"Oh, let her talk. Mother _likes_ to feel care; she wants something to worry about; she'd be as forlorn as a hen without a nest-egg if she hadn't that. Don't you trouble your head, Nabby, so long as I don't." For all that, Nabby congratulated herself that Mother Jones was not at the tea-table, for the nurture and admonition of young Zeph was one of her most fruitful and weighty sources of care. She was always declaring that "children was sech an awful responsibility, that she wondered that folks dared to git married!" She laid down precepts, strict even to ferocity, as to the early necessity of prompt, energetic government, and of breaking children's wills; and then gave master Zeph everything he cried for, and indulged all his whims with the most abject and prostrate submission. "I know I hadn't orter," she would say, when confronted with this patent inconsistency; "but then I ain't his mother. I ain't got the responsibility; and the fact is he _will_ have things and I _hev_ to let him. His parents orter break his will, but they don't; it's a great care to me;" and Mother Jones would end by giving him the sugar-bowl to play with, and except for the immutable laws of nature she would doubtless have given him the moon or any part of the solar system that he had cried for. Nevertheless, let it not be surmised that Mother Jones, notwithstanding the minor key in which she habitually indulged, was in the least unhappy. There are natures to whom the "unleavened bread and bitter herbs" of life are an agreeable and strengthening diet, and Mother Jones took real pleasure in everything that went to show that this earth was a vale of tears. A funeral was a most enlivening topic for her, and she never allowed an opportunity to pass within riding distance without giving it her presence, and dwelling on all the details of the state of the "corpse" and the minutiæ of the laying-out for weeks after, so that her presence at table between her blooming son and daughter answered all the moral purposes of the skeleton which the ancient Egyptians kept at their feasts. Mother Jones also, in a literal sense, "_enjoyed_ poor health" and petted her coughs and her rheumatisms, and was particularly discomposed with any attempt to show her that she was getting better. Yet when strictly questioned the good lady always admitted, though with a mournful shake of the head, that she had everything to be thankful for--that Hiel was a good son, and Nabby was a good daughter, and 'since Hiel had jined the church and hed prayers in his family, she hoped he'd hold on to the end--though it really worried her to see how light and triflin' he was.'