Miss Penelope took him up tartly in her softest tone:  “Then, William, may I ask why the people all over the country are calling this year’s vintage ‘comet wines’?  For that’s the way they are marking it, and everybody is putting it to itself—­as something very uncommon.  But never mind!  I am used to having what I say mocked at in this house.  It’s nothing new to me to have my words passed over as if they hadn’t been spoken.  I can bear it and it don’t alter my duty.  I am bound to go on a-doing what I believe to be right just the same, however I am treated.  I can’t sit by and say nothing when I know that I ought to lift up my voice in warning.  So I say again—­you can mark my word or not as you think best—­that we are all a-going to see some mighty wild sights before we see the last of that comet’s tail.”

“Pooh!  Pooh!  Pooh!” cried the widow Broadnax, roughly and hoarsely, as she nearly always spoke, and sitting up suddenly among her cushions.  “Who’s afraid of a comet with only one tail?  I’ll have you to know, sister Penelope, that my grandmother—­my own grandmother and Robert’s own grandmother, not yours—­could remember the famous comet of seventeen hundred and forty-four, and that had six tails.”

Miss Penelope was daunted and silenced for the moment.  She did not mind the greater number of the rival comet’s tails.  It was not that which made her feel herself at a disadvantage.  It was the slur at her lesser relationship to the master of the house.  Any reference to that was a blow which never failed to make her flinch; and one which the widow never lost a chance to deal.  But Miss Penelope had not yielded an inch through the ceaseless contention of years, and held her ground now; since there was nothing to say in reply, she ignored the taunt as she had done all that had gone before.  She turned upon William Pressley, however, as we are prone to turn upon those whom we do not fear, when we dare not attack those with whom we are really offended.

“Well, William, maybe you think that the early dying and the going blind of the wasps and the flies caused the breaking out of the ‘Jerks,’ too.  You and the rest all think you know better than I do.  I don’t complain—­maybe you all do know better.  But some day, when I am dead and gone, some day, and it mayn’t be very long, when my hands are stone cold and crossed under the coffin-lid, you will think differently about a good many matters,” she cooed, as if saying the mildest, pleasantest things in the world.  “The Jerks have brought many a proud head low.  Others besides myself will see a warning in the Jerks before they are gone.  And now here are the Shawnees a-coming to welter us in our blood.  And the Cold Plague already come to shake the life out of the few that are left.  But it is their own fault.  There’s nobody but themselves to blame.  It’s easy enough to keep from having the plague,” Miss Penelope added confidently.  “Anybody can keep from having it, if they will only take the trouble to blow real hard three times on a blue yarn string before breakfast.”