Him? Oh, bless you, no. He makes a strike, as he calls it, from time

to time. Then's my time to fret and fuss. For the money just flies

-first come first served. Straight off, he loads up the house with

cripples and idiots and stray cats and all the different kinds of poor

wrecks that other people don't want and he does, and then when the

poverty comes again I've got to clear the most of them out or we'd

starve; and that distresses him, and me the same, of course.

Here's old Dan'l and old Jinny, that the sheriff sold south one of the

times that we got bankrupted before the war--they came wandering back

after the peace, worn out and used up on the cotton plantations,

helpless, and not another lick of work left in their old hides for the

rest of this earthly pilgrimage--and we so pinched, oh so pinched for the

very crumbs to keep life in us, and he just flung the door wide, and the

way he received them you'd have thought they had come straight down from

heaven in answer to prayer. I took him one side and said, 'Mulberry we

can't have them--we've nothing for ourselves--we can't feed them.'

He looked at me kind of hurt, and said, 'Turn them out?--and they've come

to me just as confident and trusting as--as--why Polly, I must have

bought that confidence sometime or other a long time ago, and given my

note, so to speak--you don't get such things as a gift--and how am I

going to go back on a debt like that? And you see, they're so poor,

and old, and friendless, and--' But I was ashamed by that time, and shut

him off, and somehow felt a new courage in me, and so I said, softly,

'We'll keep them--the Lord will provide.' He was glad, and started to

The American Claimant