Lucinda went away and brought the handle, but she did not light the lamp. The Fates were good to her, though, for Aunt Mary forgot the lamp in her disgust over the appearance of the handle. “Take it away,” she said sharply. “Anybody’d know it wasn’t an automobile crank. I don’t want to look like a fool! Well, why ain’t you takin’ it away, Lucinda?” Lucinda took the crank back to the freezer; but as the days passed on, the situation grew worse. Aunt Mary slept more and more, and awoke to an ever-increasing ratio of belligerency. Before long Lucinda’s third cousin demanded her assistance in “moving,” and there was nothing for poor Arethusa to do but to take up the burden, now become a fearfully heavy one. Aunt Mary was getting to that period in life when the nearer the relative the greater the dislike, so that when her niece arrived the welcome which awaited her was even less cordial than ever. “Did you bring a trunk?” she asked. “A small one,” replied the visitor. “That’s something to be grateful for,” said the aunt. “If I’d invited you to visit me, of course I’d feel differently about things.” Arethusa accepted this as she accepted all things, unpacked, saw Lucinda off, assumed charge of the house, and then dragged a rocking chair to her aunt’s bedside and unfolded her sewing. Ere she had threaded her needle Aunt Mary was sound asleep, and so her niece sewed placidly for an hour or more, until, like lightning out of a clear sky: “Arethusa!” The owner of the name started—but answered immediately: “Yes, Aunt Mary.” “When I die I want to be buried from a roof garden! Don’t you forget! You’d better go an’ write it down. Go now—go this minute!” Arethusa shook as if with the discharge of a contiguous field battery. She had not had Lucinda’s gradual breaking-in to her aunt’s new trains of thought. “Aunt Mary,” she said feebly at last. Aunt Mary saw her lips moving; she sat up in bed and her eyes flashed cinders. “Well, ain’t you goin’?” she asked wrathfully. “When I say do a thing, can’t it be done? I declare it’s bad enough to live with a pack of idiots without havin’ ’em, one an’ all, act as if I was the idiot!” Arethusa laid aside her work and rose to quit the room. She returned five minutes later with pen and ink, but Aunt Mary was now off on another tack. “I want a bulldog!” she cried imperatively. “A bulldog!” shrieked her niece, nearly dropping what she held in her hands. “What do you want a bulldog for?” “Not a bullfrog!” the old lady corrected; “a bulldog. Oh, I do get so sick of your stupidity, Arethusa,” she said. “What should I or any one else want of a bullfrog?” Arethusa sighed, and the sigh was apparent. “I’d sigh if I was you,” said her aunt. “I certainly would. If I was you, Arethusa, I’d certainly feel that I had cause to sigh;” and with that she sat up and gave her pillow a punch that was full of the direst sort of suggestion.