ever that he not only hadn't any father anywhere,
but hadn't even a confederate--and so it followed that he was a
double-dyed humbug and couldn't be otherwise.

These were hard days for Barrow and the art firm. All these had their
hands full, trying to comfort Tracy. Barrow's task was particularly
hard, because he was made a confidant in full, and therefore had to humor
Tracy's delusion that he had a father, and that the father was an earl,
and that he was going to send a cablegram. Barrow early gave up the idea
of trying to convince Tracy that he hadn't any father, because this had
such a bad effect on the patient, and worked up his temper to such an
alarming degree. He had tried, as an experiment, letting Tracy think he
had a father; the result was so good that he went further, with proper
caution, and tried letting him think his father was an earl; this wrought
so well, that he grew bold, and tried letting him think he had two
fathers, if he wanted to, but he didn't want to, so Barrow withdrew one
of them and substituted letting him think he was going to get a
cablegram--which Barrow judged he wouldn't, and was right; but Barrow
worked the cablegram daily for all it was worth, and it was the one thing
that kept Tracy alive; that was Barrow's opinion.

And these were bitter hard days for poor Sally, and mainly delivered up
to private crying. She kept her furniture pretty damp, and so caught
cold, and the dampness and the cold and the sorrow together undermined
her appetite, and she was a pitiful enough object, poor thing. Her state
was bad enough, as per statement of it above quoted; but all the forces
of nature and circumstance seemed conspiring to make it worse--and
succeeding. For instance, the morning after her dismissal of Tracy,
Hawkins and Sellers read in the associated press dispatches that a toy
puzzle called Pigs in the Clover, had come into sudden favor within the
past few weeks, and that from the Atlantic to the Pacific all the
populations of all the States had knocked off work to play with it,
and that the business of the country had now come to a standstill by
consequence; that judges, lawyers, burglars, parsons, thieves, merchants,
mechanics, murderers, women, children, babies--everybody, indeed, could
be seen from morning till midnight, absorbed in one deep project and
purpose, and only one--to pen those pigs, work out that puzzle
successfully; that all gayety, all cheerfulness had departed from