. . .  And so, as you see, Cousin Gussie, we are getting on well with the work of preparation and shall be ready to leave soon.  Our excavating this season will be but preliminary, of course owing to our late start.  I am enjoying it all immensely and it is wonderfully exhilarating and inspiring to be back once more in the field.  But my greatest inspiration is my wife.  She is a remarkable woman.  A most extraordinary woman, I assure you.  How in the world I managed to exist without her companionship and guidance and amazingly practical help all these years I cannot imagine.  And I did not really exist, of course, I merely blundered along.  She is—­well, I really despair of telling you how wonderful she is.  And when I think how much of my present happiness I owe to you, Cousin Gussie, I . . .

* * * * * * *

But the greatest miracle, the miraculousness—­I don’t know there is such a word, but there should be—­of which sets me wondering continually, is that she should have been willing to marry an odd, inconsequential sort of stick like me.  And I find myself saying over and over:  “What have I ever done to deserve it? . . .”

Mr. Cabot was reading the letter from which these extracts were made to a relative, a Miss Deborah Cabot, known to him and the family as “Third Cousin Deborah.”  At this point in the reading he looked up and laughed.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed.  “Isn’t that characteristic?  Isn’t that like him?  Well, I told him once that he was magnificent.  And he is, not as I meant it then, but literally.”

Third Cousin Deborah sniffed through her thin nostrils.  “Well, perhaps,” she admitted, “but such a performance as this marriage of his is a little too much. I can’t understand him, Augustus.  I confess he is quite beyond me.”

Cabot smiled.  “In many things—­and possibly the things that count most, after all, Deborah,” he observed, “I have come to the conclusion that old Galusha is far beyond the majority of us.”

*** End of the project gutenberg EBOOK, Galusha the magnificent ***

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