“Very well, Mr. Brown; just as you choose about that.” “Oh, well, I give up.” “All right, Kent.” Molly emerged from the postoffice, with Mrs. Woodsmall following her. Such a stream of conversation poured from the latter’s lips that Judy felt her head swim. “Glad to meet you, Miss Kean. I have long wanted to see some of Molly’s correspondents. What beautiful postals you sent her last year from Maine; the summer before from Yellowstone Park; and those Eyetalian ones were grand; one year, even from Californy. You are the most traveled of all her friends, I believe, but Miss Oldham can say more on a postal than any of you, and such a eligible hand, too. Now-a-days all of you young folks write so much alike, since the round style come in, I can hardly tell your writin’ apart. It makes it very hard on a lonesome postmistress whose only way of gitting news is from the mail she handles. And now, since Uncle Sam has started this fool Rural Free Delivery, I don’t git time to more than half sort the mail before here comes Bud Woodsmall and snatches it from under my nose with irrevalent remarks about cur’osity and cats. Gimme the good old days when the neighbors come a-drivin’ up for their mail, and you could pass the time o’ day with them and git what news out of them you ain’t been able to git off of the postals, or make out through the thin ornvelopes, or guess from the postmarks. Anyhow, I gits ahead of Woodsmall lots of times. Jest yistiddy I ‘phoned over to Mrs. Brown that Molly would be in on this two train. To be sure, Woodsmall had the letter in his auto, but he has to go a long way round, and he’s sech a man for stopping and gassin’, and Molly’s ornvelope was some thinner than usual, and I could see mighty plain the time she expected to come. Said I to myself, said I, ’Now, ain’t Mrs. Brown nothing but a mother, and don’t she want the earliest news of her child she can git? And ain’t I the owner of that news, and should I not desiccate it if I can? It so happened that Woodsmall had a blow-out, and didn’t git yistiddy’s mail delivered until to-day. Now, tell me, wasn’t I right to git ahead of him?” She did not pause for a reply, but plunged into the stream of conversation again. “I don’t care if he is my own husband. He asked my sister first, and I never would have had him if there had been a chance of anything better offering. I wouldn’t have had him at all if I had foresaw that he was going to fly in my face by gitting app’inted to R. F. D., and then fly in the face of Providence by trying to run one of them artemobes.” Kent stopped the flow of words by saying: “Now, Mrs. Woodsmall, you are giving Miss Kean an entirely wrong idea of you and Bud. She will think you do not love him, and I am sure there is not a man in the county who fares better than your husband, or who shows his keep as well.”