with his family in the rooms above his shop; and my grandmother
Smith dropped her "aitches" with the cheerful ease of one to the
manner born, bless her stout old Cockney heart! I can remember her
hearing me my spelling-lesson of a night, her spectacles far down on
her old button of a nose, her white curls bobbing from under her
cap.

"What! Carn't spell 'saloon'? Listen, then, Miss: There's a hess and
a hay and a hell and two hoes and a henn! Now, then, d 'ye spell
it!"

Not that Mrs. Johnny ever accepted us. It was borne in upon the
Smiths that undesirable in-laws are outlaws. This despite the fact
that my mother's pink-and-white English face was a gentler copy of
what her uncle's had been in his youth; and that when I came along,
some years after the dear old man's death, I was named Sophronisba
at Mrs. Johnny's urgent request.

After Great-Uncle Johnny died, as if the last tie which bound her to
ordinary humanity had snapped, his widow retired into a seclusion
from which she emerged only to sue somebody. She said the world was
being turned topsyturvy by people who were allowed to misbehave to
their betters, and who needed to be taught a lesson and their proper
place; and that so long as she retained her faculties, she would do
her duty in that respect, please God!

She did her duty so well in that respect that the Hynds fortune,
which even civil war and reconstruction hadn't been able altogether
to wreck, dwindled to a mere fifteen thousand dollars; and she
wasn't on speaking terms with anybody but Judge Gatchell, her