"They didn't?" said Tom, with secretly repressed exultation. "Well, if they didn't, I guess she'll do. They are rather nice, I reckon--and I meant they should be. Say, Mornin, suppose you dress her up and let me show her to the boys." He himself picked out the sumptuous long-skirted garments she was to wear and watched with the deepest interest the rather slow process of her attiring. He was particularly pleased with a wonderfully embroidered white cloak and lace cap, which latter article he abstractedly tied on his great fist and found much too small for it. His triumph, when she was given to his arms, he did not attempt to conceal, but carried her into the store with the manner of a large victor bearing his spoils. "Now look here, boys," he announced, being greeted with the usual laughter and jocular remarks. "This ain't the style of thing we want. Hand a man a chair." His customary support being produced, he seated himself in it, keeping his charge balanced with a dexterity and ease quite wonderful to behold. "What we want," he proceeded, "is a more respectful tone. Something in the elaborate chivalric style, and we're going to have it. What we want is to come into this establishment feeling that there's no risk of our being scared or upset by any durned fool startling us and setting our delicate machinery wrong. We've come here to stay, and we expect to be more familiar with things as we grow older, and the thing for us is to start out right without any disagreeable impressions. We don't want to say when we're brought in here--'Why, here's the place where that fool gave me such a start last week. I wonder if he's here again?' What we want is to feel that here's a place that's home, and a place that a person's likely to look forward to coming to with the view to ah--I should say to a high old time of an agreeable description." "She's a-goin' to be a doggoned purty critter," said a lounger who sat on a barrel near by. "She ain't nuthin' like her mother," said another; "though she wus a purty critter when I seed her." He had only seen her in her coffin. "She ain't like her father," put in another. Tom moved in his chair uneasily. "She won't be like either of them," he said. "Let that go." There was a tone in his voice which more than one among them had now and again noticed with some slow bewilderment during the last few weeks--a tone new to them, but which in time they grew used to, though they never understood its meaning. "Kinder," they used to say, "as ef he wus mad or--ruffed up, though it warn't that exactly, either." "Black eyes, h'ain't she?" inquired the man on the barrel. "Yes." "An har. That's my kind er women, black eyes an' har, and kinder spirity. They've more devil to 'em 'n' is better able to take care of 'emselves." "She's got some one to take care of her," answered Tom. "That's my business."