e orphans, whose entire patrimony
in the Savings Bank scarcely yielded interest enough to pay for their
boots and shoes; but it remained for the present crisis to prove him
as open-minded as he was conscientious. For, no sooner had Polly
finished the rapid exposition of her great plan--how they were to draw
the money from the bank to pay for their tickets and start them in
their new life, and how they were to earn their own living when once
they got started--than he was ready to admit the reasonableness of
it.

"And when you once get out there, why, there you are!" Polly declared,
in her most convincing tone.

As she stood before him, flushed and breathless, prepared to do battle
for Dan to the very last extremity, her uncle gave old Dick a slap
that sent him tramping into his stall, and then said, with the
drawling accent peculiar to him:

"Well, Polly, you're a pretty sensible girl. If the doctor says so, I
guess it's wuth trying."

Then Polly, who had so courageously braced herself for the contest,
experienced an overwhelming revulsion of feeling, and a great wave of
gratitude and compunction swept over her. To Uncle Seth's speechless
astonishment she flung her arms around his big neck, and, with some
thing very like a sob, she cried:

"Oh, Uncle Seth, I never loved you half enough!"

Uncle Seth bore it very well, all things considered. He got pretty red
in the face, but happily a full grizzly beard kept the secret of his
blushes.

"Why, Polly!" he said, pounding away on her shoulder in an attempt to
be consolatory; "you've always ben a good girl; not a mite of trouble,
not a mite!"

They walked up to the house, Polly holding the rough, hairy hand as
tightly as if it had been a solid chunk of gold. Before the short walk
to the kitchen door was finished they had become sworn conspirators,
and Uncle Seth was so entirely in the spirit of the piece that he held
Polly back a minute to say, in a sepulchral whisper,

"Just you leave your Aunt Lucia to me. I'll fix her."

Polly never knew all the pains Uncle Seth was at to "fix" Aunt Lucia,
but by hook or crook the "fixing" was accomplished, and Aunt Lucia had
given a mournful consent.

"I shouldn't feel it right," she declared, "to let you suppose I
thought there was any hope of its curing Dan. That boy's doomed, if
ever a boy was, and I don't know how you'll ever manage with the
funeral and all, way out there in Colorado, far from kith and kin. But
your Unc