lf, of course, had but to assemble all the
bright-hued elements that awaited him a few months ahead to make his own
life a poem, a song.

"I can do that," he once said, in a moment when exaltation had briefly
made him confidential.

Raymond never saw his grandmother--at least he never cared to see her.
Here, if nowhere else, he was willing to take a cue, and he took it from
the head of the family. He thought that so many years of town life might
have made her a little less rustic in the end: the York State of 1835 or
of 1840 need not have remained York State so immitigably. And if there
was a domestic blight on the house he was willing to believe that she
was two thirds to blame: behind the old soul was a pack of poor
relations. Particularly a brother-in-law--a bilious, cadaverous fellow,
whom I saw once, and once was enough. He had been an itinerant preacher
farther East, and he lived in a woeful little cottage along one of
Jehiel's horse-car routes. His mournful-eyed wife was always asking
help. He too had "gone into real-estate," and unsuccessfully. He was the
dull reverse of that victorious obverse upon which Johnny McComas was
beginning to shine.

Another of her relatives, a niece, had married a small-town sharper. He
had brought her to the larger town, and his sharpness had taken on a
keener edge. He, too, had gone into real-estate--a lean, wiry little
man, incredibly arid and energetic, and carrying a preposterously large
mustache. There was trouble with him after Jehiel's death. It developed
that one of the documents which old Beulah Prince had been cajoled or
hectored into signing had deeded to him--temporarily and for a specific
purpose--some forty acres of purple and yellow prairie flowers,
delightful blossoms nodding and swaying in the wind, and that he had
refused to deed more than half of them back: his services at that
particular juncture were "worth something," he said. Well, life (as may
have been remarked previously) would be quite tolerable without one's
relatives. Meanwhile the summer flowers bloomed and nodded on, under the
windy blue sky, all unaware of their disgrace.

A month after Raymond's decision, flowers (of the sort favored in
cemeteries) were trying to bloom over old Jehiel. Some stroke, some
lesion, had put a period to the unhappy career of this grim old man.
Raymond set to one side, for a few weeks, his new trunk and portmanteau;
for a few weeks only--he had no notion of making, ulti