my make.
But I'm a good deal less snarly and more contented when he's a failure
than I am when he isn't."

"Then he isn't always a failure," said Hawking, brightening.

"Him? Oh, bless you, no. He makes a strike, as he calls it, from time
to time. Then's my time to fret and fuss. For the money just flies
--first come first served. Straight off, he loads up the house with
cripples and idiots and stray cats and all the different kinds of poor
wrecks that other people don't want and he does, and then when the
poverty comes again I've got to clear the most of them out or we'd
starve; and that distresses him, and me the same, of course.

"Here's old Dan'l and old Jinny, that the sheriff sold south one of the
times that we got bankrupted before the war--they came wandering back
after the peace, worn out and used up on the cotton plantations,
helpless, and not another lick of work left in their old hides for the
rest of this earthly pilgrimage--and we so pinched, oh so pinched for the
very crumbs to keep life in us, and he just flung the door wide, and the
way he received them you'd have thought they had come straight down from
heaven in answer to prayer. I took him one side and said, 'Mulberry we
can't have them--we've nothing for ourselves--we can't feed them.'
He looked at me kind of hurt, and said, 'Turn them out?--and they've come
to me just as confident and trusting as--as--why Polly, I must have
bought that confidence sometime or other a long time ago, and given my
note, so to speak--you don't get such things as a gift--and how am I
going to go back on a debt like that? And you see, they're so poor,
and old, and friendless, and--' But I was ashamed by that time, and shut
him off, and somehow felt a new courage in me, and so I said, softly,
'We'll keep them--the Lord will provide.' He was glad, and started to
blurt out one of those over-confident speeches of his, but checked
himself in time, and said humbly, 'I will, anyway.' It was years and
years and years ago. Well, you see those old wrecks are here yet."

"But don't they do your housework?"

"Laws! The idea. They would if they could, poor old things, and perhaps
they think they do do some of it. But it's a superstition. Dan'l waits
on the front door, and sometimes goes on an errand; and sometimes you'll
see one or both of them letting on to dust around in here--but that's
because there's something they want to hear about and mix their gabble
into.