s own dreamy-eyed
recital of the profits already his from "brillions" of chickens not yet
come even to the egg-stage of their careers.

Not until Miss Caroline had ceased from large and beauteous phrases
about "the great good fortune that has befallen us in the strangest
manner"--not until she descended to actual, dumfounding figures with
powerful little dollar-marks back of them, did her daughter seem to
permit herself the sweet alarms of hope. Even in that moment she did not
forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to
elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother's attorney, under guise of
thanking him for the friendly interest he had "ever manifested" in the
welfare of the Lansdales.

It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or
experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings. The impression
conveyed to me by her unenthusiastic though skilfully polite letter was
of one who had formed the habit of doubting beyond her years. These I
judged to be twenty-eight or thereabouts, while her powers of restraint
under provocation to believe savored of more years than even her mother
could claim. I had myself been compelled to note the value of negative
views, save in that inner and lonely world where I abode of nights and
Sundays; I, too, had proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual,
literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost
raw-and-twenty credulous. In a lawyer's letter of formal conciseness,
devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of
unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional
felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with
the situation. So nearly perfect was this letter that it caused her to
refer to me, in a later communication to Miss Caroline, as "your
dry-and-dusty counting-machine of a lawyer, who doubtless considers the
multiplication table as a cycle of sonnets." That, after I had merely
determined to meet her palpable needs and had signed myself her obedient
servant!

But I had convinced her. She admitted as much in words almost joyous, so
that Miss Caroline went to be with her--to fetch her when she should be
strong enough for the adventure of travel.

There were three weeks of my neighbor's absence--three weeks in which
Clem "cleaned house", polished the battered silver, "neated" the rooms,
and tried to arrange the remaining furniture so that it would loo