, taking fagots from fires of hope burning
too high to rekindle fires about to expire.

"How is he?" asked Hiram.

"_They_ say he can't last till fall," replied Henrietta; "but he'll last
another winter, maybe ten. He's having more and more fun all the time. He
has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he
happens to be sleeping badly--and that's pretty often--he bangs on the
anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then,
maybe he'll set 'em all to work mending his fishing tackle--right in the
dead of night."

"Are they all there still?" asked Hiram. "The Thomases, the Wilsons, the
Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?"

"Everyone--except Miss Frisbie. She's gone back home to Rushville, but
she's sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow. I saw Dory
Hargrave in the street a while ago. You know his mother was a first
cousin of old John's. I told him he ought not to let strangers get the
old man's money, that he ought to shy _his_ castor into the ring."

"And what did Dory say?" asked Hiram.

"He came back at me good and hard," said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored
laugh. "He said there'd been enough people in Saint X ruined by
inheritances and by expecting inheritances. You know the creek that flows
through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the
reservoir. Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had
been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any
graveyard creek, yet nobody talked of stopping it."

The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over
the other--a certain sign that he was thinking intently.

"There's a good deal of truth in what he said," she went on. "Look at our
family, for instance. We've been living on an allowance from Grandfather
Fuller in Chicago for forty years. None of us has ever done a stroke of
work; we've simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his
millions. Look at us! Bill and Tom drunkards, Dick a loafer without even
the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep
alive. Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our
family they began to loaf and wait. We've been waiting in decent, or I
should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we're still waiting.
We're a lot of paupers. We're on a level with the Wilmots."

"Yes--there are the Wilmots, too," said Hiram absently.

"That's another fo