Pooh! Pooh! Pooh!" cried the widow Broadnax, roughly and hoarsely, as
she nearly always spoke, and sitting up suddenly among her cushions.
"Who's afraid of a comet with only one tail? I'll have you to know,
sister Penelope, that my grandmother--my own grandmother and Robert's
own grandmother, not yours--could remember the famous comet of
seventeen hundred and forty-four, and that had six tails."

Miss Penelope was daunted and silenced for the moment. She did not mind
the greater number of the rival comet's tails. It was not that which
made her feel herself at a disadvantage. It was the slur at her lesser
relationship to the master of the house. Any reference to that was a
blow which never failed to make her flinch; and one which the widow
never lost a chance to deal. But Miss Penelope had not yielded an inch
through the ceaseless contention of years, and held her ground now;
since there was nothing to say in reply, she ignored the taunt as she
had done all that had gone before. She turned upon William Pressley,
however, as we are prone to turn upon those whom we do not fear, when we
dare not attack those with whom we are really offended.

"Well, William, maybe you think that the early dying and the going blind
of the wasps and the flies caused the breaking out of the 'Jerks,' too.
You and the rest all think you know better than I do. I don't
complain--maybe you all do know better. But some day, when I am dead and
gone, some day, and it mayn't be very long, when my hands are stone cold
and crossed under the coffin-lid, you will think differently about a
good many matters," she cooed, as if saying the mildest, pleasantest
things in the world. "The Jerks have brought many a proud head low.
Others besides myself will see a warning in the Jerks before they are
gone. And now here are the Shawnees a-coming to welter us in our blood.
And the Cold Plague already come to shake the life out of the few that
are left. But it is their own fault. There's nobody but themselves to
blame. It's easy enough to keep from having the plague," Miss Penelope
added confidently. "Anybody can keep from having it, if they will only
take the trouble to blow real hard three times on a blue yarn string
before breakfast."

William Pressley turned gravely and was about to protest against such
absurd superstition, but Philip Alston interfered tactfully, to assure
the lady that she was quite right, that it could not fail to benefit
almost any one to bre