into a Presbyterian convent, had there been one at hand.  Boy Number One caught the yellow cur out of bounds one day, and shaved his plumy tail to a bare stick, and Miss Lucinda fairly shed tears of grief and rage when Pink appeared at the door with the denuded appendage tucked between his little legs, and his funny yellow eyes casting sidelong looks of apprehension at his mistress.  Boy Number One was despatched directly.  Number Two did pretty well for a month, but his integrity and his appetite conflicted, and Miss Lucinda found him one moonlight night perched in her plum-tree devouring the half-ripe fruit.  She shook him down with as little ceremony as if he had been an apple; and though he lay at Death’s door for a week with resulting cholera-morbus, she relented not.  So the experiment went on, till a list of casualties that numbered in it fatal accidents to three kittens, two hens and a rooster, and at last Pink himself, who was pent into a decline by repeated drenchings from the watering-pot, put an end to her forbearance, and she instituted in her viziership the old man who had now kept his office so long,—­a queer, withered, slow, humorous old creature, who did “chores” for some six or seven other households, and got a living by sundry “jobs” of wood-sawing, hoeing corn, and other like works of labor, if not of skill.  Israel was a great comfort to Miss Lucinda:  he was efficient counsel in the maladies of all her pets, had a sovereign cure for the gapes in chickens, and could stop a cat’s fit with the greatest ease; he kept the tiny garden in perfect order, and was very honest, and Miss Manners favored him accordingly.  She compounded liniment for his rheumatism, herb-sirup for his colds, presented him with a set of flannel shirts, and knit him a comforter; so that Israel expressed himself strongly in favor of “Miss Lucindy,” and she said to herself he really was “quite good for a man.”

But just now, in her forty-seventh year, Miss Lucinda had come to grief, and all on account of Israel and his attempts to please her.  About six months before this census-taking era, the old man had stepped into Miss Manners’s kitchen with an unusual radiance on his wrinkles and in his eyes, and began without his usual morning greeting,—­

“I’ve got so’thin’ for you naow, Miss Lucindy.  You’re a master-hand for pets, but I’ll bet a red cent you ha’n’t an idee what I’ve got for ye naow!”

“I’m sure I can’t tell, Israel,” said she; “you’ll have to let me see it.”

“Well,” said he, lifting up his coat and looking carefully behind him as he sat down on the settle, lest a stray kitten or chicken should preoccupy the bench, “you see I was down to Orrin’s abaout a week back, and he hed a litter o’ pigs,—­eleven on ’em.  Well, he couldn’t raise the hull on ’em,—­’t a’n’t good to raise more ‘n nine,—­an’ so he said, ef I’d ‘a’ had a place o’ my own, I could ‘a’ had one on ’em, but, as’t was, he guessed he’d hev to send one to market for a roaster.  I went