revising
for the seventh time the last will and testament of the Widow
Weatherwax. It was the seventh revision of her third last will and
testament, to speak by the card, for the widow had a bent for
will-making, which the lawyer had noticed was of periodic intensity.
Once, in a moment of drollery, he entered a jocose memorandum in the
"tickler," under the first week-day of several successive months:
"Revise Mrs. Weatherwax's will;" and such was his foresight that twice
only during that term did she frustrate his prophecy.

This day, as always, she attained the topmost step outside his office
door breathless, and, as always, Shelby gravely lent a hand to deposit
her plump little person in the softest of his old-fashioned office
chairs. The ceremony ended regularly with the panting announcement,
"The Lord has spared me for another month."

It was the man's custom at such times to allot equal praise to
Providence and the widow's marvellous vitality for this happy issue,
and to hazard a guess that she had thought of important changes for her
will. The widow would nod assent over a heaving bosom, and slowly fan
herself back to normal respiration. The relict of a leather-lunged
Free Methodist preacher, she affected a garb of ostentatious
simplicity. No godless pleats or tucks or gores or ruffles or sinful
abominations of braid defaced the chaste sobriety of her black gown;
buttons were tolerated merely as buttons, without vain thought of
ornament; and the strange little bonnet, which she perched above hair
whose natural coquetry of curl was austerely sleeked away, was of a
composition so harshly ugly that more worldly-minded women shuddered at
the sight. The worldly-minded, indeed, were prone to the criticism
that the material of Mrs. Weatherwax's garments was beyond cavil, but
this surely was her own concern. It were sheer impertinence to finger
the texture of a zealot's sackcloth.

Shelby busied himself with his papers, pending her recovery.

"Them stairs alluz give me sech a turn," she sighed, at length. She
enunciated her R's with the merciless fidelity of her section at its
worst, saying stair-urs and tur-urn.

"Too bad the town's boom stopped short of elevators," sympathized
Shelby.

"Shouldn't use 'em, anyway," returned the widow, firmly. "They give me
a wuss turn than the stairs."

"They're trying moving stairways in some places,--a French invention, I
believe."

"Shouldn't use them contrapshuns