"Never you mind, Barbara!" cries the Brat, giving her a sounding
brotherly pat on the back. "Pay no attention to her."

"'What great events from trivial causes spring!' as the poet says: you
may live to bless the day that old Roger Crossed our doors."

"As how?" says Barbara, laughing, and rocking herself backward and
forward in a veteran American rocking-chair which, at different periods
of our history, has served most of us the dirty turn of tipping us over,
and presenting us reversed to the eyes of our family.

"Never you mind," repeats the Brat, oracularly; "truth is stranger than
fiction! odd things happen: I read in the paper the other day of a man
who pulled up the window for an old woman in the train, and she died at
once--I do not mean on the spot, but very soon after, and when she died
--listen, please, all of you--" (speaking very slowly and impressively)
--"she left him _two thousand pounds_ a year."

"I wish I saw the application," answers Barbara, still rocking and
sighing.

"Mind that you set a stool for his gouty foot," says Algy, feeling for
his faint mustache, "and run and search for his spectacle-case, when he
has mislaid it."

"Seriously," say I, "what a grand thing it would be for the family if he
were to adopt you, Barbara!"

"Or me," suggests the Brat, standing before the fire with his coat-tails