s in
their belfry, and after a few years she got on the stage, and made
a bunch of money, and went abroad. And then she had married a titled
person, and everybody supposed she was a duchess, or a countess, and ma
wanted us to inquire about her when we got over here. Ma didn't want us
to go and hunt her up to board with her, or anything, but just to get
a glimpse of high life, and see if our poor little friend was doing
herself proud in her new station in life.

[Illustration: Isn't money enough in the whole family to wad a gun 131]

Gee, but dad found her, and she ain't any more of a duchess than I am.
Her husband is a younger son of a titled person, but there isn't money
enough in the whole family to wad a gun, and our poor girl is working in
a shop, or store, selling corsets to support a lazy, drunken husband and
a whole mess of children, and while she is seven removes from a duchess,
she does not rank with the woman who washes her mother's clothes at
home. Gosh, but dad was hot when he found her, and after she told him
about her situation in life he gave her a yellow-backed fifty-dollar
bill, and came back to the hotel mad, and wanted to pack up and go
somewhere else, where he didn't know any titled-persons.

That night a couple of dukes came around to the hotel to sell dad some
stock in a diamond mine in South Africa, and they got to talking about
how English society held over our crude American society, until dad got
an addition to the mad he had when he called on our girl, and when one
of the dukes said America was being helped socially by the marriage
of American women to titled persons, dad got a hot box, like a stalled
freight train.

Says dad, says he: "You Johnnies are a lot of confidence men, who live
only to rope in rich American girls, so you can marry them and have
their dads lift the mortgages on your ancestral estates, and put on tin
roofs in place of the mortgages, 'cause a mortgage will not shed rain,
and you get their money and spend it on other women." One of the dukes
turned red like a lobster, and I think he is a lobster, anyway, and he
was going to make dad stop talking, but the duke didn't know dad, and he
continued. Says dad, says he: "I know a rich old man in the States, who
made ten million dollars on pickles, or breakfast food, and he had a
daughter that was so homely they couldn't keep a clock going in the
house.

"She came over here and got exposed to a duke, and she had never been
v