some has to go to the table; when they're there, they can take it or
leave it. The quality can keep their waiters settin' round day in an'
day out, fillin' up every chair in the room. For my part, I should
think they'd have an extension table moved in, an' a snowdrop cloth
over it!"

Miss Dyer had become comparatively placid, but now she gave way to
tears.

"Anybody can move that waiter that's a mind to," she said, tremulously.
"I would myself, if I had the stren'th; but I 'ain't got it. I ain't a
well woman, an' I 'ain't been this twenty year. If old Dr. Parks was
alive this day, he'd say so. 'You 'ain't never had a chance,' he says
to me. 'You've been pull-hauled one way or another sence you was born.'
An' he never knew the wust on't, for the wust hadn't come."

"Humph!" It was a royal and explosive note. It represented scorn for
which Mrs. Blair could find no adequate utterance. She selected the
straightest chair in the room, ostentatiously turned its back to her
enemy, and seated herself. Then, taking out her knitting, she strove to
keep silence; but that was too heavy a task, and at last she broke
forth, with renewed bitterness,--

"To think of all the wood I've burnt up in my kitchen stove an'
air-tight, an' never thought nothin' of it! To think of all the wood
there is now, growin' an' rottin' from Dan to Beersheba, an' I can't
lay my fingers on it!"

"I dunno what you want o' wood. I'm sure this room's warm enough."