It's so
curious,' she says.
"'Ain't it?' says Abbie, and smiles some more.
"So that night, when Kenelm sat by the stove, turnin' the air blue, his
sister set at the other side of the table with that advertisement hid
behind the Wellmouth Advocate readin' and thinkin'. She wrote a letter
afore she went to bed and bought a dollar's worth of stamps at the
postoffice next day. And for a week she watched the mails the way one of
these city girls does when the summer's 'most over and eight or nine of
her fellers have finished their vacations and gone back to work.
"About ten days after that Kenelm begins to feel kind of off his feed,
so's to speak. Somethin' seemed to ail him and he couldn't make out what
'twas. They'd had a good many cranberries on their bog that year and
Hannah'd been cookin' 'em up fast so's they wouldn't spile. But one
night she brings on a cranberry pie, and Kenelm turned up his nose at
it.
"'More of that everlastin' sour stuff!' he snorts. 'I've et cranb'ries
till my stomach's puckered up as if it worked with a gath'rin' string.
Take it away! I don't want it!'
"'But, Kenelm, you're always so fond of cranb'ry pie.'
"'Me? It makes me shrivel just to look at it. Pass that sugar bowl, so's
I can sweeten ship.'
"Next day 'twas salt fish and potatoes that wa'n't good. He'd been
teasin' for a salt-fish dinner for ever so long, so Hannah'd fixed up
this one just to please him, but he swallered two or three knifefuls and
then looked at her kind of sad and mournful.
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