Mrs. Stubblebine
could hardly slam the door in their faces, but she would fain have
locked the doors after them. She would not even invite them out on
the front porch. She told them the back porch was cosier and less
conspicuous. And then Mrs. Budlong had to call up on the telephone
and sing out in her telephoniest tone:

"Oh, my dear, I've just this minute heard you have guests--some of
your dear husband's relatives. Now they must come to me to dinner
to-morrow. Oh, it isn't the slightest trouble, I asSure you. I'm
giving a little party anyway. I won't take no for an answer."

And she wouldn't. Mrs. Stubblebine fairly perspired excuses, but
Mrs. Budlong finally grew so suspicious that she had to accept; or
leave the impression that the relatives were burglars or
counterfeiters in hiding. And they were not--they were pitifully
honest.

The result was even worse than she feared. Mr. Stubblebine's cousin
was so shy that he never said a word except when it was pulled out of
him, and then he said, "Yes, ma'am"!

In Carthage when you are at a dinner party and you don't quite catch
the last remark, you don't snap "What?" or "How?" or "Wha' jew say?"
Whatever your home habits may be, at a dinner party or before
comp'ny, you raise your eyebrows gracefully and murmur, "I beg your
pardon."

But Mr. Stubblebine's rural cousin grunted "Huh?"--like an Indian
chief trying to scare a white general. And he was perfectly frank
about the intimate processes of mastication.

And when he dropped a batch of scalloped oysters into his watch
pocket he solemnly fished them-out with a souvenir after-dinner
coffee spoon having the Statue of Liberty for a handle and Brooklyn
Bridge in the bowl.

And the wretch's wife was so nervous that she talked all the time
about people the others had never seen or heard of. And she said she
"never used tomattus." And she wasn't ashamed of what she was
chewing either.

Mrs. Stubblebine would have felt much obliged to fate if she had been
presented with an apoplectic stroke. But she had to sit the dinner
out. From what she said to her poor husband afterward, however, one
might have gathered that he picked out those relatives just to spite
her, when as a matter of fact he had always loathed them and
regretted them and the next day he borrowed enough money to lend them
and send them back to the soil.

Mrs. Budlong had constituted herself Entertainment Committee for all
sorts of visito