"Come to dinner with me, Alf, and let's go now. What's the use of staying to the funeral? We'll eat a good dinner and smoke, and good digestion will wait on appetite, and we'll plan and say we'll do better next time." So we left the hurly-burly and took the train, and were at Harlson's home a little before the dinner hour. Grant tried his latch-key, but it would not serve. He rang the bell, but there came no answer. Then there came a tapping and clatter from inside a window, and both of us left the porch to get down upon the sward and visit the window and investigate. Inside the window, and smiling, was a small, brown woman, holding in her arms a crowing youngster, who was making a great ado and reaching out his hands toward his father. She raised the window just a little, and put a question, gravely: "What is it that you wish, gentlemen?" Grant intimated, humbly, that we wanted to get in and be given some dinner. "Are you the gentlemen who were going to carry the Ninth Ward?" "Yes." "Did you carry it?" "No." The laughing face fell a little, but the stately air was recovered in a moment. "Well," she said, with dignity, "I'm very sorry. We do not wish to seem inhospitable, neither the baby nor I, but really we do not feel justified in harboring people incapable of carrying the Ninth Ward." We explained and pleaded and apologized and promised, but for a long time to no avail. At last, after the dinner-bell had sounded, and after we had pledged ourselves to carry that ward yet or perish, we were admitted, only then, though, as was explained, for the child's sake. He was accustomed to climb upon his father after dinner. So carrying the Ninth Ward became a synonym for any difficult feat with us, and if Grant accomplished this or that, or I made a good turn, or Jean gave her cook or dressmaker an inspiration, the Ninth Ward was referred to as having been carried. And here was that ward before us again in a greater emergency, and in its own proper person. Gunderson had a wife. He would have owned two wives had the one in his possession been surveyed and subdivided properly, for she was big enough, abundantly, for two. She was the best illustration I ever saw of what difficulties burden the ignorant rich who have social ambitions. She was good-hearted, coarse, shy and hopeful. A woman may be coarse and yet timid, as I have noted many a time, and Mrs. Gunderson was of this type. She hungered for social status, but knew not how to attain it. To her burly husband's credit, he wished, above all things, to gratify his wife's ambition, but he was as ignorant as she regarding ways and means. He had learned that there was a limit even to the power of money.