Poor Uncle Peabody!  Every step toward matrimony required such an outlay of emotion and such a sacrifice of comfort that I presume it seemed to be hardly worth while.

Yet I must be careful not to give the reader a false impression of my Aunt Deel.  She was a thin, pale woman, rather tall, with brown hair and blue eyes and a tongue—­well, her tongue has spoken for itself.  I suppose that she will seem inhumanly selfish with this jealousy of her brother.

“I promised ma that I would look after you and I’m a-goin’ to do it—­ayes!” I used to hear her say to my uncle.

There were not many married men who were so thoroughly looked after.  This was due in part to her high opinion of the Baynes family, and to a general distrust of women.  In her view they were a designing lot.  It was probably true that Mrs. Perry was fond of show and would have been glad to join the Baynes family, but those items should not have been set down against her.  There was Aunt Deel’s mistake.  She couldn’t allow any humanity in other women.

She toiled incessantly.  She washed and scrubbed and polished and dusted and sewed and knit from morning until night.  She lived in mortal fear that company would come and find her unprepared—­Alma Jones or Jabez Lincoln and his wife, or Ben and Mary Humphries, or “Mr. and Mrs. Horace Dunkelberg.”  These were the people of whom she talked when the neighbors came in and when she was not talking of the Bayneses.  I observed that she always said “Mr. and Mrs. Horace Dunkelberg.”  They were the conversational ornaments of our home.  “As Mrs. Horace Dunkelberg says,” or, “as I said to Mr. Horace Dunkelberg,” were phrases calculated to establish our social standing.  I supposed that the world was peopled by Joneses, Lincolns, Humphries and Dunkelbergs, but mostly by Dunkelbergs.  These latter were very rich people who lived in Canton village.

I know, now, how dearly Aunt Deel loved her brother and me.  I must have been a great trial to that woman of forty unused to the pranks of children and the tender offices of a mother.  Naturally I turned from her to my Uncle Peabody as a refuge and a help in time of trouble with increasing fondness.  He had no knitting or sewing to do and when Uncle Peabody sat in the house he gave all his time to me and we weathered many a storm together as we sat silently in his favorite corner, of an evening, where I always went to sleep in his arms.

He and I slept in the little room up-stairs, “under the shingles”—­as uncle used to say.  I in a small bed, and he in the big one which had been the receiver of so much violence.  So I gave her only a qualified affection until I could see beneath the words and the face and the correcting hand of my Aunt Deel.

Uncle made up the beds in our room.  Often his own bed would go unmade.  My aunt would upbraid him for laziness, whereupon he would say that when he got up he liked the feel of that bed so much that he wanted to begin next night right where he had left off.