liar; and now I suppose you'll be just meek enough to put
up with it."

Elmer took off his spectacles and rubbed his brow thoughtfully.

"I shouldn't wonder if it was a case of necessity, mamma," he said
musingly. "If I know one thing better than another it is that I would
want to go in training for a spell before crossing that woman. I know
when I was before the mast with her--"

Pearl Higgins burst into tears promptly. "I think you might spare me an
account of that," she sobbed. "I'm sure I don't want to hear about your
goings-on with anyone so ignorant as Hat Tyler. Yes, she is; she's
ignorant, and comes of ignorant people. What does she amount to, I'd
like to know? There's nothing to her at all. And now," she blazed forth
in fierier tones, "you're half in sympathy with the woman this blessed
minute! I suppose you think just because you rescued her from a watery
grave you're in duty bound to side in with her and take her part against
your own wife. I don't know how it is, but everything seems to fall out
in that woman's favor."

"Well, ain't it so!" said Elmer, not as a question but as if the full
force of the proposition had just struck him. "Now you mention it, I
don't know that I ever knew Hat Tyler to come off second best in a
transaction. I was talking to a party only the other day, and he said
the same thing himself. He says, 'Hat's a smart woman, Elmer.'"

"Why didn't you have her then, when you might have had her?"

"Always said I wouldn't marry a woman that had the heft of me," said
Elmer sagely with a fond twinkle at his Pearl. "I know that night when I
saw her arm on the fluke of that anchor I said to myself, 'I done just
right to steer clear of you, my lady.' There 't was, bare to the
shoulder, freckled all the way up, and jest that pretty size!"

"It's as big as a stovepipe!" shrieked Pearl.

"'T was smooth as a smelt," Elmer averred dreamily, "and jest of a
bigness to work, and work well, in a pinch. A woman like that would be
some protection to a man, Pearl. I wish you could have seen how she
clim up into those anchor chains. But I said to myself, 'That woman has
got too much iron in her blood to go with my constitution!'

"But she's smart; Hat is smart. All is, a man never knows how to take
her. But she's smart as a steel trap."

"Well, I wish she'd shut it then," said Pearl Higgins grimly.

Silence reigned; and in that silence could be heard the steeple clock
ticking on the mantel and the