vanced, her
tale sounded less ridiculous than it might. But it was a bloodless sort
of consolation even for Addie, and all her friends knew the story by
heart and listened to it merely with kind indulgence. "A bird in the
hand," etc., is a proverb peculiarly to the liking of Yankees. They do
not take much interest in Peruvian mines or other forms of
non-negotiable wealth unless they see a chance to work them off on a
more credulous public. As for old Mrs. Clark, when she became tied to
her chair, she was bitter on the topic. "That dratted old Field!" she
would say with the brutal directness of the realist; "your father would
have sold the whole of it for five thousand dollars and been
thankful!"--a fact that seemed to her children of no importance.

When the old woman was laid away in Woodlawn beside her husband, Addie
could give free rein to her fancies, untroubled by the darts of the
realist. But the family fortunes soon became most desperate. Fortunately
John had no children, his one small son having died as a baby. His wife,
who had perhaps become tired of the family fortune as it never quite
realized itself, tried to prod her shiftless husband into a greater
activity. But except for the getting of the pension, which was put
through in 1885, John added little to the family purse, and before his
mother's death lost his position in the gas office, a new administration
of the company holding that a municipal utility was not an asylum for
old soldiers. The trouble was, as Mrs. John knew, and as Ada always
refused to recognize, John drank. At first it was a convivial weakness
indulged in only at the reunions of old veterans,--John was a most
ardent "Vet,"--but it became a habit that took away his little
usefulness for anything. So now the family for steady income was reduced
to the pension, which was only twenty-two dollars a month. Clearly
something had to be done. Mrs. John took in lodgers in the Church Street
house, a clerk or two from the neighboring shops. And Addie finally
brought herself to learn the manipulation of the typewriter, which was
fast becoming a woman's profession, and found a position in a large
store in the city.

It would seem that the Clark fortunes had reached their lowest ebb:
family extinction was all that now remained for them. The Church Street
house rested solely, save for the small pension, on the exertions of two
ineffective women. It could just get on as it was, and if the family
life ha