mail should be distributed! Once, just from sheer content, he stopped
his:

"Did you ever ever ever
In your life life life
See the devil devil devil
Or his wife wife wife--"

and turned and looked at his Mary.

"Nice day, Kit?" he said; and she said, "Lovely!" Then she brushed her
elderly rosy cheek against his shabby coat and kissed it. They had been
married for thirty years, and she had held up his hands as he placed
upon the altar of a repugnant duty, the offering of a great
renunciation. She had hoped that the birth of their last, and only
living, child, Edith, would reconcile him to the material results of the
renunciation; but he was as indifferent to money for his girl as he had
been for himself.... So there they were, now, living rather carefully,
in an old stone farmhouse on one of the green foothills of the Allegheny
Mountains. The thing that came nearest to soothing the bruises on his
mind was the possibilities he saw in Maurice.

"The inconsequence of the scamp amounts to genius!" he used to tell his
Mary with admiring displeasure at one or another of Maurice's scrapes.
"Heaven knows what he'll do before he gets to the top of Fool Hill, and
begins to run on the State Road! Look at this mid-year performance. He
ought to be kicked for flunking. He simply dropped everything except his
music! Apparently he _can't_ study. Even spelling is a matter of private
judgment with Maurice! Oh, of course, I know I ought to have scalped
him; his father would have scalped him. But somehow the scoundrel gets