oard they who
partook carried their plates for the purpose to a side table. "The look
of the animal's tail is enough for me--it curls," he would say.

"So does a pig's tail curl," his son used to remonstrate sensibly.

"Not having kept a straight course so long,--then twirling up
deceitfully like a second thought. This fellow is a monstrosity,--and
his wife has a pocket for a cradle,--and I don't know who they are nor
where they came from,--they were left over from before the Flood,
perhaps,--they look somehow prehistoric to me. I am not acquainted with
the family."

And turning his head aside he would wave away the dainty, the delight of
the pioneer epicure time out of mind.

The diplomatic reason, however, that Richard Mivane was wont to shove
off his grandchildren from the arm of that stately chair was that here
they got on his blind side,--his simple, grandfatherly, affectionate
predilection. The touch of them, their scrambling, floundering, little
bodies, their soft pink cheeks laid against his, their golden hair in
his clever eyes, their bright glances at close range,--he was then like
other men and could deny them nothing! His selfishness, his vanity, his
idleness, his frippery were annulled in the instant. He was resolved
into the simple constituent elements of a grandfather, one part doting
folly, one part loving pride, and the rest leniency, and he was as wax
in their hands.

None of them had so definitely realized this, accurately discriminating
cause and effect, as Peninnah Penelope Anne. She felt safe the moment
that she was perched on the arm of her grandfather's chair, her soft
clasp about his stiff old neck, her tears flowing over her cheeks, all
pink anew, escaping upon his wrinkled, bloodless, pale visage and taking
all the starch out of his old-fashioned steinkirk. He struggled futilely
once or twice, but she only hugged him the closer.

"Oh, don't let him go! Oh, don't let him go!" she cried.

"The wolf that we were talking about? By no means! Lovely creature that
he is! We'll preserve, if you like, wolves instead of pheasants! I
remember a gentleman's estate in Northumberland--a little beyond the
river"--

"Oh, grandfather, don't let him go!" she sobbingly interrupted. "It was
he who shot the wolf and stampeded the herds, and the cow-drivers will
quarrel with him when they would not have angry words with another
ambassador. They will kill him! They will kill him!"

"What for? Poaching?--s