eks gradually sank into sob and
moan, and from that hour he was her one confidante and comrade. Not
even in him would she allow the least untidiness, but would fly to meet
him at the threshold, picking up each paw in turn and manicuring it in
her apron, and would insist, despite our remonstrances, in squatting
down outside the back door and feeding his dinner to him, bit by bit,
lest "Gobble-mouth" drop crumbs and gravy on "Poor Ellen's clane
gravel."

Sigurd found this fellowship at his meals so entrancing that he would
eat even baked beans from Ellen's lean brown fingers and would take
advantage of her society to get twice as much dinner as was good for
him. When his dish was empty and polished bright, under Ellen's
approving eye, by his circling tongue, he would promenade dolefully
about the kitchen, peering with an air of deep dejection into coal hod
and wood basket, as if he were starved to a diet of cinders and
kindlings, well aware that behind his back Ellen was heaping his dish
anew. Her excess of thrift, from which our own table suffered, was
never brought to bear on Sigurd.

As he ate, she would tell him long stories of her childhood in hungry
Ireland and of her hard, bewildered, wandering life in the Land of
Promise. Only once was I guilty of pausing by the kitchen door to
listen.

"It was the place afore this, Darlint, or maybe the place afore that,
or maybe another, that Old Goldtooth wedded my widow woman and took her
to New York for the shows. He'd been drinking more than a drop the day
and he says, 'Let's bring Poor Ellen along, for the fun of it. You can
lend her your second-best bonnet, for there's money to buy more in New
York.' But it wasn't her second-best, nor yet her third, the comical
thing she set on me. To a hotel in New York he took us and a grand feed
he gave us. Thin off to the show they wint, and he put a newspaper in
my hand, and opened up at a page with niver a picture on it, and he
told me to sit there like a lady and read about Boarding Houses. So
there was Poor Ellen all that avening, and long it was as a rosary of
nights, holding up that paper, with the quare letters, all sizes,
dancing over it, and reading about Boarding Houses. But whin they came
back--O Darlint, the saints defind us!--he told me it was about the
Borden Murder I'd been reading, not Boarding Houses at all, and Poor
Ellen not sensing a scratch of it, or sure she'd been scared into a
fit. Don't let thim tache you t