by Daddy and Susie, whose sturdy arm supported him. Poor Dad! He was
looking aged and worried, and I felt ever so sorry for him.

Susie's way of speaking to people is invariably to address them as if
they were rather deaf, and as if no one else could possibly hear.

"Yis, sor," she was saying, "it's jist as you says, a real crazy, foolish
thing. But fur as I kin see them kind o' things is what makes up the most
o' folk's lives. They is some gits ketched all by theirselves, and others
gits ketched tryin' ter help others, and some niver gits ketched at all
an' dies peaceful in the beds o' they. If there didn't no one take
chances th' world wouldn't hardly be no fit place ter live in."

I suppose that Daddy could find no reply to such philosophy. He was
doubtless very angry on my account, and I am sure he had been giving
Susie a piece of his mind, all the way down. He entered the shack,
ordering Susie to remain outside.

"Don't you dare come in," he said, quite exasperated. "I have no doubt at
all that you will have to look after all the rest of us when we get ill.
You can go back to your pots and pans or wait for me out of doors, just
as you wish."

Then he came in, closing the door behind him, and looked around the room,
profoundly disgusted. Mr. Barnett was again engaged in swabbing throats
while Frenchy supported the patients and I held a bottle in whose neck a
candle had been planted. No one could pay much attention to him just
then. Poor old Dad! He thinks that because the first emigrant in our
family dates back a couple of hundred years or so we are something rather
special in the way of human beings, and I know very well that he thought