invalid pretty soon he would really have something the matter with him.

And he had incurred another offensive diagnosis: Old Doc Purdy, the medical examiner, whose sworn testimony had years before procured the judge his pension as a Civil War veteran, became brutal about it. Said Purdy: "I had to think up some things that would get the old cuss his money and dummed if he didn't take it all serious and think he did have 'em!"

The judge had been obliged to abandon all thoughts of a career. Years before he had been Newbern's justice of the peace, until a gang of political tricksters defeated the sovereign will of the people. And perhaps he would again have accepted political honours, but none had been offered him. Still, the family was prosperous. For in addition to the pension, Mrs. Penniman kept a neat card in one of the front windows promising "Plain and Fancy Dressmaking Done Here," and Winona now taught school.

Having adjusted the cushion, Winona paused before the cage of a parrot on a stand at the end of the porch. The bird sidled over to her on stiff legs, cocked upon her a leering, yellow eye and said in wheedling tones, "Pretty girl, pretty girl!" But then it harshly screeched, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" This laughter was discordant, cynical, derisive, as if the bird relished a tasteless jest.

Winona went to the hammock and resumed an open book. Its title was "Matthew Arnold—How to Know Him." She was getting up in Matthew Arnold for a paper. Winona at twenty was old before she should have been. She was small and dark, with a thin nose and pinched features. Her dark hair, wound close to her small head, was pretty enough, and her dark eyes were good, but she seemed to carry almost the years of her mother. She was an earnest girl, severe in thought, concerned about her culture, seeking to subdue a nature which she profoundly distrusted to an ideal she would have described as one of elegance and refinement. The dress she wore was one of her best—for an exemplary young man would call that evening, bringing his choice silver flute upon which he would play justly if not brilliantly to Winona's piano accompaniment—but it was dull of tint, one of her mother's plain, not fancy, creations. Still Winona felt it was daring, because the collar was low and sported a fichu of lace. This troubled her, even as she renewed the earnest effort to know Matthew Arnold. She doubtfully fingered at her throat a tiny chain that supported a tiny pendant. She slipped the thing under the neck of her waist. 

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