our wife, and I
am going to do my share, keeping house and helping around. And you have
got to do your share, and treat me fairly. I once heard that the first
Mrs. Balberry didn't get all that was coming to her--that she had to
wear the same dress and bonnet for years. Now, I want to say, right now,
that isn't my style. When I want a new dress I want it, and you are
going to give it to me."

"Am I?" he said, slowly.

"Yes, you are, Abner Balberry, and if I want spending money you have got
to give me that, too. If you don't, I'll quit work and won't do a
blessed thing around the house. So there!"

She spoke with such vigor that it made him groan. He felt it in his
bones that she meant to have her way.

"I am a-goin' to do my duty," he said, humbly.

"You'd better. If you don't----" and she ended with a shake of her head
that meant a great deal.

"She's bound to have her way," he told himself later. "I've got to git
used to it, I suppose. Drat the luck, anyway. I wish I had never heard
o' thet pot o' gold!"

In a roundabout fashion Abner Balberry had heard that Nat had gone to
Buffalo, and then he learned through a man who had been to New York
that his nephew was in the metropolis. Abner had often longed to visit
New York, and here he saw his opportunity to do so.

"I'm a-goin' to New York," he announced one day, shortly after the pot
of gold incident.

"What are you going to do there?" asked his wife.

"I'm a-goin' to look fer Nat. I've heard he's down there, an' I want to
save him from goin' to destruction."

"Better leave him where he is," said the new wife, who did not fancy
another of her husband's people around the farm.

"No, I'm a-goin' to hunt him up. I feel it's my duty to do it."

"Then, if you go to New York, you have got to take me along, Abner."

"Take you along, Lucy?"

"Yes. I've always wanted to go to New York. Fred can take care of the
farm while we are gone." Fred and the other Guff children had been
installed on the place, but none of them had proved of much assistance.
Fred, himself, was decidedly lazy--not half as willing as Nat, so Abner
himself admitted.

"I don't see how I can take you, Lucy. It costs a heap to go to New
York."

"Well, if you can spend the money on yourself, you can spend it on me,
too," she answered, calmly.

"But it's my duty to go--to save Nat from goin' to the dogs."

"You didn't bother about Nat when you were courting me."

"I didn't know where he w