ntively.
"I'll have to ask you to excuse the expression, Miss Hands, but I really
am! Perhaps I'd better tell you how things used to be in this house, and
then you can see how--how blowed I am at findin' them as they be."

"I should be real pleased if you would!" said Mary Sands. "I've been
wonderin' and wonderin', ever since I come, but there's no near
neighbors, you know, and I don't know as I should have cared to ask 'em
if there had been; but you are a friend of both, I see, and it seems
different."

"I'll wash to your wipin'," said Calvin Parks, taking off his coat and
rolling up his shirt sleeves, "and we can talk as we go; I'm an old hand
at dishes too. Well! Friend of both? well, I should remark! I lived on
the next ro'd, not more'n half a mile across lots. You might have seen a
burnt cellar hole?--Well, that was our home. First I remember of Sam and
Sim was them sittin' together in their chair. 'Twas a queer chair, made
o' purpose to hold the two of 'em. There they set, and tell 'tother from
which was more than I could do, or anybody else for that matter, except
their Ma. They might ha' been nine then, and I s'pose I was four or
five. I rec'lect I went up to 'em and says, 'Be you one boy cut in two?'
Cur'us things children are, sure enough. They was dressed alike, then
and always; fed alike, and reared alike, every human way of it. Doctored
alike, too, poor young ones! One time when they was babies the wrong
one got the medicine, and after that Ma Sills always dosed 'em both,
whichever was sick. 'There's goin' to be no partiality!' she says; 'the
Lord made them children off the same last, and they're goin' to stay the
same!' Why, Miss Hands, she wouldn't so much as allow they could _think_
different. If they got to scrappin', same as all boys do, y'know, Ma
would take 'em by the scruff of their necks and haul 'em up to the
looking-glass. 'Look at there!' she'd say. 'Do you see them boys? do you
see the way they look? Now I give you to understand that your souls
inside is just as much alike as your bodies outside. I ain't sure but
it's two halves of the same soul,' she'd say, 'and do you think I'm
goin' to let 'em quarrel? You make up and love each other pretty right
away, or I'll take the back of the hairbrush to you both!'

"So they'd make up; they had to! There! Ma Sills certinly did rule the
roost, and no mistake. She'd been a widder ever since the boys were a
year old, so she had to do for herself and the