for example. Her conversation has the effect of hasheesh for lengthening the apparent duration of time: the Happy Thought man would call it dry as an extinct volcano; it drives everybody to the wall; is a perfect battering-ram for that--all talk and no wool, you know. She is perpetually finding mares' nests and getting news by the "grapevine telegraph," and she is always looking for signs in the air, in the embers, in candle-snuff, in empty teacups, as if mysterious laws like Kepler's threaded the universe and she knew the clue to them. If the cat turns her tail to the fire, the hired girl's mother thinks something will happen. She has a great deal of trouble. "Trouble sticks to me," says she. She keeps turkeys which are creatures that assert their American origin by running away to the woods and going wild at every opportunity, and a respectable old lady in cap and spectacles cannot chase wild turkeys through the woods; besides, they insist on roosting in her neighbors' cherry trees, a proceeding sure to kill the trees. And she keeps a cow with a genius for opening gates. Her cow has a habit of standing meditatively before a garden gate swinging her tail, but suddenly, after looking cautiously round, she will hook one horn into the gate by a quick twirl of her head, and by giving it a series of searching shakes will unfasten the latch, after which she will shoulder herself into the garden and take off its cream in great content. These facts are calculated to inflict a wound on neighborly peace not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but all the king's horses and all the king's men could not make it whole again. The hired girl's mother keeps hens too, and being a lone woman lets them run round the house for company. In winter you will be surprised to see a hen's face looking from her parlor window with an air of being at home. The hired girl's sister and sister's husband also come frequently to see her, riding in an old wagon drawn by a large, gray, famished horse that devours the farmer's oats by the bushel. The sister's husband is a carpenter by trade. He usually has a large boil or carbuncle on his arm that gives him leisure, and he sits by the kitchen fire with his chair tilted back, rubbing a grease spot on the wall from his bushy black hair and getting redder and redder in the face, talking about his boil until his head looks like a lampwick that has burned too long and needs snuffing. They stay until the sisters begin to quarrel. "Your coffee is dish-water and your gravy paste," sneers the hired girl's sister before she goes, alluding to the fact that thin coffee and fried pork gravy, in which are lumps that break on the tongue and fill the mouth with dry flour, are the vulnerable points of the farmhouse breakfast.