The general threw back his head and laughed until the table groaned, while Miss Chris’s double chin shook softly over her cameo brooch.

Aunt Griselda wiped her eyes on the border of her handkerchief.

“Aunt Cornelia Callowell was a righteous woman,” she murmured.  “I never thought that I should hear her ridiculed in the house of her great-nephew.  She scalloped me a flannel petticoat with her own hands.  Eugenia, in my day little girls didn’t reach for the butter.  They waited until it was handed to them.”

Congo, the butler, rushed to Eugenia’s assistance, and the general shook his finger at her and formed the word “guest” with his mouth.  Miss Chris changed the subject by begging Aunt Griselda to have a wing of chicken.

“I don’t believe in so much dieting,” she said cheerfully.  “I think your nerves would be better if you ate more.  Just try a brown wing.”

“I know my nerves are bad,” Aunt Griselda rejoined, still wiping her eyes, “though it is hard to be accused of a temper before my own nephew.  But I know I am a burden, and I have overstayed my welcome.  Let me go.”

“Why, Aunt Griselda?” remonstrated Miss Chris in hurt tones.  “You know I didn’t accuse you of anything.  I only meant that you would feel better if you didn’t drink so much tea and ate more meat—­”

“I am not too old to take a hint,” replied Aunt Griselda.  “I haven’t reached my dotage yet, and I can see when I am a burden.  Here, Congo, you may put my teapot away.”

“O Lord!” gasped the general tragically; and rising to the occasion, he said hurriedly:  “By the way, Chris, they told me at the post-office to-day that old Dr. Smith was dead.  It was only last week that I met him on his way to town with his niece’s daughter, and he told me that he had never been in better health in his life.”

“Dear me!” exclaimed Miss Chris, holding a large spoonful of raspberries poised above the dish to which she was helping.  “Why, old Dr. Smith attended me forty years ago when I had measles.  I remember he made me lie in bed with blankets over me, though it was August, and he wouldn’t let me drink anything except hot flax-seed tea.  They say all that has been changed in this generation—­”

“Leave me plenty of room for cream, Aunt Chris,” broke in Bernard, with an anxious eye on Miss Chris’s absent-minded manipulations.  She reached for the round, old silver pitcher, and poured the yellow cream on the sugared berries without pausing in her soft, monotonous flow of words.

“But even in those days Dr. Smith was behind the times, and he has been so ever since.  He used to say that chloroform was invented by infidels, and he would not let them give it to his son, Lawrence, when he broke his leg on the threshing machine.  It was a mania with him, for, when I was nursing in the hospitals during the war, he told me with his own lips that he believed the Lord was on our side because we didn’t have chloroform.”