tall, raw-boned, angular woman with piercing black eyes,
and a firm forbidding jaw. One look at Mrs. McGuire
usually made a book agent forget the name of his book.
When she shut her mouth, no lips were visible; her upturned
nose seemed seriously to contemplate running up under
her sun bonnet to escape from this wicked world with all
its troubling, and especially from John Watson, his wife
and his family of nine.

One fruitful cause of dispute between Mrs. McGuire and
the Watsons was the boundary line between the two estates.
In the spring Mrs. Watson and the boys put up a fence of
green poplar poles where they thought the fence should
be, hoping that it might serve the double purpose of
dividing the lots and be a social barrier between them
and the relict of the late McGuire. The relict watched
and waited and said not a word, but it was the ominous
silence that comes before the hail.

Mrs. McGuire hated the Watson family collectively, but
it was upon John Watson, the man of few words, that she
lavished the whole wealth of her South of Ireland hatred,
for John Watson had on more than one occasion got the
better of her in a wordy encounter.

One time when the boundary dispute was at its height,
she had burst upon John as he went to his work in the
morning, with a storm of far-reaching and comprehensive
epithets. She gave him the history of the Watson family,
past, present, and future--especially the future; every