id it just that
way, so you can see. 'Oh, I'll be stuck on 'em at fifty a head,' says
Dave, 'but I knew you'd listen to reason, we being such old neighbours.'
'I ain't heard reason since that last song,' I says. I'm listening to my
heart, and it's a grand pity yours never learned to talk.' 'Fifty a
head,' says the old robber.

"So, thus throwing away at least fifteen hundred dollars like it was a
mere bagatelle or something, I walk out into the romantic night and beat
it for home, wanting to be in before my happy couple reached there, so
they'd feel free to linger over their parting. My, but I did feel
responsible and dangerous, directing human destinies so brashly the way
I had."

There was a pause, eloquent with unworded emotions.

Then "Human destinies, hell!" the lady at length intoned.

Hereupon I amazingly saw that she believed her tale to be done. I
permitted the silence to go a minute, perhaps, while she fingered the
cigarette paper and loose tobacco.

"And of course, then," I hinted, as the twin jets of smoke were rather
viciously expelled.

"I should say so--'of course, then'--you got it. But I didn't get it for
near an hour yet. I set up to my bedroom window in the dark, waiting
excitedly, and pretty soon they slowly floated up to the front gate,
talking in hushed tones and gurgles. 'Male and female created He them,'
I says, flushed with triumph. The moon wasn't up yet, but you hadn't any
trouble making out they was such. He was acting outrageously like a male
and she was suffering it with the splendid courage which has long
distinguished our helpless sex. And there I set, warming my old heart in
it and expanding like one of them little squeezed-up sponges you see in
the drug-store window which swells up so astonishing when you put it in
water. I wasn't impatient for them to quit, oh, no! They seemed to
clench and unclench and clench again, as if they had all the time in the
world--with me doing nothing but applaud silently.

"After spending about twenty years out there they loitered softly up the
walk and round to the side door where I'd left the light burning, and I
slipped over to the side window, which was also open, and looked down on
the dim fond pair, and she finally opened the door softly and the light
shone out."

Again Ma Pettengill paused, her elbows on the arms of her chair, her
shoulders forward, her gray old head low between them. She drew a long
breath and rumbled fiercely:

"And th