your poor mother. Well-a-well, weak or strong, we go
in our time!"

As they landed and climbed the hill, Mr. Sam spoke with Peter Benny aside.

"They may ask about that letter at the inquest. You have thought of the
inquest, of course?"

"If they do, I must answer them."

"So far as you know, there was nothing in it to cause strong emotion--
nothing to account--?"

"Dear me, no," answered Mr. Benny, staring at him in mild astonishment;
"so far as I know, nothing whatever."

After packing Susannah off to her room with a Bible and a smelling-bottle,
Mrs. Purchase had set herself to reduce the household to order.
"'Tisn't in nature to think of death," confessed Martha the dairy-girl,
"when you'm worrited from pillar to post by a woman in creaky boots."

Above and beside her creaky boots Aunt Hannah had a cheerful, incurable
habit of slamming every door she passed through. It came, she would
explain, of living on shipboard where cabin was divided from cabin either
by a simple curtain or by sliding panels. Be this is it may, she kept the
house of mourning re-echoing that day "like a labouring ship with a cargo
of tinware," to quote Martha again, whose speech derived many forcible
idioms from her father, the mate of a coaster.

Nevertheless--and although it appeared to induce a steady breeze through
the house, rising to a moderate gale when meals were toward--Aunt Hannah's
presence acted like a tonic on all. She presented to Mr. Sam a
weather-ruddied cheek, receiving his kiss on what, in so round a face as
hers, might pass for the point of the jaw. In saluting Master Calvin she
had perforce to take the offensive, and did so with equal aplomb.
After a rapid survey of some three seconds she picked off his velveteen
cap and kissed him accurately in the centre of the forehead.

"I meant to do it on the top of his head," she informed Myra later,
"but the ghastly child was smothered in bear's-grease. Lord knows that,
as 'twas, I very nearly slipped in my thumb and kissed _that_, as I've
heard tell that folks do in the witness-box."

Myra did not understand the allusion; but from the first she divined that
her aunt misliked Master Calvin and found that mislike consolatory.

"As for these two," the good lady announced, indicating brother and
sister, "I allow to myself they'll be best out of the way till the
funeral. I've been through the clothes-press, and put up their
night-clothes and a few odd items in a han