"Oh, no, I'm used to it; and I'd rather have him so than the other way.
When I call him a failure, I mean to the world he's a failure; he isn't
to me. I don't know as I want him different much different, anyway.
I have to scold him some, snarl at him, you might even call it, but I
reckon I'd do that just the same, if he was different--it's my make.
But I'm a good deal less snarly and more contented when he's a failure
than I am when he isn't."

"Then he isn't always a failure," said Hawking, brightening.

"Him? Oh, bless you, no. He makes a strike, as he calls it, from time
to time. Then's my time to fret and fuss. For the money just flies
--first come first served. Straight off, he loads up the house with
cripples and idiots and stray cats and all the different kinds of poor
wrecks that other people don't want and he does, and then when the
poverty comes again I've got to clear the most of them out or we'd
starve; and that distresses him, and me the same, of course.

"Here's old Dan'l and old Jinny, that the sheriff sold south one of the
times that we got bankrupted before the war--they came wandering back
after the peace, worn out and used up on the cotton plantations,
helpless, and not another lick of work left in their old hides for the
rest of this earthly pilgrimage--and we so pinched, oh so pinched for the
very crumbs to keep life in us, and he just flung the door wide, and the
way he received them you'd have thought they had come straight down from
heaven in answer to prayer. I took him one side and said, 'Mulberry we
can't have them--we've nothing for ourselves--we can't feed them.'
He looked at me kind of hurt, and said, 'Turn them out?--and they've come
to me just as confident and trusting as--as--why Polly, I must have
bought that confidence sometime or other a long time ago, and given my