f doors. Working in a stuffy office wouldn't suit me.
Oh, as a worker in the city I am a rank failure, and that's all there is
about it!"

He went home to supper much more tired than he would have been had he
done a full day's work at Dwight's Emporium. Indeed, the job he had lost
now loomed up in his troubled mind as much more important than it had
seemed when he had desired to change it for another.

Mother Atterson was at home. She hadn't more than taken off her bonnet,
however, and had had but a single clash with Chloe in the kitchen.

"I smelled it burnin' the minute I set my foot on the front step!"
she declared. "You can't fool my nose when it comes to smelling burned
stuff.

"Well, Hiram," she continued, too full of news to remark that he was at
home long before his time, "I saw the poor old soul laid away, at least.
I wish now I'd got Chloe in before, and gone to see Uncle Jeptha before
he was in his coffin.

"But I didn't think I could afford it, and that's a fact. We poor folks
can't have many pleasures in this world of toil and trouble!" added
the boarding house mistress, to whom even the break of a funeral, or a
death-bed visit, was in the nature of a solemn amusement.

"And there the old man went and made his will years ago, unbeknownst to
anybody, and me bein' his only blood relation, as you might say, though
it was years since I seen him much, but he remembered my mother with
love," and she began to wipe her eyes.

"Poor old man! And me with a white-faced cow that I'm afraid of my life
of, and an old horse that looks like a moth-eaten hide trunk we to
have in our garret at home when I was a little girl, and belonged to my
great-great-grandmother Atterson----

"And there's a mess of chickens that eat all day long and don't lay an
egg as far as I could see, besides a sow and a litter of six pigs that
squeal worse than the the switch-engine down yonder in the freight
yard----

"And they're all to be fed, and how I'm to do it, and feed the boarders,
too, I don't for the life of me see!" finished Mrs. Atterson, completely
out of breath.

"What do you mean?" cried Hiram, suddenly waking to the significance of
the old lady's chatter. "Do you mean he willed you these things?"

"Of course," she returned, smoothing down her best black skirt. "They
go with the house and outbuildings--`all the chattels and appurtenances
thereto', the will read."

"Why, Mrs. Atterson!" gasped Hiram. "He must have left