“Gone, sir—­gone!  Knocked out with a chip while she was splitting kin’ling-wood when she was a child.  She fixed it up somehow with a glass one, and it gave her the oddest expression you ever saw.  The false one would stand perfectly still while the other one was rolling around, so that ’bout half the time you couldn’t tell whether she was studying astronomy or watching the hired girl pare potatoes.  And she lay there at night with the indisposed eye wide open glaring at me, while the other was tight shut, so that sometimes I’d get the horrors and kick her and shake her to make her get up and fix it.  Once I got some mucilage and glued the lid down myself, but she didn’t like it when she woke in the morning.  Had to soak her eye in warm water, you know, to get it open.

“Now, I reckon you could run in some language about her eccentricities of vision, couldn’t you?  Don’t care what it is, so that I have the main facts.”

“Was she peculiar in other respects?”

“Well, yes.  One leg was gone—­run over by a wagon when she was little.  But she wore a patent leg that did her pretty well.  Bothered her sometimes, but most generally gave her a good deal of comfort.  She was fond of machinery.  She was very grateful for her privileges.  Although sometimes it worried her, too.  The springs’d work wrong now and then, and maybe in church her leg’d give a spurt and begin to kick and hammer away at the board in front of the pew until it sounded like a boiler-factory.  Then I’d carry her out, and most likely it’d kick at me all the way down the aisle and end up by dancing her around the vestibule, until the sexton would rebuke her for waltzing in church.  Seems to me there’s material for poetry in that, isn’t there?  She was a self-willed woman.  Often, when she wanted to go to a sewing-bee or to gad about somewhere, maybe, I’d stuff that leg up the chimney or hide it in the wood-pile.  And when I wouldn’t tell her where it was, do you know what she’d do?”

“What?”

“Why, she’d lash an umbrella to her stump and drift off down the street ’sif that umbrella was born there.  You couldn’t get ahead of her.  She was ingenious.

“So I thought I’d mention a few facts to you, and you can just throw them together and make them rhyme, and I’ll call ’round and pay you for them.  What day?  Tuesday?  Very well; I’ll run in on Tuesday and see how you’ve fixed her up.”

Then Mr. Smith smoothed up his hat with his handkerchief, wiped the accumulated sorrow from his eyes, placed his hat upon his head, and sailed serenely out and down the stairs toward his desolated hearthstone.

The last caller was an artist.  He took a chair and said,

“My name is Brewer; I am the painter of the allegorical picture of ‘The Triumph of Truth’ on exhibition down at Yelverton’s.  I called, major, to make some complaint about the criticism of the work which appeared in your paper.  Your critic seems to have misunderstood somewhat the drift of the picture.  For instance, he says—­Let me quote the paragraph: