The Tinder-Box
and then straighten out the threads at her leisure--and the man's leisure too.

Glendale affairs interest me more every day. This has been a remarkable afternoon and I wish Jane had been in Glendale to witness it.

"Say, Evelina, all the folks over at our house have gone crazy, and I wish you would come over and help Cousin James with 'em," Henrietta demanded, as I sat on my side porch, calmly hemming a ruffle on a dress for the Kitten. Everybody sews for the twins and, as much as I hate it, I can't help doing it.

"Why, Henrietta, what is the matter?" I demanded, as I hurried down the front walk and across the road at her bare little heels. By the time I got to the front gate I could hear sounds of lamentation.

"A railroad train wants to run right through the middle of all their dead people and Sallie started the crying. Dead's dead, and if Cousin James wants 'em run over. I wants 'em run over too." She answered over her shoulder as we hurried through the wide front hall.

And a scene that beggars description met my eyes, as I stood in the living-room door. I hope this account I am going to try and write will get petrified by some kind of new element they will suddenly discover some day and the manuscript be dug up from the ruins of Glendale to interest the natives of the Argon age about 2800 A. D.

Sallie sat in the large armchair in the middle of the room weeping in the slow, regular way a woman has of starting out with tears, when she means to let them flow for hours, maybe days, and there were just five echoes to her grief, all done in different keys and characters. Cousin Martha knelt beside the chair and held Sallie's head on her ample bosom, but I must say that the expression on her face was one of bewilderment, as well as of grief.

The three little Horton cousins sat close together in the middle of the old hair-cloth sofa by the window and were weeping as modestly and helplessly as they did everything else in life, while Mrs. Hargrove, in her chair under her son's portrait, was just plainly out and out howling.

And on the hearth-rug, before the tiny fire of oak chips that the old ladies liked to keep burning all summer, stood the master of the house and, for once in my life, I have seen the personification of masculine helplessness. He was a tragedy and I flew straight to him with arms wide open, which clasped both his shoulders as I gave him a good shake to arouse him 
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