as such a keen pleasure to make other people yield their
pennies for a good cause, without adding any of his own!

Deacon Baxter had now been a widower for some years and the community
had almost relinquished the idea of his seeking a fourth wife. This was
a matter of some regret, for there was a general feeling that it would
be a good thing for the Baxter girls to have some one to help with the
housework and act as a buffer between them and their grim and irascible
parent. As for the women of the village, they were mortified that the
Deacon had been able to secure three wives, and refused to believe that
the universe held anywhere a creature benighted enough to become his
fourth.

The first, be it said, was a mere ignorant girl, and he a beardless
youth of twenty, who may not have shown his true qualities so early in
life. She bore him two sons, and it was a matter of comment at the
time that she called them, respectively, Job and Moses, hoping that the
endurance and meekness connected with these names might somehow help
them in their future relations with their father. Pneumonia, coupled
with profound discouragement, carried her off in a few years to make
room for the second wife, Waitstill's mother, who was of different fibre
and greatly his superior. She was a fine, handsome girl, the orphan
daughter of up-country gentle-folks, who had died when she was eighteen,
leaving her alone in the world and penniless.

Baxter, after a few days' acquaintance, drove into the dooryard of the
house where she was a visitor and, showing her his two curly-headed
boys, suddenly asked her to come and be their stepmother. She assented,
partly because she had nothing else to do with her existence, so far as
she could see, and also because she fell in love with the children at
first sight and forgot, as girls will, that it was their father whom she
was marrying.

She was as plucky and clever and spirited as she was handsome, and she
made a brave fight of it with Foxy; long enough to bring a daughter into
the world, to name her Waitstill, and start her a little way on her life
journey,--then she, too, gave up the struggle and died. Typhoid fever it
was, combined with complete loss of illusions, and a kind of despairing
rage at having made so complete a failure of her existence.

The next year, Mr. Baxter, being unusually busy, offered a man a good
young heifer if he would jog about the country a little and pick him
up a housekeeper;