“But she don’t care for utility; it’s simply a mania for buying things.  We haven’t a stove in the house, and yet what does she do at Murphy’s sale but bid on sixty-two feet and three elbows of rusty stovepipe and cart it home with four debilitated gingham umbrellas.  Said the umbrellas were a bargain because, by putting in new covers and handles and a rib here and there, they would do for birthday presents for her aunts.  And the stovepipe could be sent out to the farm to be put around the peach trees to keep the cows off.  How in thunder she was ever going to get a stovepipe around a peach tree never crossed her mind.  She is just as impractical as a baby.

“When Bailey had the auction at his insurance office, there she was, and, sure enough, that afternoon she landed in our side yard with Bailey’s poll-parrot and a circular saw.  It amused me.  She wanted to use that saw as a dinner-gong, but it was cracked, and so she has turned it into a griddle for muffins.  Bailey had taught the parrot to swear so that I was afraid it’d demoralize Charley, and I don’t mind telling you in confidence that I killed it by putting bug-poison in a water-cracker.

“Now, I see there’s an auction advertised for Friday at Peters’; and Peters has a pyramid of old tomato cans and bric-a-brac of that sort piled up in his back yard.  Now, you see if that woman don’t bid on those cans until she runs them up to a dollar apiece, and then come lugging them around to our house with some extraordinary idea about loading them up with gunpowder and selling them to the government during the next war for bombshells.  If she does, that winds the thing up.  I’m a good-natured man, but no woman shall bring home three hundred tomato cans to my house and retain a claim upon my affections.  I’ll resign first.”

My feeling was that he was a little mixed in his notions about bric-a-brac, but that he really had a grievance.

* * * * *

Potts told me, also, that he came home very late one night recently, and when he went up stairs his wife and children were in bed asleep.  He undressed as softly as he could, and then, as he felt thirsty, he thought he would get a drink of water.  Fortunately, he saw a gobletful standing on the washstand, placed there for him, evidently, by Mrs. Potts.  He seized it and drank the liquid in two or three huge gulps, but just as he was draining the goblet he gagged, dropped the glass to the floor, where it was shivered to atoms, while he ejected something from his mouth.  He was certain that a live animal of some kind had been in the water, and that he had nearly swallowed it.  This theory was confirmed when he saw the object which he spat out go bounding over the floor.  He pursued it, kicking a couple of chairs over while doing so, and at last he put his foot on it and held it.  Of course Mrs. Potts was wide awake by this time and scared nearly to death, and the baby was screaming at the top of its lungs.  Mrs. Potts got out of bed and turned up the gas, and said,