It was the man's custom at such times to allot equal praise to Providence and the widow's marvellous vitality for this happy issue, and to hazard a guess that she had thought of important changes for her will. The widow would nod assent over a heaving bosom, and slowly fan herself back to normal respiration. The relict of a leather-lunged Free Methodist preacher, she affected a garb of ostentatious simplicity. No godless pleats or tucks or gores or ruffles or sinful abominations of braid defaced the chaste sobriety of her black gown; buttons were tolerated merely as buttons, without vain thought of ornament; and the strange little bonnet, which she perched above hair whose natural coquetry of curl was austerely sleeked away, was of a composition so harshly ugly that more worldly-minded women shuddered at the sight. The worldly-minded, indeed, were prone to the criticism that the material of Mrs. Weatherwax's garments was beyond cavil, but this surely was her own concern. It were sheer impertinence to finger the texture of a zealot's sackcloth. Shelby busied himself with his papers, pending her recovery. "Them stairs alluz give me sech a turn," she sighed, at length. She enunciated her R's with the merciless fidelity of her section at its worst, saying stair-urs and tur-urn. "Too bad the town's boom stopped short of elevators," sympathized Shelby. "Shouldn't use 'em, anyway," returned the widow, firmly. "They give me a wuss turn than the stairs." "They're trying moving stairways in some places,--a French invention, I believe." "Shouldn't use them contrapshuns neither. The French are a godless people, full of vanity and all uncleanness." Shelby's imagination balked at suggesting another alternative, and he held his peace. The visitor's jetty eyes forsook his face and pounced upon the clerk, who, with tongue in cheek, was filling out narrow slips of paper at a battered table clothed in a baize of a dye traditionally held to have been green. "How's your ma's lumbago, Willie Irons?" she demanded. The youth stammered a husky reply, and blushed far into his brick-colored hair. He was of an age when a babyish diminutive becomes a thorn unspeakable. Mrs. Weatherwax glanced tranquilly past his writhings to the ancient table. "Ross," she asked, "wa'n't that your grandfather's?" "Yes. He used it in his place of business." "I call to mind seein' it in the old distillery when I was a girl," pursued the widow, who never called a spade an agricultural implement. "Distillin's a wicked business." "People thought differently about many things in my grandfather's day." The widow sniffed. "Wrong's wrong. Is that Seneca Bowers's roll-top desk?" "It was Mr. Bowers's. I bought it when we dissolved partnership." "Law books, too?" "Yes." "Threw in the pictur's, I s'pose?" indicating some dingy lithographs of political worthies past and present. "Yes," admitted Shelby with superhuman good nature; "they came to boot."