ion moves here and there and along with it ways and
means and customs and fashions and the looks of the buildings and the
furniture, but there is a saying of the Judge that comes back to me now.
"The way of vice, virtue, passions, and instincts of men is universal
and everlasting," he'd say, and as for himself, his eyes were watching
it all from too high a place for him to be jumping this way and that,
like one of the sheep running with the flock.

It showed on the inside of the house then, as it did the day he died in
this city. The look of it was the same then, with most everything that
was in it used for comfort and not for show, though in those first days
there was no end of ornaments, that was kept for memory's sake--a piece
of coral as big as your head brought back by Mrs. Colfax's father, who
had been a minister or something to Brazil, and spears from the South
Sea Islands, and two big blue biscuitware jars from China that had been
a wedding present to the Judge's mother from an importer of tea, who had
courted her and been rejected, and documents in frames which I can't
remember, except a commission in the army signed by a man named James
Madison, and a college degree, and a letter written by Jonathan Edwards
to a man dying of consumption. They were hard to keep clean, but I liked
those things because they reminded a body of the fact that days had gone
by when other people was living with their ambitions and loves, and
snoring at night, and pain in their wisdom teeth, and all forgotten now!

Anyway, you'd never know they had wealth, they lived so simply, and Mrs.
Colfax had even done much of her own housework. I was hired because a
baby was coming, and you can believe it was a happy house in those days,
with its peace and the sprinklers spraying water on the lawn in the last
hot days of the autumn, and the leaves rustling outside the kitchen
window, and the wife singing in her room upstairs, and the Judge looking
at her as she sat across the table at breakfast, with his eyes wide
open, because, whatever anybody else might think, he believed her the
most beautiful looking woman in the world.

I was happy, too, speaking generally. The only trouble was the training
that Madame Welstoke had given me. After a body has learned a little of
being shrewd like a snake, a cat, or a weasel, and looking on anybody as
fair game for blackmail or threats or health cures, it is very hard to
shut the cover down on them and never