of them and substituted letting him think he was going to get a

cablegram--which Barrow judged he wouldn't, and was right; but Barrow

worked the cablegram daily for all it was worth, and it was the one thing

that kept Tracy alive; that was Barrow's opinion.

And these were bitter hard days for poor Sally, and mainly delivered up

to private crying. She kept her furniture pretty damp, and so caught

cold, and the dampness and the cold and the sorrow together undermined

her appetite, and she was a pitiful enough object, poor thing. Her state

was bad enough, as per statement of it above quoted; but all the forces

of nature and circumstance seemed conspiring to make it worse--and

succeeding. For instance, the morning after her dismissal of Tracy,

Hawkins and Sellers read in the associated press dispatches that a toy

puzzle called Pigs in the Clover, had come into sudden favor within the

past few weeks, and that from the Atlantic to the Pacific all the

populations of all the States had knocked off work to play with it,

and that the business of the country had now come to a standstill by

consequence; that judges, lawyers, burglars, parsons, thieves, merchants,

mechanics, murderers, women, children, babies--everybody, indeed, could

be seen from morning till midnight, absorbed in one deep project and

purpose, and only one--to pen those pigs, work out that puzzle

successfully; that all gayety, all cheerfulness had departed from the

nation, and in its place care, preoccupation and anxiety sat upon every

countenance, and all faces were drawn, distressed, and furrowed with the

signs of age and trouble, and marked with the still sadder signs of

mental decay and incipient madness; that factories were at work night and

270

The American Claimant