hack yere in de snow wif dese yere ol' legs o' mine."

"Get one of them station cabs," advised the grocer; and so, after
considerable discussion, the bundle problem was solved.

Ten minutes later Uncle Noah entered a hired carriage for the first
time in his life. At the town florist's he rapped a timid signal to
the driver to stop, and, glowing with anticipation, spryly shuffled
into the warm, scented air of the little shop. Here, to the smiling
clerk's astonishment, he ordered a bunch of violets to be delivered
Christmas morning to "de young lady wif de gray eyes whut's at Major
Verney's."

"Surely," smiled the clerk, "you don't want that on the card?"

But Uncle Noah was stubborn; more, he insisted on writing the
inscription himself, his orthography quite as quaint as his penmanship,
and so the card went to be read by the wonderful gray eyes in the
morning.

Back through the snow in his rickety carriage rolled Uncle Noah,
rattling home along the snowy road down which he had trudged in the
early evening, chuckling now intermittently in a mental rehearsal of
his new plan.

"Fifty cents a day!" he thought, "an' to-morrow I'se a-goin' to slip
over to Fernlands in de mornin' an' ask her to lemme buy maself back on
de 'stallment plan. Mos' likely she'll take a dollar a week, an' wid
all de rest o' dat grocer money ol' Mis' doan have to know whut de
Colonel an' me is a-goin' through."