Aunt Jerry was not in the best of spirits when she received the letter. She had been having a cistern dug under her back stoop, and what with hurrying Robbins, who dug it, and watching her clock to see that he worked his hours, she had worried herself almost sick; while to crown all, the poor old man, who at her instigation had spent nearly one entire day in wheeling the dirt to a safe distance from the house, where it wouldn’t “stand round in a great ugly pile,” found on sinking his hogshead that he had dug his excavation too large, and would need all, or nearly all, the dirt to fill it up again; and greatly to the horror of the highly incensed Miss Pepper, he spent another day in wheeling his dirt back again. It was of no use for Miss Jerusha to scold, and call the man a fool. She had ordered the dirt away herself, and now she listened in a half-frantic condition to the slow tramp, tramp of Robbins’ feet, and the rattling sound of the wheelbarrow which brought it back again, and undid the work of yesterday. “Shiffless as the rot,” was Aunt Jerry’s parting comment, spoken to herself, as, the cistern finally finished, Robbins departed, just as a boy brought her Edna’s letter. The sight of the money mollified her a little, and for a long time she sat thinking, with her pasteboard sun-bonnet on her head, and Tabby in her lap. At last, her thoughts found vent in words, and she anathematized Roy Leighton, and called him “a stingy hunks if he touched a dollar of that child’s hard earnings. Don’t catch me to do it, though I dare say _he_ thinks I will!” and Aunt Jerry gave a contemptuous sniff at the mysterious _he_, whoever he might be. The next day she went to Canandaigua, and got a new bank-book, with “Edna Browning’s” name in it, and put to her credit two hundred dollars, and then at night wrote to her niece, telling her “she had done better than she ever ’sposed she would, and that if she kept on she might in time make a woman, perhaps.” Not a word, however, did she say with regard to her disposition of the funds: that was a surprise for the future; but after finishing her letter, she caught up a half sheet of paper, in a fierce kind of way, and wrote hurriedly: “PHILIP OVERTON:—I dare say you think me as mean as _pussley_, and that I kept that money Edna sent for my own, but I assure you, sir, I didn’t. I put every dollar in the bank for _her_, and added another hundred besides. “Yours to command, JERUSHA PEPPER.” “P.S.—I hope, from some things Edna tells me, you are thinking about your depraved state, while out of the ark of safety. J. P.” Edna never saw this letter, for Uncle Phil did not think it best to show it to her; but he read it many times with infinite satisfaction, and took a pinch of snuff each time he read it, and chuckled over it amazingly, and said to himself: