THERE were two newspapers in Auburn. The “Transcript” was one of the oldest newspapers in the middle West, and it well upheld the dignity of its years. It was Republican as to politics, conservative as to opinion, and inclined to Methodism as to religion. It prided itself upon the fact that in the fifty years of its existence it had never changed its politics or its make-up, and had never advanced its subscription price or a new theory. It represented Auburn in being slow, substantial, and self-satisfied.

The “Ledger” was a new arrival in Auburn, and had not yet proved its right to live. It had a flippant tone that barred its entrance to the best families, and Auburn had never given it the official sanction that would insure its permanent success. The difference in the spirit of the two papers might be seen by a glance down the personal columns of each. The “Transcript” was wont to state in dignified terms that “Joseph Slater departed yesterday for Jamestown.” The “Ledger” would announce flippantly, “Joe Slater went to Jimtown yesterday. What’s up, Joe?” This was spicy, all Auburn agreed, but it savored of vulgarity, and the old residents clung to their old paper, in spite of the fact that the new sheet was enterprising, clean, and up-to-date. The “Ledger” catered to advertisements; the “Transcript” paid special attention to the obituary column. And the citizens of Auburn subscribed to the “Transcript,” and borrowed the “Ledger.”

On the morning of the sixteenth of July the “Transcript” contained two items more than the “Ledger.” The first of these was headed:

The other item was not poetic. It was in the advertisement column, and read:—

“I saw your advertisement in the paper this morning,” said Miss Bates, stopping at the doctor’s gate in the early evening.

Barbara sat on the porch step, her bright head drooped upon the vine-covered railing. It had been sweeping-day, and the unused muscles of her back were protesting against their unaccustomed exercise. Perhaps it was weariness that sent the querulous note into her voice.

“How did you know it was mine?”

“Why, I happened to meet David on the way to the ‘Transcript’ office this morning. I knew that Ellen left you several days ago, so I put two and two together. Besides, my dear, I would have known for other reasons. The advertisement showed that it was written by an inexperienced housekeeper.”

“How?” asked Barbara.

“Nobody ever advertises for help in Auburn. Newspapers aren’t much good for that. If you want a girl, all you have to do is to spread the news among your acquaintances.”

“That isn’t hard, with you to help,” muttered Gassy, from the step above.

“What’s that, Cecilia? Oh, I thought you spoke to me.—And they will be on the outlook for you. It is much cheaper than advertising. How are you getting along without Ellen?”

Barbara thought of the half-done potatoes, the broken water-pitcher, and the soda-less biscuits that had been incidents of the day. But she was in no humor for a confession to Miss Bates.

“Pretty well,” she said.

“That’s good. You know so little about housework, Barbara, that I wouldn’t have been surprised if you were missing her. Not that you’re to blame for that. Lots of people set a college education above home training, nowadays. Just about noon to-day I smelled something burning, and I said to myself, ‘There goes Barbara Grafton’s dinner.’ But of course it might have come from some other kitchen. The wind came straight this way, though.”

“Yes?” said Barbara, wearily.

“Is it true that you’ve turned vegetarian? I was at the butcher’s this morning, and Jack came in and got a steak. I knew that your pa is away, but I thought that one steak wouldn’t do for your family. I happened to mention it to the butcher, and he said that your meat orders were falling off lately. So I just wondered if you had given up eating meat.”

A long, thin arm, extended from the step above, thrust Barbara vigorously in the side. In the dusk the action was hidden from the visitor, but Barbara knew well its purport She was being enjoined to tell nothing to Miss Bates.

“Our appetites for meat seem to be falling off this hot weather,” she returned guardedly.

“Of course it’s a lot cheaper to live that way,” said the visitor. “Saves cooking, too. And you won’t have time to do much cooking if all these reports I hear of your starting a benevolent society are true.”

There was no response from Barbara.

“If you’re thinking of going into club-work, you’d better join our lodge,—the Ancient Neighbors. Maybe you’d be elected to office. Mrs. Beebe, the old Royal Ranger, resigned three months ago, and Miss Homer, the new one, ain’t giving satisfaction. She don’t seem to be capable of learning the ritual. She got the meeting open last night, and forgot what came next, and had to send for Mrs. Beebe to get it shut. If you have any memory for rituals, Barbara, maybe I could get you in for office.”

Barbara murmured her thanks. “I haven’t much time for club-work, though, now,” she said.

“I have,” said a small voice. Gassy’s fist, inclosing an imaginary missile, shook in the direction of the unconscious visitor.

“I expect that your literary work takes up most of your time.”

Barbara caught her breath sharply. How much had that dreadful woman heard?

“Of course you may not be writing, but I have had my suspicions about it, since I met you with that fat envelope with the Century Company’s stamp, a week ago. I knew that you had done a bit of writing at school, and I put two and two together, and said to myself, ‘Barbara Grafton’s gone to writing.’ I couldn’t help wondering if the ‘Century’ had taken it, or sent it back. Of course, being an author myself, I’m always interested in budding genius. What is it, Barbara, poetry or fiction?”

Out of the shadow of the porch vines came Gassy’s sharp little voice. “Jack cut your poetry out of the paper this morning, Miss Bates,” she said.

“Did he?” said Miss Bates, delightedly. “I didn’t know Jack was so appreciative as that. I’m afraid the poetry wasn’t as good as some I have written. But I felt it—every word of it—when I wrote it. And I suppose Jack liked its tone of sincerity. That is my highest ambition: not to win fame or money, but to be cut out and carried in the vest-pocket.”

“He said,” giggled Gassy, from behind the vines, “that he couldn’t have the sanctity of the home invaded,”—the imitation of Jack’s inflection was perfect,—“an’ that he wouldn’t suffer our minds,—David’s and mine, he meant,—to be c’rrupted, so he cut it out; but I think he sent it to mother. We always save all the funny things for her, to cheer her up, now she’s sick.”

The darkness hid the terrible expression upon Miss Bates’s face, but it did not conceal the frigidity of her tones as she took her elbows from the doctor’s gate. “Your sister’s got a job in giving you some of her college culture, Gassy Grafton,” she said to the small fold of light gingham which showed alongside the vine-clad porch post. She looked back over her shoulder to fire her last volley of ammunition.

“I hope it will amuse your mother,” she said. “If you’d all been a little less selfish about using her like a hack-horse when she was at home, you wouldn’t have to be sending jokes to her at a sanitarium, now.”

“What on earth did you tell her that for?” asked Barbara, as Miss Bates swept around the corner.

“She deserved it. She needn’t pick on you!”

“But you can’t give people all they deserve, in this world, little sister.”

“No, not always,” said Gassy. “But I always do when I can.”

Miss Bates’s opinion about the value of newspaper advertising seemed to be well founded. A week passed without an applicant for the vacant position in the Grafton kitchen. Barbara grew tired and cross and discouraged. The weather turned hot, and the sunny kitchen on the east side of the house seemed to harbor all the humidity of the day. The nurse at the sanitarium wrote that Mrs. Grafton was not improving as rapidly as she could wish. David’s hay fever began, and he went wheezing around the house in a state of discomfort that wrung Barbara’s sympathetic heart. The writing and the precious study-hour had to be abandoned. So it was with a feeling of relief that the over-worked girl saw a strange woman come through the office gate one morning. The newcomer was not at all prepossessing. Hair, eyes, and skin were of the uncertain whity-yellow of a peeled banana. Her shirt-waist bloused in the back as well as the front, and she had yet to learn the Æsthetic value of sufficient petticoats. She stared uncertainly at Barbara as the latter opened the side door.

“Did you wish to see any one?” asked Barbara, after a painful silence.

“Yes, mam,” said the girl.

“Whom do you want?”

There was another long pause, during which the girl shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Then she said, “The lady, mam.”

“Did you come to inquire about a position?”

The young woman evidently concentrated her energy upon the question. Her mind moved so slowly and jerkily that Barbara, watching the process, was reminded of the working of an ouija board. She would not have been surprised to hear the girl squeak. But the query was beyond the newcomer. It was plain that vernacular must be tried.

“Do you want a place?”

The girl brightened a shade. “Yes, mam.”

“Can you cook?”

“No, mam.”

“Wait upon the table?”

“No, mam.”

“Sweep and dust?”

“No, mam.”

“Can’t you bake at all?”

“No, mam.”

“Have you never cooked?”

“No, mam.”

“Well, what can you do?”

The whity-yellow girl brightened again. It was evident that this time she was to vary her reply.

“I kin milk, mam.”

Two hours later, Jack surveyed the new acquisition through the porch window. “I see we have an Angel of the House,” he said to Barbara, who had stretched her weary length in the hammock. “How came she here?”

“She just blew in.”

“In answer to your advertisement?”

“No, she had never seen it.”

Jack took another critical look through the window. “She doesn’t give the impression of being overweighted with intelligence. And she’s certainly not beautiful. Has her color run in the wash, or was she always of that gentle hue? But appearances must be deceitful; she’s a paragon of cleverness, if she fills the bill for you. I suppose she is a wonderful cook?”

Barbara shook her head.

“Neat?”

“She doesn’t look so.”

“Well, willing?”

“I haven’t discovered yet.”

“Honest, anyway?”

“I don’t know anything about her morals.”

Jack assumed a momentary air of distress. Then he drew a long sigh of relief as he remarked, “Well, I know she’s experienced. You said no others need apply!”

The hammock’s motion stopped, and Barbara lay ominously silent for a minute. Then the pent-up feeling of the past week burst forth in her reply:—

“John Grafton, I don’t know one earthly thing about that girl! She’s done farm-work all her life. She doesn’t know how to cook. She never heard of rice or celery. She never has seen a refrigerator! She’s afraid of the gas-stove. She wouldn’t know what I meant if I asked her about references. She can’t do anything but milk. She isn’t one single thing that I advertised for, or hoped for, or wanted! But maybe she can learn. And I’m so tired, and hot, and discouraged, and I’ve spoiled so many things!”

And for once in his life Jack understood, and forbore.

“I’ve seen a good many kinds of imbecility in my life,” said Jack, a week later. “But never one to equal hers.

She was born stupid, achieved stupidness, and had stupidity thrust upon her,—all three. I found her pouring water on the gas-stove to put out the burner, the other day. She’ll have us all gas-fixiated, if we don’t watch out.”

“That was several days ago,” laughed Barbara. “She’s developed a stage beyond that, now. In fact, she’s devoted to the gas-stove. I can hardly prevail upon her to turn it off at all. She announced to me yesterday that it was the handiest thing she ever saw,—that you ‘only had to light it once a day, and fire all the time.’ Think what our gas-bill is likely to be under her tender ministrations!”

“Her awe of it is evidently great,” said Jack. “She asked Gassy this morning if she was named after the stove. ‘I don’t wonder they named you that,’ she said; ‘I ain’t never seen nothing like it. W’y, if I wuz to go home and tell ’em I turned on a spit, and there wuz the fire, they’d say I wuz a liar!’”

“She’s an idgit!” ejaculated Gassy; “a born idgit!”

Gassy’s epithet clung. It was used by the family with bated breath and apprehensive glance, but still it was used. No other title seemed appropriate after that was once heard, and her Christian name sank into oblivion from disuse. It was never employed except in her presence. And the Idgit certainly earned her title. She put onions in the rice-pudding; she melted the base off of the silver teapot by setting it on the stove; she cut up potatoes peeling and all, for creamed potatoes, explaining that “some liked ’em skinned, an’ some didn’t”; she left the receiver of the telephone hanging by its cord for hours, until the doctor’s patients were desperate, and so many complaints poured in at the central office that a man was sent to repair damages; she turned the hose on the walls and floor of the kitchen to facilitate scrubbing, until the whole room was deluged, and overflowed like the Johnstown flood; she answered the doorbell by calling through the dining-room and the front hall that “no one’s to home”; she put the bread sponge in the oven of the range, and then built a fire above it to “raise it quick” (the oven was full of burned paste before Barbara discovered the time-saving device); she ladled the gold-fish out of the aquarium to feed them, and left the four red, dead little corpses on the library mantel. “They’re too pretty to sling out,” she said.

Barbara wavered between exasperation and amusement during the twenty-four hours of the day. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her,” she confided to her father one evening. “I thought that intelligence was a part of the make-up of every human being; but Addie either has no place for it in her identity, or else the place that is there is empty. I gave her a recipe yesterday,—how she ever learned to read is beyond my comprehension,—that called for ‘six eggs beaten separately.’ Addie emptied one from its shell, beat it, emptied another, beat that, and followed the same proceeding with the whole six.”

“I can tell something funnier than that,” said Dr. Grafton. “I telephoned over here from the livery stable this afternoon, and asked Addie to ‘hold the phone’ until I could read a message to her. Central rang off before I could read it, and then I couldn’t get connections again. So I came over home to give it to her, twenty minutes later, and found her obediently still holding the receiver.”

“The last teller of tales has the best chance,” chuckled Jack. “What message did you give the Idgit to give Miss Bates when she called here yesterday?”

Barbara considered. “That I was in, but that I was engaged, I think,” she said finally.

“She gave it, all right! She told Miss Bates that you were at home, but that you were going to be married. Thanks to Miss Bates’s activity and interest, the report is widely circulated throughout Auburn.”

Barbara groaned.

“Don’t worry over it,” said her father. “The fact that Miss Bates is standing sponsor for the story will destroy its danger.”

“Oh, I’m not worrying about that,” responded Barbara. “What is the report of my betrothal to an unknown, and therefore harmless, man, as compared with the problem of the Idgit? I don’t want her, I can’t keep her, and yet how am I to get rid of her?”

“Maybe she’ll leave; she told me her family wanted her back,” said Gassy, hopefully.

“I can’t see what for,” said Barbara, “unless it is to kill chickens. That is the one thing she has done without blunder or assistance, since she stepped over our threshold. And unless Addie’s family are given over wholly to a diet of fowl, I fail to see how she could be of any use to them.”

But relief from the Idgit came sooner than was expected. In the middle of an afternoon of canning raspberries, Mrs. Willowby came to inquire about Mrs. Grafton’s health. Barbara slipped off her berry-stained apron, sighed over the fruit-stained nails that no amount of manicuring would whiten, and dabbed some powder on her shiny face. Then she went into the living-room to greet her guest.

Mrs. Willowby was one of the few residents who reconciled Barbara to Auburn. Refinement was her birthright, and in her gentle voice, simple manner, and fine breeding were combined all the aristocracy of old Auburn, and none of its pettiness; all the progress of new Auburn, and none of its crudeness. The miseries of kitchen-work were forgotten, as the two dropped into the dear familiar talk of the college world, that partook of neither servants nor weather, recipes nor house-cleaning.

“It’s a hundred years since I have talked Matthew Arnold with any one,” sighed Barbara. “No, perhaps two months would be nearer the truth. But it seems like a hundred years.”

“Why don’t you?” asked Mrs. Willowby.

“Just now, I haven’t time,” said Barbara; “but if I had all the time in the world, there wouldn’t be any one to talk to.”

“Why not your father and mother?”

“Father and mother! Why, father doesn’t know poetry,—except Riley and Bret Harte; and mother doesn’t care for it.”

Mrs. Willowby’s sweet brown eyes twinkled. “You’re joking with me, Barbara.”

“No, I’m in earnest.”

“You dear little girl! Are you such a stranger to your own home people? I don’t believe that Matthew Arnold ever wrote anything that your mother doesn’t know. Where she gets time, with all her multitudinous duties, to love Shelley, and live Browning, and keep abreast of Stephen Phillips and Yeats, I don’t see; but she does it, somehow. She is one of the few true poetry-lovers I know. As for your father, I have heard him quote Riley and Harte to you children, because, I always supposed, he thought you could understand them. But he himself doesn’t stop there. He isn’t so widely read as your mother, but the old poets he has made his own. He knows his yellow Shakespeare from cover to cover. How have you ever lived in the same house with them and yet been such a stranger? Your father and mother, dear, are the cultivated people of Auburn.”

Surprise was written strongly on every feature of Barbara’s face.

“That’s the trouble with college life. You young people never get the opportunity to know your own families, nowadays. At the time when you are just beginning to be old enough to appreciate your parents, you are sent away. Then you go to work, or marry, and leave home without knowing the real wealth that often lies at your own doors. Did you ever read Emerson’s ‘Days’?”

Barbara shook her head. Mrs. Willowby turned to the open book-shelves, and took down a shabby green volume. “It has your mother’s own marks,” she said, as she turned to the page, where a lead pencil had traced a delicate line about the words,—

There was a moment’s pause after the stately lines were finished.

“I understand,” said Barbara, finding her voice. “But I never knew,—before. It is true, Mrs. Willowby, about losing some things by college life. I’m beginning to think that there are lots of things to be learned at home.”

The gentle brown eyes smiled at the new tone of humility. “My dear little girl,” began Mrs. Willowby, “if you have discovered that, you have learned the very thing for which you were sent to college. The most important lessons in the word are not learned from textbooks, and all—Goodness, Barbara, what on earth was that?”

Somewhere from the back regions of the house had come the sound of a mighty explosion. It was followed by the sound of breaking glass, and a shrill shriek.

“The Idgit!” breathed Barbara. The Emerson slid to the floor, and the hostess and guest rushed to the kitchen.

In the middle of the floor sat the Idgit, a whity-yellow island in a sea of raspberry juice and broken glass. From the oven of the gas-stove came a volume of flame and smoke. The stove-lids lay on the floor, and the kitchen was full of flying flecks of soot. Barbara rushed to the stove, and turned off the burners, one by one. Then she lifted the huddled heap from the floor.

“What is the matter, Addie?” she asked.

The ouija board in the Idgit’s brain was unusually stubborn and unmanageable. It was fully three minutes before anything intelligible came from her lips. Then the inarticulate sounds resolved themselves into the words, “Oh, gol, mam!”

“What happened?”

“I dunno, mam.”

“What did you do to the stove?”

“I dunno, mam.”

“Did you light it? How did the burners come to be turned on?”

“I was cleaning the stove, mam. I must ’a’ turned ’em on when I washed the knobs.”

“Then did you light it?”

“No, mam. I left it to carry the fruit down cellar; an’ I lit a match to see by.”

“Oh!” said Barbara.

For the first and last time in her career the Idgit uttered a voluntary sentence. “I’m going to quit to-night. Gol! that gas-stove!”