there, scattered over the surface of my desk like surprised conspirators, feigning ignorance of one another’s presence, were twelve yellow Match-boxes!

How they mastered the combination of the door and got into the room, I shall not attempt to explain. I am only an amateur Detective.

All I know is that Match-boxes, though they be scattered to the ends of the house (or World), always get together in some one place.

Perhaps it is for safety, they get together.

I have always wondered why they are called Safety Matches.

Perhaps that is the reason!