was a
match for a small boy, but that a man would cheat and domineer over her.
Experience sadly put to flight these notions for a succession of boys in
this cabinet-ministry for the first three years of her stay in Dalton
would have driven her into a Presbyterian convent, had there been one at
hand. Boy Number One caught the yellow cur out of bounds one day, and
shaved his plumy tail to a bare stick, and Miss Lucinda fairly shed
tears of grief and rage when Pink appeared at the door with the denuded
appendage tucked between his little legs, and his funny yellow eyes
casting sidelong looks of apprehension at his mistress. Boy Number One
was despatched directly. Number Two did pretty well for a month, but his
integrity and his appetite conflicted, and Miss Lucinda found him one
moonlight night perched in her plum-tree devouring the half-ripe fruit.
She shook him down with as little ceremony as if he had been an
apple; and though he lay at Death's door for a week with resulting
cholera-morbus, she relented not. So the experiment went on, till a list
of casualties that numbered in it fatal accidents to three kittens,
two hens and a rooster, and at last Pink himself, who was pent into a
decline by repeated drenchings from the watering-pot, put an end to her
forbearance, and she instituted in her viziership the old man who had
now kept his office so long,--a queer, withered, slow, humorous old
creature, who did "chores" for some six or seven other households, and
got a living by sundry "jobs" of wood-sawing, hoeing corn, and other
like works of labor, if not of skill. Israel was a great comfort to Miss
Lucinda: he was efficient counsel in the maladies of all her pets, had
a sovereign cure for the gapes in chickens, and could stop a cat's fit
with the greatest ease; he kept the tiny garden in perfect order,
and was very honest, and Miss Manners favored him accordingly. She
compounded liniment for his rheumatism, herb-sirup for his colds,
presented him with a set of flannel shirts, and knit him a comforter; so
that Israel expressed himself strongly in favor of "Miss Lucindy," and
she said to herself he really was "quite good for a man."

But just now, in her forty-seventh year, Miss Lucinda had come to grief,
and all on account of Israel and his attempts to please her. About six
months before this census-taking era, the old man had stepped into Miss
Manners's kitchen with an unusual radiance on his wrinkles and in his
eyes, an