ressing-gown
and slippers. Miss Sally Ruth gave him outright a brand-new Bible, and
loaned him an old cedar-wood wardrobe which had been her
great-grandmother's, and which still smelt delicately of generations
of rose-leaved and lavendered linen.

"All I ask," said Miss Sally Ruth sharply, "is that you'll read Paul
with your eyes open and your mouth shut, and that you'll keep your
clothes in that wardrobe and your moths out of it. If it was intended
for anybody to teach you anything, then Paul will teach you; but it
_wasn't_ intended for a cedar-wood wardrobe to hold moths, and I hope
you won't forget it!"

Major Cartwright sent over a fishing-rod, a large jar of tobacco, and
a framed picture of General Lee.

"Because no man, suh, could live under the same roof with even his
pictured semblance, and not be the bettah fo' it," said the major
earnestly. "I know. I've got to live with him myself. When I'm fair to
middlin' he's in the dinin' room. When I've skidded off the straight
an' narrow path I lock him up in the parlor, an' at such times I sleep
out on the po'ch. But when I'm at peace with man an' God I take him
into my bedroom an' look at him befo' retirin'. He's about as easy to
live with as the Angel Gabriel, but he's mighty bracin', Marse Robert
is: mighty bracin'!"

Thus equipped, John Flint settled himself in his own house. It had
been a wise move, for he had the sense of proprietorship, privacy, and
freedom. He could come and go as he pleased, with no one to question.
He could work undisturbed, save for the children who brought him such
things as they could find. He put his breeding cages out on the
vine-covered piazzas surrounding two-sides of his house, arranged the
cabinets and boxes which had been removed from my study to his own,
nailed up a few shelves to suit himself, and set up housekeeping.

My mother had been frankly delighted to have my creeping friends moved
out of the Parish House, and Clelie abated in her dislike of the
one-legged man because he had, in a way, removed from her a heretofore
never-absent fear of waking up some night and finding a caterpillar
under her bed. More yet, he entailed no extra work, for he flatly
refused to have her set foot in his rooms for the purpose of cleaning
them. He attended to that himself. The man was a marvel of neatness
and order. Mesdames, permit me to here remark that when a man is neat
and orderly no woman of Eve's daughters can compare with him. John