WALL, it never rains but it pours, duz it? And it has been my experience durin’ quite a middlin’ long life (jest how long, hain’t no matter, as I know on, to anybody but the man who takes our senses). But as I wuz sayin’, it has always been my experience that if company gets to comin’ either on my side or hisen, they keep a comin’. And it wuz only a short time after John Richard’s departure and exodus that I got a letter from a aunt on my side kinder askin’ and proposin’ to have her daughter Melinda Ann come to Jonesville to make us a long visit. And only a little while after this, one of hisen writ to the same effect. And we had ’em both here to one time. It wuz hard, but it seemed providential, and couldn’t be helped, and it worked out a onexpected good in the end that paid us some for it. But I wouldn’t go through it agin for a dollar bill. You see the way on’t is, I sot out in married life determined to do as well or better by the relations on his side than I did by them on my own side. I wuz bound to do well by the hull on ’em, jest bound to. But I made up my mind like iron that I would stand more, take more sass, be more obleegin’, and suffer and be calm more from hisen than from mine, and I would do awful, awful well by both sides. And it wuz these beliefs carried out and spread out into practice that caused my agonies and my sufferin’s that I went through for weeks. The way on’t wuz, I had a letter from the city from my great-aunt Melinda Lyons, a tellin’ me that her oldest girl, Melinda Ann (a old maiden), wuz all run down with nervous prostration, nervous fits and things, and she asked me if I would be willin’ to have her come down into the country and stay a few weeks with me. Wall, Aunt Melinda had done a good many good turns by me when I wuz a girl, and then I set quite a good deal of store by Melinda Ann, she and I wuz jest about of a age, and I talked it over with Josiah, and we give our consents and writ the letter, and the next week Melinda Ann come on, bag and baggage. A leather trunk and a bag for baggage. Wall, we found Melinda Ann wuz very good dispositioned and a Christian, but hard to get along with. [Illustration: MELINDA HAS A FIT.] The least thing we could do or say that wuz not jest so would throw her into a fit—a nervous fit you know—she would have spazzums, and all sally away, and faint like, and act. And then I would have to soothe her with catnip, and bring her up with mustard poultices, and apply a soap-stone to her. Why, one night Josiah happened to throw he bootjack down kinder hard (he had a corn and hit it, bein’ the cause). Wall, I stood over Melinda more’n two hours after that, three poultices bein’ applied in vain for relief, till arneky softened the blow to her. And one night the slats came out of the hired man’s bed, jest acrost the hall from hern, and it took more’n a quart of catnip to make her hull agin.