acknowledged that anything lay out of the range
of her experience. Take your chicken till I get tea, for I am my own girl
to-night."

We had a very merry time over the tea-table and in washing up the dishes.
Until the boys went to bed we were in something of a frolic with them and
the baby, and it was not till the little one was asleep in her crib and Ed
and Charley were quiet in bed that we noticed how wild the weather was
getting.

The rain, which had at first fallen in pattering drops, was now driving in
sheets before a mighty wind, which roared through the woods back of the
house with a noise like thunder. The branches of the huge oaks in the
front yard creaked and groaned as only oak boughs can. The house shook,
the rain lashed the roof, and the wind clawed and rattled the blinds like
some wild creature trying to get in.

"I hope Wyn is safe under shelter,'' said Mrs. Moore.

"He will have reached the end of his journey long before this. I hope he
will have no trouble with the men, but he is not apt to. I pity poor Mr.
Robinson. When Wyn chooses, his extreme politeness is something quite
awful."

"I will say for my husband," observed Mrs. Moore, "that when he sets
himself to work to be disagreeable, he can, without doing one uncourteous
thing, be more aggravating than any one I ever saw in my life."

"It is perfectly evident that he never tries his airs on you, or you would
not speak so. Hear the wind blow!"

"It is no use listening to the weather. The house will stand, I suppose.
Have you got your work? Then let me read to you. It will seem like old
times, before I was married."

Minny Moore was in some respects a very remarkable woman. Though little
Carry was her first baby, she _could_ talk on other subjects. She did not
expect you to listen with rapture to the tenth account of how baby had
said "Da-da," or thrill with agony over the tale of an attack of wind. She
had been her husband's friend and companion before the baby was born: she
did not entirely throw him over now that it had come. She had always been
fond of reading, and she continued to keep up her interest in the world
outside of her nursery. She thought that as her daughter grew up her
mother would be as valuable as a guide and friend if she did not wholly
sink the educated woman in the nurse-maid and seamstress. These habits may
have been "unfeminine," but they certainly made Mrs. Moore much more
agreeable as a companion than if she had be