urray and Dad and I were
everything to each other. We were very happy too, although we were
bossed by Uncle Abimelech more or less. But he meant it well and
Father didn't mind.

Then Father died--oh, that was a dreadful time! I hurried over it in
my thinking-out. Of course when Murray and I came to look our position
squarely in the face we found that we were dependent on Uncle
Abimelech for everything, even the roof over our heads. We were
literally as poor as church mice and even poorer, for at least they
get churches rent-free.

Murray's heart was set on going to college and studying medicine. He
asked Uncle Abimelech to lend him enough money to get a start with and
then he could work his own way along and pay back the loan in due
time. Uncle Abimelech is rich, and Murray and I are his nearest
relatives. But he simply wouldn't listen to Murray's plan.

"I put my foot firmly down on such nonsense," he said. "And you know
that when I put my foot down something squashes."

It was not that Uncle Abimelech was miserly or that he grudged us
assistance. Not at all. He was ready to deal generously by us, but it
must be in his own way. His way was this. Murray and I were to stay on
the farm, and when Murray was twenty-one Uncle Abimelech said he would
deed the farm to him--make him a present of it out and out.

"It's a good farm, Murray," he said. "Your father never made more than
a bare living out of it because he wasn't strong enough to work it
properly--that's what _he_ got out of a college course, by the way.
But you are strong enough and ambitious enough to do well."

But Murray couldn't be a farmer, that was all there was to it. I told
Uncle Abimelech so, firmly, and I talked to him for days about it, but
Uncle Abimelech never wavered. He sat and listened to me with a
quizzical smile on that handsome, clean-shaven, ruddy old face of his,
with its cut-granite features. And in the end he said,

"You ought to be the one to go to college if either of you did, Prue.
You would make a capital lawyer, if I believed in the higher education
of women, but I don't. Murray can take or leave the farm as he
chooses. If he prefers the latter alternative, well and good. But he
gets no help from me. You're a foolish little girl, Prue, to back him
up in this nonsense of his."

It makes me angry to be called a little girl when I put up my hair a
year ago, and Uncle Abimelech knows it. I gave up arguing with him. I
knew it was no u