ng her how wise she has been to retire to this sylvan quietude,
where she can dream away her life in peace. She started easily:

"That's it; they always intimate that running a ranch is mere cream
puffs compared to a regular business, and they'd like to do the same
thing to-morrow if only they was ready to retire from active life. Mebbe
they get the idea from these here back-to-nature stories about a
brokendown bookkeeper, sixty-seven years old, with neuritis and gastric
complications and bum eyesight, and a wife that ain't ever seen a well
day; so they take every cent of their life savings of eighty-three
dollars and settle on an abandoned farm in Connecticut and clear nine
thousand dollars the first year raising the Little Giant caper for
boiled mutton. There certainly ought to be a law against such romantic
trifling. In the first place, think of a Connecticut farmer abandoning
anything worth money! Old Timmins comes from Connecticut. Any time that
old leech abandons a thing, bookkeepers and all other parties will do
well to ride right along with him. I tell you now--"

The second cigarette was under way, and suddenly, without modulation,
the performer was again on the theme, Posnett _nee_ Postlethwaite.

"Met her two years ago in Boston, where I was suffering a brief visit
with my son-in-law's aunts. She was the sole widow of a large woolen
mill. That's about all I could ever make out--couldn't get any line on
him to speak of. The first time I called on her--she was in pink silk
pyjamas, smoking a perfecto cigar, and unpacking a bale of lion and
tiger skins she'd shot in Africa, or some place--she said she believed
there would be fewer unhappy marriages in this world if women would only
try more earnestly to make a companion of their husbands; she said she'd
tried hard to make one of hers, but never could get him interested in
her pursuits and pastimes, he preferring to set sullenly at his desk
making money. She said to the day of his death he'd never even had a
polo mallet in his hand. And wasn't that pitiful!

"And right now she wanted to visit a snappy little volcano she'd heard
about in South America--only she had a grown son and daughter she was
trying to make companions of, so they would love and trust her; and
they'd begged her to do something nearer home that was less fatiguing;
and mebbe she would. And how did I find ranching now? Was I awfully keen
about it and was it ripping good sport? I said yes, to an