season they sat thus for two or three hours in the morning; they sat thus for two or three hours in the afternoon; they sat thus for two or three hours in the evening. They had been sitting thus for fifteen years, and they would sit thus, unless the houses were torn down, or one of them died, for forty more, rocking back and forth, dealing out destinies in badly placed, but discreetly smothered voices. They were acquainted with all the gossip of the town. What they could not acquire from direct observation they learned through the butcheror bakeror grocer-boy, or over the clothes-lines in the back-yard from the neighbours' servants.
At exactly eight o'clock in the morning of June 17, 1897, Mrs. Bierbauer opened her screen-door and waddled out into the open. A moment later she was rocking back and forth in her clumsy, wooden chair, scanning the street north and south, like the night-watch on a battleship peering into the deep for periscopes. At one minute past eight, Mrs. Fox, mindful that flies and moths and other insect vermin were especially pestiferous this summer, opened her screen-door to the slightest possible degree and slid out in the manner of the slender Bernhardt of the eighties leaving Scarpia's room in La Tosca. She bowed to her friend.
Mornin', Mrs. Bierbauer.
Mornin', Mrs. Fox. You're a little late this mornin'.
It was characteristic of the formal nature of their
