all. Here is my bill for the money due me. But if
you cannot conveniently pay me, I will agree, in the presence of these
good friends, to postpone the settlement until the next time I lay my
eyes upon you. If you do not then pay me, I shall then levy upon your
personal possessions.'

"The Dowager glared at the Princess Ferrando, and, having shaken her
long forefinger at that beautiful young lady, she departed, and was
never seen in the palace again."

Here Jonas folded the paper.

"Is that the end?" asked the Daughter of the House.

"That is all there is of it," said Jonas, sententiously.

"I thought," said the Daughter of the House, "that the story would tell
how he governed his rented principality, and if he ever got his own. I
worked it out in my mind like a flash that he would govern so well that
his own people would go to him and beg him to govern them."

"I think," said the Next Neighbor, "that if that principality was
governed at all, it was by that scheming wife."

"There's two ways of ending a story," said Pomona. "One is to wind it
up, and the other is to let it run down. Now when a story is running
down as if it was a clock, it's often a good deal longer than you think
before it stops; so we thought we would wind this one up right there."

Euphemia laughed. "But if you wind it up," she said, "you help it to
keep on going."

For a moment Pomona looked embarrassed; but she quickly recovered
herself. "I don't mean to wind it up like a clock," she said, "but to
wind it up like an old-fashioned clothes-line which isn't wanted again
until you have some more things to hang on it."

The Husband of Euphemia stated it as his opinion that that was an
excellent way to stop a story; but Euphemia did not agree with him. "I
think," she said, "that a story of that kind ought to end with a moral.
They nearly always do."

Pomona now looked at Jonas, and Jonas looked at Pomona.

"Several times, when we was writing the story," said Pomona, "I had a
notion that Jone was trying to squeeze a moral into it here and there;
but he didn't say nothing about it, and I didn't ask him, and if there's
anything more to say about it, it's for him to do it."

Jonas smiled. "My opinion about morals to stories is that the people who
read them ought to work them out for themselves," said he. "Some people
work out one kind of moral, and others work out another kind. It was a
pretty big job to write that story, which I had to do the