out forfeiture of the entire estate.

I can fancy the ancient beldam sniggering sardonically the while she
figured to herself the chagrined astonishment, the helpless wrath,
of her watchfully waiting neighbors, when they should discover that
historic Hynds House, dating from the beginning of things
Carolinian, had passed into the unpedigreed hands of a woman named
Smith. I can fancy her balefully exact perception of the attitude so
radically conservative a community must needs assume toward such an
intruder as myself, foisted upon it, so to speak, by an enemy who
never failed to turn the trick.

Because I'm not a Hynds, at all. Great Aunt Sophronisba was my aunt
not by blood but by marriage; she having, when she was no longer
what is known as a spring chicken, met my Great-Uncle Johnny
Scarlett and scandalized all Hyndsville by marrying him out of hand.

I have heard that she was insanely in love with him, and I believe
it; nothing short of an over-mastering passion could have induced
one of the haughty Hyndses to marry a person with such family
connections as his. For my father, George Smith, was a ruddy
English ship-chandler who pitched upon Boston for a home, and lived
with his family in the rooms above his shop; and my grandmother
Smith dropped her "aitches" with the cheerful ease of one to the
manner born, bless her stout old Cockney heart! I can remember her
hearing me my spelling-lesson of a night, her spectacles far down on
her old button of a nose, her white curls bobbing from under her
cap.

"What! Carn't spell 'saloon'? Listen, then, Miss: There's a hess and
a hay and a hell and two hoes and a henn! Now, then, d 'ye spell
it!"

Not that Mrs. Johnny ever accepted us. It was borne in upon the
Smiths that undesirable in-laws are outlaws. This despite the fact
that my mother's pink-and-white English face was a gentler copy of
what her uncle's had been in his youth; and that when I came along,
some years after the dear old man's death, I was named Sophronisba
at Mrs. Johnny's urgent request.

After Great-Uncle Johnny died, as if the last tie which bound her to
ordinary humanity had snapped, his widow retired into a seclusion
from which she emerged only to sue somebody. She said the world was
being turned topsyturvy by people who were allowed to misbehave to
their betters, and who needed to be taught a lesson and their proper
place; and that so long as she retained her faculties, she would do
her duty in t