“I don’t know whether to lick you or not,” she said judicially. Finally: “Go up to bed without supper.” Jimmy went. She addressed us in perfect good humor, as a musical volcano might: “Come and eat.” III THE DAUGHTER OF THE KING Never did I see beefsteak so thick. There was a garnish of fried onions. There was a separate sea of gravy. There was a hill of butter, a hill of thickly sliced bread. There was a delectable mountain of potatoes. That was all. These people were living the simple life, living it in chunks. At table, as everywhere, the husband solemnly deferred to the wife. She was to him a druid priestess. And so she was radiant, as woman enthroned is apt to be. Of course, no young lady from finishing school would have liked the way we tunnelled and blasted our way through the provender. We were gloriously hungry and our manners were a hearty confession of the fact. My passion for the joys of the table partially sated, I began to realize the room. There were hardly any of the comforts of home. There was a big onyx time-piece, chipped, and not running. Beside it was a dollar alarm-clock in good trim. There were in the next room, among other things, two frail gilt parlor chairs, almost black. The curtains were streaked with soot and poorly ironed. She said she had washed them yesterday. But, she continued, “I just keep cheerful, I don’t keep house. Doesn’t seem like I can, this street is so awful dirty and noisy and foreign.” “Yet you like it,” said the husband. “Yes,” she said, “that’s because I’m half Irish. The Irish were born for excitement.” “What’s _your_ ancestry?” I asked the husband. “My father was a mountain white. Moved here from North Carolina, and dug coal and married a Pennsylvania Dutch lady.” “It’s your turn,” she said to me. “You are a preacher?” “That’s a kind of an excuse I make.” “You can’t be any worse than the preacher we had here,” continued the wife. “He lived down toward Shickshinny. He preached in an old chapel. He wouldn’t start a Sunday school. We needed one bad enough. He just married folks. He hardly ever buried them. They say he was afraid. And,” she continued, with a growing tone of condemnation, “it’s a preacher’s BUSINESS to face death. “Just about the time two of our children died of diphtheria, was when he came to these parts. He was a Presbyterian, and I was raised a Presbyterian, and he wouldn’t preach the funeral of my two babies. He promised to come, and we waited two hours. So I just read the Bible at the grave.” This she recounted with a bitter sense of insult. “And the same day he locked up his mother, too.” “Locked up his mother?” “Yes. Some said he wanted to visit a woman he didn’t want her to know about. They said he was afraid she would follow him and spy. He locked up the old lady, and she about yelled the roof off, and the neighbors let her out. “And then,” continued my hostess, “when he was dying, he sent for a Wilkesbarre priest.”