These were hard days for Barrow and the art firm.  All these had their hands full, trying to comfort Tracy.  Barrow’s task was particularly hard, because he was made a confidant in full, and therefore had to humor Tracy’s delusion that he had a father, and that the father was an earl, and that he was going to send a cablegram.  Barrow early gave up the idea of trying to convince Tracy that he hadn’t any father, because this had such a bad effect on the patient, and worked up his temper to such an alarming degree.  He had tried, as an experiment, letting Tracy think he had a father; the result was so good that he went further, with proper caution, and tried letting him think his father was an earl; this wrought so well, that he grew bold, and tried letting him think he had two fathers, if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to, so Barrow withdrew one of them and substituted letting him think he was going to get a cablegram—­which Barrow judged he wouldn’t, and was right; but Barrow worked the cablegram daily for all it was worth, and it was the one thing that kept Tracy alive; that was Barrow’s opinion.

And these were bitter hard days for poor Sally, and mainly delivered up to private crying.  She kept her furniture pretty damp, and so caught cold, and the dampness and the cold and the sorrow together undermined her appetite, and she was a pitiful enough object, poor thing.  Her state was bad enough, as per statement of it above quoted; but all the forces of nature and circumstance seemed conspiring to make it worse—­and succeeding.  For instance, the morning after her dismissal of Tracy, Hawkins and Sellers read in the associated press dispatches that a toy puzzle called Pigs in the Clover, had come into sudden favor within the past few weeks, and that from the Atlantic to the Pacific all the populations of all the States had knocked off work to play with it, and that the business of the country had now come to a standstill by consequence; that judges, lawyers, burglars, parsons, thieves, merchants, mechanics, murderers, women, children, babies—­everybody, indeed, could be seen from morning till midnight, absorbed in one deep project and purpose, and only one—­to pen those pigs, work out that puzzle successfully; that all gayety, all cheerfulness had departed from the nation, and in its place care, preoccupation and anxiety sat upon every countenance, and all faces were drawn, distressed, and furrowed with the signs of age and trouble, and marked with the still sadder signs of mental decay and incipient madness; that factories were at work night and day in eight cities, and yet to supply the demand for the puzzle was thus far impossible.  Hawkins was wild with joy, but Sellers was calm.  Small matters could not disturb his serenity.  He said—­

“That’s just the way things go.  A man invents a thing which could revolutionize the arts, produce mountains of money, and bless the earth, and who will bother with it or show any interest in it?—­and so you are just as poor as you were before.  But you invent some worthless thing to amuse yourself with, and would throw it away if let alone, and all of a sudden the whole world makes a snatch for it and out crops a fortune.  Hunt up that Yankee and collect, Hawkins—­half is yours, you know.  Leave me to potter at my lecture.”