neither. The French are a godless
people, full of vanity and all uncleanness."

Shelby's imagination balked at suggesting another alternative, and he
held his peace. The visitor's jetty eyes forsook his face and pounced
upon the clerk, who, with tongue in cheek, was filling out narrow slips
of paper at a battered table clothed in a baize of a dye traditionally
held to have been green.

"How's your ma's lumbago, Willie Irons?" she demanded.

The youth stammered a husky reply, and blushed far into his
brick-colored hair. He was of an age when a babyish diminutive becomes
a thorn unspeakable. Mrs. Weatherwax glanced tranquilly past his
writhings to the ancient table.

"Ross," she asked, "wa'n't that your grandfather's?"

"Yes. He used it in his place of business."

"I call to mind seein' it in the old distillery when I was a girl,"
pursued the widow, who never called a spade an agricultural implement.
"Distillin's a wicked business."

"People thought differently about many things in my grandfather's day."

The widow sniffed. "Wrong's wrong. Is that Seneca Bowers's roll-top
desk?"

"It was Mr. Bowers's. I bought it when we dissolved partnership."

"Law books, too?"

"Yes."

"Threw in the pictur's, I s'pose?" indicating some dingy lithographs of
political worthies past and present.

"Yes," admitted Shelby with superhuman good nature; "they came to boot."

The widow sniffed again. "'Pears to me," said she, "you've got nothin'
new."

The man wheeled in his chair to a neighboring safe and took a
tape-bound document from a pigeon-hole.

"Shall we begin?" he asked.

"Yes--if you're so rushed," she returned, and composed her features to
fitting solemnity. As the lawyer slowly read the instrument, which he
could have rattled off from memory, Mrs. Weatherwax punctuated the
pious phrases of its exordium with approving wags. "'Frail and
transitory,'" she interpolated; "that's jest what life is. I might be
took any minute." At the reference to the payment of her lawful debts
she recovered her spirits sufficiently to put in that she did not owe a
"red cent," as everybody knew. Finally she called a halt. "Needn't go
any farther," she directed. "The first part's what I like to hear
best. Exceptin' one thing, all the rest about my green rep sofy
a-goin' to Cousin Phoebe, the pickle-caster to Brother Henry, the old
dishes what can't be sold to my beloved nephew, Jason Weatherwax, and
my best tableclot