e
anything to save his life, and then when it's saved put his propity into
his womern's name. That's human. You know the good book says a pure man
from New York is the noblest work of God."

"Well, when did this desire to endosmose your fellow-man first break out
on you?"

"About a year and a half ago it began to rankle in my mind. I read up
everything I could get hold of regarding the longevity and such things
to be had here. In the winter I sent in a fair, honest, advertisement
regarding my place, and, Judas H. Priest! before I could say 'scat' in
the spring, here came letters by the dozen, mostly from school-teachers
at first, that had a good command of language, but did not come. I
afterwards learned that these letters was frequently wrote by folks that
was not able to go into the country, so wrote these letters for mental
improvement, hoping also that some one in the country might want them
for the refinement they would engender in the family.

"I took one young woman from town once, and allowed her 25 per cent. off
for her refining influence. Her name was Etiquette McCracken. She knew
very little in the first place, and had added to it a good deal by
storing up in her mind a lot of membranous theories and damaged facts
that ought to ben looked over and disinfected. She was the most hopeless
case I ever saw, Mr. Nye. She was a metropolitan ass. You know that a
town greenhorn is the greenest greenhorn in the world, because he can't
be showed anything. He knows it all. Well, Etiquette McCracken very nigh
paralyzed what few manners my children had. She pointed at things at
table, and said she wanted some o' that, and she had a sort of a starved
way of eating, and short breath, and seemed all the time apprehensive.
She probably et off the top of a flour barrel at home. She came and
stayed all summer at our house, with a wardrobe which was in a
shawl-strap wrapped up in a programme of one of them big theaters on
Bowery street. I guess she led a gay life in the city. She said she did.
She said if her set was at our house they would make it ring with
laughter. I said if they did I'd wring their cussed necks with laughter.
'Why,' she says, 'don't you like merriment?' 'Yes,' I says, 'I like
merriment well enough, but the cackle of a vacant mind rattling around
in a big farmhouse makes me a fiend, and unmans me, and I gnaw up two or
three people a day till I get over it,' I says."

"Well, what became of Miss McCracken?"