unter and took a plug of tobacco
from a box.

"I'd take along a few sticks o' peppermint, too," he said, as he
wistfully surveyed the candy-jars, "but I've got so I can't suck a stick
without toothache. Ain't a bit o' fun treatin' yore stomach if you have
to abuse yore gums while you are at it. Well, so long, boys," he said,
after he had carefully counted the coins Cahews had put into his hand
and was descending the steps. "Folks says that partin' is always harder
on the ones that are left behind, an' I reckon it's so in this case, for
it's dull enough here, an' I intend to have a good time. The funeral,
and paying due respect to the dead, will occupy me to-day and to-morrow,
an' after that I want to take a fish in Ben's brag pond. They say he's
got--or did have when he was alive--government trout two foot long, an'
oodlin's of 'em, hungry enough to bite anything you stick on yore hook."

If the news of the wealthy planter's death and the departure of the
Wrinkles under the high honor which had been conferred upon the
unpretentious pair furnished food for gossip at Chester, what may be
said of the later report which at first crawled from the bereaved
mansion, and then, taking on speed, ran hurtling like wildfire over the
country?

Ben Warren, sick unto death, and yet in full possession of his senses,
for valid reasons of his own had cut off many anxious more distant
relatives and bequeathed all his real estate and personal property to
his loving and faithful niece, "Hester Wrinkle Henley."

Henley himself was disposed to regard the report as a false one, a
canard set afloat by the irrepressible Wrinkle, who would joke as
readily about the dead as the living. But even the shrewd business man
himself was convinced one morning by the appearance of Wrinkle, who had
dismounted from a fine horse at the hitching-post and came in lashing
the legs of his baggy trousers with a riding-whip.

"I reckon you've heard what's happened, Alf," he began, in a tone in
which there was no guile. "It never rains but it pours cats and
pitchforks. I'm out o' breath. Forty-six men, women, an' babies met me
as I rid in all as eager to know the facts as if they had the'r names in
the pot, an' I had to go over the tale so many times that my hoss got so
he would nod or shake his head exactly right whenever a question was
axed. Them that hate Het would turn white at the gills an' groan, an'
the rest would say, 'Oh, my!' an' set in to do it on th