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"Em'ly ain't any call to. She wa'n't named after her, as I was, an' she never saw her but once, when she was a little girl. It ain't more'n ten year since I saw her. She lived out West. I didn't feel as if Em'ly had any call to wear crape.'

Matilda said no more, but there was an unquelled suspicion in her eye as they parted at the Babcock gate.

The next week a trunk full of Aunt Elizabeth Taylor's clothes arrived from the West. Her daughter had sent them. There was in the trunk a goodly store of old woman's finery, two black silks among the other gowns. Aunt Elizabeth had been a dressy old lady, although she died in her eighties. It was a great surprise to the sisters. They had never dreamed of such a thing. They palpitated with awe and delight as they took out the treasures. Emily clutched Elizabeth, the thin hand closing around the thin arm.

"Liz'beth!"
"What is it?

"We won't say

anything about this to anybody. We'll jest go together to meetin' next Sabbath, an' wear these black silks, an' let Matilda Jennings see."

Elizabeth looked at Emily. A gleam came into her dim blue eyes; she tightened her thin lips. "Well, we will," said she. The following Sunday the sisters wore the black silks to church. During the week they appeared together at a sewing meeting, then at church again. The wonder and curiosity were certainly not confined to Matilda Jennings. The eccentricity which the Babcock sisters displayed in not going into society together had long been a favorite topic in the town. There had been a great deal of speculation over it. Now that they had appeared together three consecutive times, there was much talk.

On the Monday following the second Sunday Matilda Jennings went down to the Babcock house. Her cape-bonnet was on one-sided, but it was firmly tied. She opened the door softly, when her old muscles were straining to jerk the latch. down gently in the proffered chair, and displayed quite openly She sat a worn place over the knees in her calico gown.

"We had a pleasant Sabbath yesterday, didn't we?" said she.

"Real pleasant," assented the sisters. "I thought we had a good discourse." The Babcocks assented again.

"I heerd a good many say they thought it was a good discourse," repeated Matilda, like an emphatic chorus. Then she suddenly leaned forward, and her face, in the depths of her awry bonnet, twisted into a benevolent smile. "I was real glad to see you out together," she whispered, with meaning emphasis. The sisters smiled stiffly.

Matilda paused for a moment; she drew herself back, as if to gather strength for a thrust; she stopped smiling. "I was glad to see you out together, for I thought it was too bad the way folks was talkin'," she said.

Elizabeth looked at her.

"How were they talkin'?" "Well, I don't know as there's any harm in my tellin' you. I've been thinkin' mebbe I ought to for some time. It's been round considerable lately that you and Em'ly didn't get along well, an' that was the reason you didn't go out more together. I told 'em I hadn't no idea 'twas so, though, of course, I couldn't really tell. I was real glad to see you out together, 'cause there's never knowin' how folks do get along, an' I was real glad to see you'd settled it if there had been any trouble."

"There ain't been any trouble."

"Well, I'm glad if there ain't been any, an' if there has, I'm glad to see it settled, an' I know other folks will be too."

Elizabeth stood up. "If you want to know the reason why we haven't been out together, I'll tell you," said she. "You've been tryin' to find out things every way you could, an' now I'll tell you. You've drove me to it. We had just one decent dress between us, and Em'ly an' me took turns wearin' it, and Em❜ly used to wear lace on it, an' I used to rip off the lace and sew on black velvet when I wore it, so folks shouldn't know it was the same dress. Em'ly an' me never had a word in our lives, an' it's a wicked lie for folks to say we have."

Emily was softly weeping in her handkerchief, there was not a tear in Elizabeth's eyes; there were bright spots on her cheeks and her slim height overhung Matilda Jennings imposingly.

"My aunt 'Liz'beth, that I was named for, died two or three weeks ago," she continued, "an' they sent us a trunk full of her clothes, an' there was two decent dresses among 'em, an' that's the reason why Em'ly an' me have been found out together sence. Now, Matilda Jennings, you have found out the whole story, an' I hope you're satisfied."

Now that the detective instinct and the craving inquisitiveness which were so strong in this old woman were satisfied, she should have been more jubilant than she was. She had suspected what nobody else in town had suspected; she had verified her suspicion, and discovered what the secrecy and pride of the sisters had concealed from the whole village; still she looked uneasy and subdued. "I sha'n't tell anybody," said she.

"You can tell nobody you're a mind to."

"I sha'n't tell nobody." Matilda Jennings arose; she had passed the parlor door when she faced about. "I s'pose I kinder begretched you that black silk," said she, "or I shouldn't have cared so much about findin' out. I never had a black silk myself, nor any of my folks that I ever heard of. I ain't got nothin' decent to wear anyway."

There was a moment's silence. "We sha'n't lay up anything," said Elizabeth then, and Emily sobbed responsively. Matilda passed on, and opened the outer door. Elizabeth whispered to her sister, and Emily nodded, eagerly. "You tell her," said she. "Matilda," called Elizabeth. Matilda looked back. "I was jest goin' to say that, if you wouldn't resent it, it got burned some, but we mended it nice, that you was perfectly welcome to that black silk. Em'ly an' me don't really need it, and we'd be glad to have you have it."

There were tears in Matilda Jennings's black eyes, but she held them unwinkingly. "Thank ye," she said, in a gruff voice, and stepped along over the piazza, down the steps. She reached Emily's flower garden. The peppery sweetness of the nasturtiums came up in her face; it was quite early in the day, and the portulacas were still out in a splendid field of crimson and yellow. Matilda turned about, her broad feet just cleared a yellow portulaca which had straggled into the path, but she

did not notice it. The homely old figure pushed past the flowers and into the house again. She stood before Elizabeth and Emily. "Look here," said she, with a fine light struggling out of her coarse old face, "I want to tell you — I see them firecrackers a-sizzlin' before Em'ly stepped in 'em."

MAMMON AND THE ARCHER1

O. HENRY

OLD Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall's Eureka Soap, looked out of the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight SuffolkJones came out to his waiting motor-car, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace's front elevation.

"Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!" commented the ex-Soap King. "The Eden Musee'll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet, if he don't watch out. I'll have this house painted red white and blue next summer, and see if that'll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher."

And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the door of his library and shouted "Mike!" in the same voice that had once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.

"Tell my son," said Anthony to the answering menial, "to come in here before he leaves the house."

When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth, ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and rattled the keys in his pocket with the other.

"Richard," said Anthony Rockwall, "what do you pay for the soap that you use?"

1 From The Four Million. Doubleday, Page and Company. Reprinted by permission.

537

Richard, only six months home from college, was startled a little. He had not yet taken the measure of this sire of his, who was as full of unexpectednesses as a girl at her first party. "Six dollars a dozen, I think, dad."

"And your clothes ?"

"I suppose about sixty dollars, as a rule."

"You're a gentleman," said Anthony, decidedly. "I've heard of these young bloods spending $24 a dozen for soap, and going over the hundred mark for clothes. You've got as much money to waste as any of 'em, and yet you stick to what's decent and moderate. Now I use the old Eureka for sentiment, but it's the purest soap made. Whenever you not only pay more than ten cents a cake for soap, you buy bad perfumes and labels. But fifty cents is doing very well for a young man in your generation, position, and condition. As I said, you're a gentleman. They say it takes three generations to make one. They're off. Money'll do it as slick as soap grease. It's made you one. By hokey! it's almost made one of me. nearly as impolite and disagreeable, and ill-mannered as these I'm two old Knickerbocker gents on each side of me that can't sleep of nights because I bought in between 'em."

"There are some things that money can't accomplish," remarked young Rockwall, rather gloomily.

"Now, don't say that," said old Anthony, shocked. "I bet my money on money every time. I've been through the encyclopædia down to Y looking for something you can't buy with it; and I expect to have to take up the appendix next week. I'm for money against the field. Tell me something money won't buy."

'For one thing," answered Richard, rankling a little, "it won't buy one into the exclusive circles of society."

"Oho! won't it?" thundered the champion of the root of evil. "You tell me where your exclusive circles would be if the first Astor hadn't had the money to pay for his steerage passage over?"

Richard sighed.

"And that's what I was coming to," said the old man, less