As he had no inclination toward Art, and walked flat-footed over canvases whenever he came into the studio, Julian got him employment. Jack’s apprenticeship to buying and selling was to me a long period of alternate hopes and despairs. He would begin well, and in fancy I saw him a merchant prince; but eventually he fell out with everybody and thought himself abused when his employer objected to his dribbling small change along the streets, and losing keys. I did not know what to do for Jack when the despair seasons came upon me. But in the end he did very well for himself. He got tired of the city, and no cajoling of mine could keep him from thrusting some shirts into a valise, grasping a pair of heavy boots in his hand, and starting for the country, sowing handkerchiefs and unmated socks in his wake. He went to work for a middle-aged widow with considerable property, and she got the dear boy’s consent to marry him: so there he is, a landed proprietor, with a thrifty wife to button his sleeves and join knives with him in the butter. Our bric-à-brac ways trouble him no more, and what he loses in the furrow at planting time he may find again during harvest. And when he comes to see us, his loving heart is as mellow as the apples he brings. Then there was Aunt Lizy. I suppose she was christened Eliza, but her name was always pronounced Lizy with a plaintive lingering on the _i_. We had her with us two years. She was a stepsister of my stepmother’s. She looked like an Indian, and had seen more trouble than any other woman with whom she ever measured experiences. Her breathing was all done in sighs, and she tweaked her nose so much it was twisted at the end, and all of a dark red color. She and I never could understand why fortune hit her so hard, and we talked about it so much that I was kept quite bilious. Aunt Lizy felt too low to sit in the parlor unless dragged there by entreaties, and spent a great deal of her time on the back stairs with a sunbonnet drawn over her eyes. She did not want to go anywhere, and the sound of the door-bell exorcised her as if she were a ghost. She compared her lot to mine until I was ashamed of myself, wondering if I had not stood in her sun. I think Julian secretly regarded her as a trying disease that we had in the house, and that must be doctored and endured. She was so much in awe of him that I suffered anguish with her whenever he tried to show a man’s bluff kindness to her. Aunt Lizy finally died, and her face looked young and cheerful in the coffin. We scraped some money together and bought a lot in the cemetery, and her misused body rests there under roses, myrtle, and verbenas. I take pains to keep her shade pleasant and her sod well trimmed; and when the flowers look particularly thrifty, I feel as if Aunt Lizy were learning how to laugh, at last.