by the stove, turnin' the air blue, his
sister set at the other side of the table with that advertisement hid
behind the Wellmouth Advocate readin' and thinkin'. She wrote a letter
afore she went to bed and bought a dollar's worth of stamps at the
postoffice next day. And for a week she watched the mails the way one of
these city girls does when the summer's 'most over and eight or nine of
her fellers have finished their vacations and gone back to work.

"About ten days after that Kenelm begins to feel kind of off his feed,
so's to speak. Somethin' seemed to ail him and he couldn't make out what
'twas. They'd had a good many cranberries on their bog that year and
Hannah'd been cookin' 'em up fast so's they wouldn't spile. But one
night she brings on a cranberry pie, and Kenelm turned up his nose at
it.

"'More of that everlastin' sour stuff!' he snorts. 'I've et cranb'ries
till my stomach's puckered up as if it worked with a gath'rin' string.
Take it away! I don't want it!'

"'But, Kenelm, you're always so fond of cranb'ry pie.'

"'Me? It makes me shrivel just to look at it. Pass that sugar bowl, so's
I can sweeten ship.'

"Next day 'twas salt fish and potatoes that wa'n't good. He'd been
teasin' for a salt-fish dinner for ever so long, so Hannah'd fixed up
this one just to please him, but he swallered two or three knifefuls and
then looked at her kind of sad and mournful.

"'To think,' says he, 'that I've lived all these years to be p'isoned
fin'lly! And by my own sister, too! Well, that's what comes of bein'
wuth money. Give me my pipe and let me forget my troubles.'

"'Course this kind of talk made Hannah mad, but she argued that 'twas
the Kill-Smudge gettin' in its work, so she put a double dose into his
teacup that night, and trusted in Providence.

"And the next day she noticed that he swallered hard between every pull
at his pipe, and when, at last, he jumped out of his chair, let out
a swear word and hove his pipe at the cat, she felt consider'ble
encouraged. She thought 'twas her duty, however, to warn him against
profane language, but the answer she got was so much more prayerful than
his first remarks, that she come about and headed for the sittin'-room
quick.

"Well, to make a long yarn short, the Kill-Smudge done the bus'ness.
Kenelm stuck to smokin' till he couldn't read a cigar sign without his
ballast shiftin', and then he give it up. And--as you might expect from
that kind of a man--he was mo