silly and pestered and rough-housed out of his senses by his little girl
cousin, Margery Hemingway--Mrs. W.B.'s little girl, you understand--and
her only seven, or two years younger than Junior, but leading him round
into all kinds of musses till his own mother was that demoralized after
a couple of days she said if that Margery child was hers she'd have her
put away in some good institution.

"Of course she only told that to me, not to Margery's mother. I don't
know--mebbe she would of put her away, she was that frightened little
Margery would get Junior killed off in some horrible manner, like the
time she got him to see how high he dast jump out of the apple tree
from, or like the time she told him, one ironing day, that if he drank a
whole bowlful of starch it would make him have whiskers like his pa in
fifteen minutes. Things like that--not fatal, mebbe, but wearing.

"Well, this day come a telegram about nine A.M. for Mrs. W.B., that her
aunt, with money, is very sick in New Jersey, which is near Yonkers; so
she and Mrs. L.H. Cummins, her sister, must go to see about this
aunt--and would I stay and look after the two kids and not let them get
poisoned or killed or anything serious? And they might have to stay
overnight, because the aunt was eccentric and often thought she was
sick; but this time she might be right. She was worth all the way from
three to four hundred thousand dollars.

"So I said I'd love to stay and look after the little ones. I wanted to
stay. Shopping in New York City the day before, two bargain sales--one
being hand-embroidered Swiss waists from two-ninety-eight upward--I felt
as if a stampede of longhorns had caught me. Darned near bedfast I was!
Say, talk about the pale, weak, nervous city woman with exhausted
vitality! See 'em in action first, say I. There was a corn-fed hussy in