Oh dear me! oh dear suz!

The nurse, Jean, had a sister who had come over from England with a cargo of trouble and children—­after Jean had come on to California.

And Elnathan, good-natured when he wuz a mind to be, had listened to Jean’s story of her sister’s woes, with poverty, hungery children, and a drunken husband, and had given this sister two small rooms in one of his tenement housen, and asked so little for them, that they wuz livin’ quite comfortable, if anybody could live comfortable, in such a stiflin’, nasty spot.

Their rooms wuz on top of the house, and wuz kept clean, and so high up that they could get a breath of air now and then.

But the way up to ’em led over a crazy pair of stairs, so broken and rotten that even the Agent wuz disgusted with ’em and had wrote a letter to Elnathan asking for new stairs, and new sanitary arrangements, as the deaths wuz so frequent in that particular tenement, that the Agent wuz frightened, for fear they would be complained of by the City Fathers—­though them old fathers can stand a good deal without complainin’.

Wall, the Agent wrote, but Elnathan wuz at that time buildin’ a new orchid house (he had more’n a dozen of ’em before) for The Little Maid; she loved these half-human blossoms.

And he wuz buildin’ a high palm house, and a new fountain, and a veranda covered with carved lattice-work around The Little Maid’s apartments.  And a stained-glass gallery, leading from the conservatory to the greenhouses, and these other houses I have mentioned, so that The Little Maid could walk out to ’em on too sunny days, or when it misted some.

And so he wrote back to his Agent, that “he couldn’t possibly spend any money on stairs or plumbin’ in a tenement house, for the repairs he wuz making on his own place at Menlo Park would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars—­and he felt that he couldn’t fix them stairs, and he thought anyway it wuzn’t best to listen to the complaints of complaining tenants.”  And he ended in that jokelar way of hisen—­

“That if you listened to ’em, and done one thing for ’em, the next thing they would want would be velvet-lined carriages to ride out in.”

And the Agent, havin’ jest seen the tenth funeral a-wendin’ out of that very house that week, and bein’ a man of some sense, though hampered, wrote back and said—­“Carriages wouldn’t be the next thing that they would all want, but coffins.”

He said sence he had wrote to Elnathan more than a dozen had been wanted there in that very house, and the tenants had been borne out in ’em.

(And laid in fur cleaner dirt than they wuz accustomed to there;) he didn’t write this last—­that is my own eppisodin’.

And agin the Agent mentioned the stairs, and agin he mentioned the plumbin’.

But Elnathan wuz so interested then and took up in tryin’ to decide whether he would have a stained-glass angel or some stained-glass cherubs a-hoverin’ over the gallery in front of The Little Maid’s room, that he hadn’t a mite of time to argue any further on the subject—­so he telegrafted—­