“Let me see—I guess she was around seventeen when Hopeful first went there—girls was more advanced at seventeen than they are now. That fall, when it came time to close the house and go to New York, Abby Clergy tells Hopeful she wants her to come and live in their New York house the same as if she was one of these high-flyer maids they bring from Paris. Of course Hopeful was mighty glad, for she had come to love Miss Abby and she knew Jim would have told her to go, if he could have done it. But before they closed the house, they give a harvest dance, so they called it—late in September it was—and I never did see such a time. The stables were packed with teams, and the steam cars ran a special train to South Wales for some of the people, and a fellow in New York sent the food, and champagne just flowed like the lake water. They had fiddlers from New York, and a florist with a load of flowers to fix up every room, and nobody else on the lake shore thought of going home until the Clergys’ harvest dance was over. “Hopeful used to tell me everything that was goin’ on and she often says, ‘Betsey, that girl is too beautiful and good to live—I’m afraid she is goin’ to be taken.’ I laffed at her and said she’d marry a fine gentleman, and Hopeful would watch their children playin’ on the beach, but Hopeful always said no, she had a feeling things wouldn’t be right. Now Abby Clergy was beautiful—just five feet tall, she was, and slight as a reed. She had big, black, satiny eyes and an ivory skin. It was natural for her never to have color and her hair was blue black, combed up high and fastened with a carved comb, and, when she laffed, Ali Baba said her teeth was prettier than her strings of pearls—real pearls they was, too—but I must tell you something about Ali Baba. “Nobody never thought of calling Joshua Maples anything but Josh, until Miss Abby named him Ali Baba after he started bein’ her father’s summer coachman and winter caretaker. One day he says to her, ‘Miss Abby, don’t you ever worry about anybody’s stealin’ this house. Just dismiss it from your mind the minute you leave here in the fall—and I ain’t goin’ to let any one steal you, neither.’ And she laffs and says, ‘Why, who wants to steal me?’ And that was a joke, because Abby Clergy had more beaux than she could remember their names, but she just smiled at them all and never cared any more for any particular one than she did for any particular rose that was bloomin’ outside her window. ‘A lot of thieves,’ says Josh—he was pretty smart in talking—‘and I guess you’ll have to ask me as well as your Pa before I give my consent.’ That sort of tickled her and she jumped up and down and says, ‘You be Ali Baba, and I’ll let you watch over the forty thieves,’ and from then on he was Ali Baba to her, and nobody else ever called him any other name.