nd
if this is the end I shan't feel it's money wasted. I'm a great believer
in bein' patient. Most always, that is. Here, Lucinda you take this to
Joshua and tell him to take it right to mail. Be prompt, now. I'm a great
believer in doin' things prompt."

Lucinda took the letter and was prompt. "She wants this letter took right
to the mail," she said to Joshua, Aunt Mary's longest-tried servitor.

"Then it'll be took right to mail," said Joshua.

"She's pretty mad," said Lucinda.

"Then she'll soon get over it," replied the other, taking up his hat and
preparing to depart for the barn forthwith.

Lucinda returned to Aunt Mary with a species of dried-up sigh. One is not
the less a slave because one has been enslaved for twenty years, and
Lucinda at moments did sort of peek out through her bars--possibly envying
Joshua the daily drives to mail when he had full control of something that
was alive.

Lucinda had been, comparatively speaking, young when she had come to wait
upon the pleasure of the Watkins millions, and her waiting had been so
pertinent and so patient that it had endured over a quarter of a century.
Aunt Mary had been under fifty in the hour of Lucinda's dawn; she was over
seventy now. Jack hadn't been born then; he was in college now; and Jack's
older brothers and sisters and his dead-and-gone father and mother had
been living somewhere out West then, quite hopeful as to their own lives
and quite hopeless as to the stern old great-aunt who never had paid any
attention to her niece since she had chosen to elope with the doctor's
reprobate son. Now the father and mother were dead and buried, the
brothers and sisters reinstated in their rights and had all grown up and
become great credits to the old lady, whose heart had suddenly melted at
the arrival of five orphans all at once. And there was only Jack to
continue to worry about.

Jack was not anything particularly remarkable; he was just one of those
lovable good-for-nothings that seem born to get better people into trouble
all their lives long. He had been spoiled originally by being ten years
younger than the next youngest in the family; and then, when the children
had been shipped on to Aunt Mary's tender mercies, Jack had won her heart
immediately because she accidentally discovered that he had never been
baptized, and so felt fully justified in re-naming him after her own
father and having the name branded into him for keeps by her own religious