“What!” cried Euphemia. “You are not going to-day?”

“If it is goot to go at all it is goot to go now,” said the girl.

“And you will go off and leave me without any one in the house, after my putting myself out to give you a fair notice? It's shameful!”

“I think it is very goot for me to go now,” quietly replied the girl. “This house is very loneful. I will go to-morrow in the city to see your husband for my money. Goot morning.” And off she trudged to the station.

Before I reached the house that afternoon, Euphemia rushed out to tell this story. I would not like to say how far I kicked those ham-bones.

This German girl had several successors, and some of them suited as badly and left as abruptly as herself; but Euphemia never forgot the ungrateful stab given her by this “ham-bone girl,” as she always called her. It was her first wound of the kind, and it came in the very beginning of the campaign when she was all unused to this domestic warfare.

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CHAPTER VII. TREATING OF AN UNSUCCESSFUL BROKER AND A DOG.

It was a couple of weeks, or thereabouts, after this episode that Euphemia came down to the gate to meet me on my return from the city. I noticed a very peculiar expression on her face. She looked both thoughtful and pleased. Almost the first words she said to me were these:

“A tramp came here to-day.”