IV.

Gregory Wilkinson seemed to find himself quite comfortable in our little

home, and settled down there into a sort of permanency. We were glad to

have him stay with us, for he was a first-rate fellow, and always good

company in his pleasant, quiet way, and he told us two or three times

that he was enjoying himself. He told me a great many more than two or

three times that he considered Susan to be a wonderfully fine woman;

indeed, he told me this at least once every day, and sometimes oftener.

He was greatly struck--just as everybody is who lives for any length

of time in the same house with Susan--by her capable ways, and by her

unfailing equanimity and sweetness of temper. Even when the colored girl

fell down the well, carrying the rope and the bucket along with her,

Susan was not a bit flustered. She told me just where I would find the

clothes-line and a big meat-hook; and when, with this hastily-improvised

apparatus, we had fished the colored girl up and got her safely on

dry land again, she knew exactly what to do to make her all right and

comfortable. As Gregory Wilkinson observed to me, after it was all over,

from the way that Susan behaved, any one might have thought that hooking

colored girls up out of wells was her regular business.

As to making Susan angry, that simply was impossible. When things went

desperately wrong with her in any way she would just come right to me

and cry a little on my shoulder. Then, when I had comforted her, she

would chipper up and be all right again in no time. Gregory Wilkinson

happened to come in one day while a performance of this sort was going

on, and for fear that he should think it odd Susan explained to him that

it was a habit of hers when things very much worried her and she felt

like being ugly to people. (The trouble that day was that the colored

girl, who had a wonderful faculty for stirring up tribulation, had

broken an India china teacup that had belonged to Susan's grandmother,

and that Susan had thought the world of.) That evening, while we were

sitting on the veranda smoking, and before Susan, who was helping clear

the supper-table, had joined us, Gregory Wilkinson said to me, with

oven, more emphasis than usual, that Susan was the finest woman he had

ever known; and he added that he was very sorry that when he was my ago

he had not met and married just such another.

He and I talked a good deal at odd times about the money that our

great-great-great-uncle the pirate had buried, and that through all

these years had stayed buried so persistently. He did not take much

interest in the matter personally, but for my sake, and still more for

Susan's sake, he was beginning to be quite anxious that the money should

be found. He even suggested that we should take Old Jacob over to the

bay-side and let him try again to find the _Martha Ann's_ anchorage; but

a little talk convinced us that this would be useless. The old man had

been given every opportunity, during the two days that we had cruised

about with him, to refresh his memory; and we both had been the pained

witnesses of the curious psychological fact that the more he refreshed

it, the more utterly unmanageable it had become. The prospect, we

agreed, was a disheartening one, for it was quite evident that for our

purposes Old Jacob was, as it were, but an elderly, broken reed.

About this time I noticed that Gregory Wilkinson was unusually silent,

and seemed to be thinking a great deal about something. At first we

were afraid that he was not quite well, and Susan offered him both her

prepared mustard plasters and her headache powders. But he said that he

was all right, though he was very much obliged to her. Still, he kept

on thinking, and he was so silent and preoccupied that Susan and I

were very uncomfortable. To have him around that way, and to be always

wondering what he could possibly be thinking about, Susan said, made her

feel as though she were trying to eavesdrop when nobody was talking.

One afternoon while we were sitting on the veranda--Susan and I trying

to keep up some sort of a conversation, and Gregory Wilkinson thinking

away as hard as ever he could think--a thin man in a buggy drove down

the road and stopped at our hitch-ing-post. When he had hitched his

horse he took out from the after-part of the buggy a largo tin vessel

standing on light iron legs, and came up to the house with it. He made

us all a sort of comprehensive bow, but stopped in front of Susan, set

the tin vessel upon its legs, and said:

"Madam, you behold before you the most economical device and the

greatest labor-saving invention of this extraordinarily devicious and

richly inventive age. This article, madam"--and he placed his hand

upon the tin vessel affectionately--"is Stowe's patent combination

interchangeable churn and wash-boiler."

Susan did not say anything; she simply shuddered.

"As at present arranged, madam," the man went on, "it is a churn.

Standing thus upon these light yet firm legs" (the thing wobbled

outrageously), "with this serviceable handle projecting from the top,

and communicating with an exceptionally effective churning apparatus

within, it is beyond all doubt the very best churn, as well as the

cheapest, now offered on the American market. But observe, madam, that

as a wash-boiler it is not less excellent. By the simple process of

removing the handle, taking out the dasher, and unshipping the legs--the

work, as you perceive, of but a moment--the process of transformation

is complete. As to the trifling orifice that the removal of the handle

leaves in the lid, it becomes, when the wash-boiler side of this

Protean vessel is uppermost, a positive benefit. It is an effective

safety-valve. Without it, I am not prepared to say that the boiler would

not burst, scattering around it the scalded, mangled remains of your

washer-woman and utterly ruining your week's wash.

"And mark, madam, mark most of all, the economy of this invention. I

need not say to you, a housekeeper of knowledge and experience,

that churning-day and wash-day stand separate and distinct upon your

household calendar. Under no circumstances is it conceivable that the

churn and the wash-boiler shall be required for use upon the same day.

Clearly the use of the one presupposes and compels the neglect of the

other. Then why cumber your house with these two articles, equally large

and equally unwieldly, when, by means of the beautiful invention that

I have the honor of presenting to your notice, the two in one can be

united, and money and house-room alike can be saved? I trust, madam, I

believe, that I have said enough to convince you that my article is all

that fancy can paint or bright hope inspire; that in every household

made glad by its presence it will be regarded always and forever as a

heaven-given boon!" Suddenly dropping his rhetorical tone and coming

down to the tone of business, the man went on: "You'll buy one, won't

you? The price--"

The change of tone seemed to arouse Susan from the spellbound condition

in which she had remained during this extraordinary harangue.

"O-o-o-oh!" she said, shudderingly, "do take the horrid, horrid thing

right away!" Then she fled into the house.

I was very angry at the man for disturbing Susan in this way, and I told

him so pretty plainly; and I also told him to get out. At this juncture,

to my astonishment, Gregory Wilkinson interposed by asking what the

thing was worth; and when the man said five dollars, he said that he

would buy it. The man had manifested a disposition to be ugly while

I was giving him his talking to, but when he found that he had made a

sale, after all, he grew civil again. As he went off he expressed the

hope that the lady would be all right presently, and the conviction

that she would find the combination churn and wash-boiler a household

blessing that probably would add ten years to her life.

"What on earth did you buy that for?" I asked, when the man had gone.

"Oh, I don't know. It seems to be a pretty good wash-boiler, anyway.

I heard your wife say the other day that she wanted a wash-boiler. She

needn't use it as a churn if she don't want to, you know."

"But my wife never will tolerate that disgusting thing, with its horrid

suggestiveness of worse than Irish uncleanliness, about the house," I

went on, rather hotly. "I really must beg of you to send it away."

"All right," he answered. "I'll _take_ it away. I'm going to New York

to-morrow, and I'll take it along."

"And what ever will you do with it in New York?" I asked.

"Well, I can't say positively yet, but I guess I'll send it out to the

asylum. They'd be glad to get it there, I don't doubt--not as a churn,

you know, but for wash-boiling."

Then he went on to tell me that one of the things that he especially

wanted done at the asylum with his legacy was the construction of a

steam-laundry, with a thing in the middle that went round and round, and

dried the clothes by centrifugal pressure. He explained that the asylum

was only just starting as an asylum, and was provided not only with

very few destitute red Indian children, but also with very few of the

appliances which an institution of that sort requires, and that was

the reason why he had selected it, in preference to many other very

deserving charities, to leave his money to.

I must say that I was glad to hear him talking in this strain, for his

sudden announcement of his intended departure for New York, just after

I had spoken so warmly to him, made me fear that I had offended him. But

it was clear that I hadn't, and that his going off in this unexpected

fashion did not mean anything. He always did have a fancy for doing

things suddenly.

Susan was worried about it, in just the same way, when I told her; but

she ended by agreeing with me that he was not in the least offended at

anything. Indeed, that evening we both were very much pleased to notice

what good spirits he was in. His preoccupied manner was entirely gone,

and, for him, he was positively lively. Evidently, whatever the thing

was that he had been thinking about so hard, he had settled it in a way

that satisfied him.

Just as we were going to bed he told me, in what struck me at the time

as rather an odd tone, that he was under the impression that he had

somewhere a chest full of old family papers, and that possibly among

these papers there might be something that would tell me how to find the

fortune that Susan and I certainly deserved to have. As he said this

he laughed in a queer sort of way, and then he looked at Susan very

affectionately, and then he took each of us by the hand.

"Oh!" said Susan, rapturously (when Susan is excited she always begins

what she has to say with an "Oh!" I like it). "To think of finding a

piece of old yellow parchment with a quite undecipherable cryptogram

written on it in invisible ink telling us just where we ought to dig!

How perfectly lovely! Why _didn't_ you think of it sooner?"

"Because I have been neither more nor less than a blind old fool.

And--and I have to thank you, my dear," he continued, still speaking in

the queer tone, "for having effectually opened my eyes." As he made this

self-derogatory and quite incomprehensible statement he turned to Susan,

kissed her in a great hurry, shook our hands warmly, said goodnight, and

trotted off up-stairs to his room. His conduct was very extraordinary.

But then, as I have already mentioned, Gregory Wilkinson had a way of

always doing just the things which nobody expected him to do.

He had settled back into his ordinary manner by morning; at least he was

not much queerer than usual, and bade us good-bye cheerily at the Lewes

railway station. I had hired a light wagon and had driven him over in

time for the early train, bringing Susan along, so that she might see

the last of him. What with all three of us, his trunk and valise, and

the churn-wash-boiler, we had a wagon-load.

Susan was horrified at the thought of his giving the churn-wash-boiler

to the asylum. "Even if they only are allowed to use it as a

wash-boiler," she argued, earnestly, "think what dreadful ideas of

untidiness it will put into those destitute red Indian children's

heads!--ideas," she went on, "which will only tend to make them disgrace

instead of doing credit to the position of easy affluence to which your

legacy will lift them when they return to their barbaric wilds. If

you _must_ give it to them, at least conceal from them--I beg of you,

conceal from them--the fatal fact that it ever was meant to be a churn

too."

Gregory Wilkinson promised Susan that he would conceal this fact from

the destitute red Indian children; and then the train started, and he

and the churn-wash-boiler were whisked away. We really were very sorry

to part with him.