enough out at interest to bring her in fifteen dollars each month. This, with her garden truck and home, made her independent.

To have money in the bank was a distinguishing mark of rank. Not a soul at Shintown except Eliza could boast so much. Sam Houston was the only one in the countryside who had tales to tell of a father and a grandfather who lived on interest money.

Her financial independence made Eliza’s peculiarities a little more bearable. They were the idiosyncracies of the bloated capitalist.

Eliza drove to the Bend the first of each quarter to draw her interest money. She wore a black silk dress and a little bonnet. How she hated the stiff shininess of black silk. How miserably awkward she felt with the caricature of black lace and purple pansies, which custom called a bonnet, on her head. But she had been reared to believe that black silk was the only proper dress for a woman, no longer young, and the days after twenty years were always placed to the credit of age.

So she wore her black silk, although she saw nothing pretty in it. The women of Shintown envied her the possession of such a mark of gentility and declared that Eliza had a good bit of style for a woman of her age, and after a fashion all their own were proud of her.

She always drove Old Prince when she went to the Bend. There was always a little shopping before she came home. Quarter day fell on the first of July. The sun was fairly blazing upon the stretch of dusty road which knew no shadow of tree.

Miss Eliza was anxious to get home. Her hands were sweating in their heavy gloves. Not a breeze was stirring. The stiff black silk was not an easy or comfortable dress for a hot day. Yet she let Old Prince take his time. The flies bothered him considerably, and he shied like a young colt at every object in the road. He had not been out of the stable-yard for a week and what energy had been left to him had been bottled up for this trip to town.

In his youth, some years before, he had been a vicious animal which only a man with a steady nerve and strong hand could manage. But age had made him tractable. He went home at a steady gait with the reins hanging loose on his back, except when Eliza shook them to dislodge an annoying fly.

As they turned the bend of the road at Farwell, Old Prince shied suddenly and turned the wheels deep in the ditch. Eliza steadied herself and seized the reins. “There, old 

 Prev. P 4/85 next