Aunt Lucretia was my only comforter, and a stern, unflinching, rude comforter she was. "Jack, _Colonel_ Ballington, actually wilted, a weakling, ruined by matrimony and too much love, as I always said you’d be, if you didn’t look out. Jack, you make me tired; born on this stock farm, seeing my crop of colts and calves, my spring lambs, too, and whatnots; the finest and most high-bred matrons of my paddock, bringing in their first borns and not a fool doctor in ten miles to meddle with them and Nature and her ways! And now Eloise, the gamiest, nerviest, bravest thoroughbred of them all! You make me tired! Come, I want to make a man of you." She seized my arm and led me into the house. In the library she took down her huge silver goblet, an international trophy won in France, her prize for the best merino wool, and then she led me down into the cellar. I had never been in it but once before. It was cool and damp, its sleepers lined with cobwebs. She lit a lantern and led me into the farthest, darkest, cobwebbiest corner. She stood before a small ten-gallon cask, and said with some show of grim humor, "Jack, it was fifteen years ago to-day—Did you know this was an anniversary? Well, fifteen years ago to-day I brought Eloise here, adopted her and gave her to you; and that day I told my old friend, Jack Daniel, to send me this ten-gallon cask of pure whiskey, to be put away, and to get good and mellow for just what I knew would one day happen—the first colt! And now we are going to tap it in his honor!" "_His_ honor, Aunt Lucretia?" I said shamedly. "I had set my heart on her being a—a—why, we are going to name her Lucretia," I added timidly and with some confusion. "Jack, you were always a fool; a bigger one since you married, just as I knew you’d be, all of ’em are. Why, of course he’ll be a good lusty chap; and I have already named him _Andrew Jackson_, and that’s what he’ll be, name and all. I am going to give his daddy a drink; he needs it, weak-kneeing around here like an old run-down selling-plater in the home stretch." In the dining-room she took down a cut-glass goblet and pottered around in the side-board till she had found her old-time loaf sugar. This she broke into bits, and, putting a piece in the goblet, she held it up to the light and eyed me queerly. I knew Aunt Lucretia, and that this ceremony was her way of playing for time and a kindly way of diverting my mind from Eloise. "Very few people, Jack," she went on, "know how to make a toddy. Now you pour a little water over this sugar and let it melt; if you crush it with the spoon it spoils the whole thing, and then pour the whiskey in slowly, stirring it all the time. The nutmeg; ah—"