k-Home Sausage" and "Bute's Banner Brand Better Baked
Beans." Also there was a magnificent mansion on the Avenue.

Aunt Clarissa had family and culture and a Boston manner. Uncle Joshua
had a kind heart, a hemispherical waistcoat and a tremendous deal of
money. Later on the kind heart stopped beating and Aunt Clarissa was
left with the money, the mansion and--but of course the "manner" had
been all her own all the time.

So when John Bangs died, Aunt Clarissa Bute sent for the son, talked
with the latter, and liked him. She wrote to her relative, Augustus
Adams Cabot, of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot, in Boston, who, although
still a young man, was already known as a financier, and looked out for
her various investments, saying that she found young Galusha "a nice
boy, though rather odd, like his father," and that she thought of taking
his rearing and education into her own hands. "I have no children of
my own, Augustus. What do you think of the idea?" Augustus thought it a
good one; at least he wrote that he did. So Aunt Clarissa took charge of
Galusha Bangs.

The boy was fourteen then, a dreamy, shy youngster, who wore spectacles
and preferred curling up in a corner with a book to playing baseball. It
was early spring when he came to live with Aunt Clarissa and before the
summer began he had already astonished his relative more than once.
On one occasion a visitor, admiring the Bute library, asked how many
volumes it contained. Aunt Clarissa replied that she did not know. "I
have added from time to time such books as I desired and have discarded
others. I really have no idea how many there are." Then Galusha, from
the recess by the window, looked up over the top of the huge first
volume of Ancient Nineveh and Its Remains which he was reading and
observed: "There were five thousand six hundred and seventeen yesterday,
Auntie."

Aunt Clarissa started so violently that her eyeglasses fell from her
aquiline nose to the end of their chain.

"Good heavens, child! I didn't know you were there. What did you say?"

"I said there were five thousand six hundred and seventeen books on the
shelves here yesterday."

"How do you know?"

"I counted them."

"COUNTED them? Mercy! What for?"

Galusha's spectacles gleamed. "For fun," he said.

On another occasion his aunt found him still poring over Ancient Nineveh
and Its Remains; it was the fifth volume now, however.

"Do you LIKE to read that?" she asked.

"Yes, Auntie. I