hy's sale but bid on sixty-two feet and three elbows of rusty
stovepipe and cart it home with four debilitated gingham umbrellas.
Said the umbrellas were a bargain because, by putting in new covers
and handles and a rib here and there, they would do for birthday
presents for her aunts. And the stovepipe could be sent out to the
farm to be put around the peach trees to keep the cows off. How in
thunder she was ever going to get a stovepipe around a peach tree
never crossed her mind. She is just as impractical as a baby.

"When Bailey had the auction at his insurance office, there she was,
and, sure enough, that afternoon she landed in our side yard with
Bailey's poll-parrot and a circular saw. It amused me. She wanted to
use that saw as a dinner-gong, but it was cracked, and so she has
turned it into a griddle for muffins. Bailey had taught the parrot to
swear so that I was afraid it'd demoralize Charley, and I don't mind
telling you in confidence that I killed it by putting bug-poison in a
water-cracker.

"Now, I see there's an auction advertised for Friday at Peters'; and
Peters has a pyramid of old tomato cans and bric-a-brac of that sort
piled up in his back yard. Now, you see if that woman don't bid on
those cans until she runs them up to a dollar apiece, and then come
lugging them around to our house with some extraordinary idea about
loading them up with gunpowder and selling them to the government
during the next war for bombshells. If she does, that winds the thing
up. I'm a good-natured man, but no woman shall bring home three
hundred tomato cans to my house and retain a claim upon my affections.
I'll resign first."

My feeling was that he was a little mixed in his notions about
bric-a-brac, but that he really had a grievance.

* * * * *

Potts told me, also, that he came home very late one night recently,
and when he went up stairs his wife and children were in bed asleep.
He undressed as softly as he could, and then, as he felt thirsty, he
thought he would get a drink of water. Fortunately, he saw a gobletful
standing on the washstand, placed there for him, evidently, by Mrs.
Potts. He seized it and drank the liquid in two or three huge gulps,
but just as he was draining the goblet he gagged, dropped the glass to
the floor, where it was shivered to atoms, while he ejected something
from his mouth. He was certain that a live animal of some kind had
been in the water, and th