Mrs. Cliff's Yacht

by Frank R. Stockton

Now Willy leaned forward in her chair, and her eyes glistened. As her body grew colder, so did her temper grow warmer.

"If it's Mrs. Cliff you're thinkin' about, Nancy Shott," said she, "I'll just tell you that you're as wrong as you can be! There isn't a more generous and a kinder person in this whole town than Mrs. Cliff is, and she isn't only that way to-day, but she's always been so, whether she's had little or whether she's had much!"

"What did she ever do, I'd like to know!" said Miss Nancy. "She's lined her own nest pretty well, but what's she ever done for anybody else—"

"Now, Nancy Shott," said Willy, "you know she's been doin' for other people all her life whenever she could! She's done for you more than once, as I happen to know,—and she's done for other neighbors and friends. And, more than that, she's gone abroad to do good, and that's more than anybody else in this town's done, as I know of!"

"She didn't go to South America to do good to anybody but herself," coolly remarked the visitor.

"I'm not thinking of that!" said Willy. "She went there on business, as everybody knows! But you remember well enough when she was in the city, and I was with her, when the dreadful cholera times came on! Everybody said that there wasn't a person who worked harder and did more for the poor people who were brought to the hospital than Sarah did.

"She worked for them night and day; before they were dead and after they were dead! I did what I could, but it wasn't nothin' to what she did! Both of us had been buyin' things, and makin' them up for ourselves, for cotton and linen goods was so cheap then. If it hadn't been for the troubles which came on, we'd had enough to last us for years! But Sarah Cliff isn't the kind of woman to keep things for herself when they're wanted by others, and when she had given everything that she had to those poor creatures at the hospitals, she took my things without as much as takin' the trouble to ask me, for in times like that she isn't the woman to hesitate when she thinks she's doin' what ought to be done, and at one time, in that hospital, there was eleven corpses in my night-gowns!"

"Horrible!" exclaimed Miss Shott, rising to her feet. "It would have killed me to think of such a thing as that!"

"Well, if it would have killed you," said Willy, "there was another night-gown left."

"If you're going to talk that way," said Miss Shott, "I might as well go. I supposed that when I came here I would at least have been treated civilly!"