[Illustration] MORE “SHORT SIXES.” [Illustration] MORE “SHORT SIXES”~ BY H·C·BUNNER~ [Illustration] ILLUSTRATED BY C·J·TAYLOR· KEPPLER & SCHWARZMANN·PUBLISHERS. PUCK BUILDING·NEW·YORK·MDCCCXCIV·· [Illustration] Copyright, 1894, by KEPPLER & SCHWARZMANN. [Illustration: colophon] TO A. L. B. Contents. Page. The Cumbersome Horse 1 Mr. Vincent Egg and the Wage of Sin 22 The Ghoollah 46 Cutwater of Seneca 68 Mr. Wick’s Aunt 84 What Mrs. Fortescue Did 110 “The Man with the Pink Pants” 134 The Third Figure in the Cotillion 156 “Samantha Boom-de-ay” 180 My Dear Mrs. Billington 214 THE CUMBERSOME HORSE. It is not to be denied that a sense of disappointment pervaded Mr. Brimmington’s being in the hour of his first acquaintance with the isolated farm-house which he had just purchased, sight unseen, after long epistolary negotiations with Mr. Hiram Skinner, postmaster, carpenter, teamster and real estate agent of Bethel Corners, who was now driving him to his new domain. Perhaps the feeling was of a mixed origin. Indian Summer was much colder up in the Pennsylvania hills than he had expected to find it; and the hills themselves were much larger and bleaker and barer, and far more indifferent in their demeanor toward him, than he had expected to find them. Then Mr. Skinner had been something of a disappointment, himself. He was too familiar with his big, knobby, red hands; too furtive with his small, close-set eyes; too profuse of tobacco-juice, and too raspingly loquacious. And certainly the house itself did not meet his expectations when he first saw it, standing lonely and desolate in its ragged meadows of stubble and wild-grass on the unpleasantly steep mountain-side.