ccess didn't encourage others to set
up in opposition? But a cherry-garden isn't grown in a day. Mrs. Furnace
had dropped into it (so to speak) when the trees that William John had
planted were already on the way to yield good profit. Also she was a
woman who knew how to keep a pleasure-garden decent, however near it might
lie to a great town and a naval port. Simple woman though she seemed, she
understood scandal.

But in the midst of life we are in death. One day, at the height of his
prosperity, William John drove over to Menheniot Churchtown (where his
sister Tryphena resided with her boy Nandy and kept a general shop) to
fetch them over to Merry-Garden for a visit. Aunt Barbree loved children,
you understand: besides which, Tryphena's husband had left her poor, and
'twas the first week in August after a good season, and the mazzards
wanted eating if they weren't to perish for want of it. . . . So William
John, who by this time was rich enough to set up a tax-cart, but
inexperienced to manage it, drove over to Menheniot and fetched his sister
and the boy: and on the way home the horse bolted and scattered the lot,
with the result that William John was flung against a milestone and sister
Tryphena across a hedge. The pair succumbed to their injuries: but the
boy Nandy (aged fourteen) was picked up with no worse than a stunning, and
a bump at the back of his head which hardened so that he was ever
afterwards able to crack nuts with it, and even Brazil nuts, by hammering
with his skull against a door or any other suitable object. Of course,
when they picked him up he hadn't a notion he possessed any such gift.

Well here, as you might say, was a pretty kettle of fish for Aunt Barbree.
Here not only was a loving husband killed, and a sister-in-law, but at one
stroke two out of the three healthy lives on which the whole lease of
Merry-Garden depended. She mourned William John for his own sake,
because, as husbands go, she had reason to regret him; and Tryphena
Jewell, for a poor relation, had never been pushing. Tryphena's fault
rather had been that she gave herself airs. Having no money to speak of,
she stood up against Aunt Barbree's riches by flaunting herself as a
mother: "though," as Aunt Barbree would complain to her husband, "I can't
see what she finds uncommon in the child, unless 'tis the number of his
pimples: and I've a mind, the next time, to recommend Wessel's
Antiscorbutic Drops. The boy looks u