r affection for it with interest--pretty good
interest.

Your affectionate father,

JOHN GRAHAM.

P.S.--I forgot to say that I had bought a house on Michigan Avenue for
Helen, but there's a provision in the deed that she can turn you out
if you don't behave.

No. 7

From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, to his son,
Pierrepont, at Yemassee-on-the-Tallahassee. The young man is now in
the third quarter of the honeymoon, and the old man has decided that
it is time to bring him fluttering down to earth.

VII

CHICAGO, January 17, 189-.

_Dear Pierrepont_: After you and Helen had gone off looking as if
you'd just bought seats on 'Change and been baptized into full
membership with all the sample bags of grain that were handy, I found
your new mother-in-law out in the dining-room, and, judging by the
plates around her, she was carrying in stock a full line of staple and
fancy groceries and delicatessen. When I struck her she was crying
into her third plate of ice cream, and complaining bitterly to the
butler because the mould had been opened so carelessly that some salt
had leaked into it.

Of course, I started right in to be sociable and to cheer her up, but
I reckon I got my society talk a little mixed--I'd been one of the
pall-bearers at Josh Burton's funeral the day before--and I told her
that she must bear up and eat a little something to keep up her
strength, and to remember that our loss was Helen's gain.

Now, I don't take much stock in all this mother-in-law talk, though
I've usually found that where there's so much smoke there's a little
fire; but I'm bound to say that Helen's ma came back at me with a
sniff and a snort, and made me feel sorry that I'd intruded on her
sacred grief. Told me that a girl of Helen's beauty and advantages had
naturally been very, very popular, and greatly sought after. Said that
she had been received in the very best society in Europe, and might
have worn strawberry leaves if she'd chosen, meaning, I've since found
out, that she might have married a duke.

[Illustration: Crying into her third plate of ice cream]

I tried to soothe the old lady, and to restore good feeling by
allowing that wearing leaves had sort of gone out of fashion with the
Garden of Eden, and that I liked Helen better in white satin, but
everything I said just seemed to enrage her the more. Told me plainly
that she'd thought, and hinted that she'd hoped, right up to last
month,