nd fourteen second-hand sun-bonnets,
and more mournful refuse like that. Said she didn't intend to buy,
but she bid on them to run them up to help Mrs. Scudmore, and the
auctioneer knocked them down quicker'n a wink. Said it was 'Lot 47,'
and she had to take it all. And she said maybe she could make up the
sun-bonnets into bibs for the baby and use the tea-pots for preserves.
She thought she might make a pretty fair bedstead out of the posts by
propping the other ends on a chair; and she said it was a lucky thing
she was so forehanded about those churns, because she might have a
cow knocked down to her, and then she would be all ready for
butter-making. More'n likely she'll buy some old steer and bring him
home while she's rummaging around for bric-a-brac.

"When the Paxtons had their sale in January she was around there,
of course, and came home after dinner with the usual dismembered
furniture; and when I said to her, 'Emma, why under Heaven did you buy
in the mud-dredge and the sausage-stuffer?' she said she thought the
sausage-stuffer would do for a cannon for the boys on the Fourth of
July, and there was no telling if Charley wouldn't want to be a
civil engineer when he grew up, and perhaps he'd get a contract for
deepening the channel of the river; and then he'd rise up and bless
the foresight of the mother who'd bought a mud-dredge for two dollars
and saved it up for him.

"I sold that scoop on Wednesday for old iron for fifteen cents; and
I'll bang the head off of Charley if he ever goes to dredging mud or
playing cannon with the sausage-stuffer. I won't have my boys carrying
on in that way.

"Over there at Robinson's sale I believe she'd've bid on the whole
concern if I hadn't come in while she was going it. As it was,
she bought an aneroid barometer, three dozen iron skewers, a
sacking-bottom and four volumes of Eliza Cook's poems. Said she
thought those volumes were some kind of cookery-books, or she wouldn't
have bid on them, and the barometer would be valuable to tell us which
was north. _North_, mind you! She thought it indicated the points of
the compass. And yet they want to let women vote! I threw in those
skewers along with the mud-dredge, and she's used the sacking-bottom
twice to patch Charley's pants; and that's all the good we ever got
out of that auction.

"But she don't care for utility; it's simply a mania for buying
things. We haven't a stove in the house, and yet what does she do at
Murp