In a Little Town

ers sighed. "Well, I never did have any l

he wept

r another interval she rallied to a smile: "I was prepared for the worst, though; so I picked out El

urse, who would have a

, I guess, to see my own baby. Oh, Goshen! Is that how she looks?" A kind of swoon; then more meditation, followed by a courageous philosophy: "Children alway

led through a mustache of safety-pins that she thought so. Mrs.

to fit her. During her earliest years the witty little children called her Elephant

elop into a swan and fly away with a fabulously wealthy prince. Later she dwi

er ducks, and Mrs. Govers resigned herself to the melancho

time of Ellaphine's birth-"out of the nowhere into the here"-Ellaphine was the first to be marr

carried off Eddie Pouch-the very Eddie of whom his mother used to say, "He's

cle Loren's. Eddie was sorry to change his name, but he said his mother was not responsible at the time she pasted the l

child's-size arrow in, Eddie idolized Luella. So did the other boys; and as Eddie was the smallest of the lot, he was lost in

ieve in spending money. And Eddie had no mother to go to when the boys mistreated him an

Loren's factory-one of the largest feather-duster factories in t

engaging smiles for a net. She asked him to take her to the Sunday-school picnic, and asked him what he liked best for her to put in for him.

s he ought to have been, in view of the fact that Uncle Loren had been taken s

tremendous wealth. Hitherto it had pained Uncle Loren to devote a penny to anything but the sweet uses of investment. Now it sudden

d when there was a crust of ice over it which the pastor had to break with a stick befo

he factory, of course, he must leave behind; but he drafted a hasty will presenting all his money to th

d hardly folded his last testament and stuffed it into his pillow-slip when t