"I'm not Mrs. Guff any more," said the lady. "I'm Mrs. Balberry, your new aunt."
"Oh, so you're married, Uncle Abner."
"Yes," was the answer. "But see here, Nat, I don't understand about thet pocketbook," said the farmer.
"It's simple enough. As I said before, the game is an old one. That fellow had the pocketbook all the time. It was stuffed with old paper, with a dollar bill wrapped on the outside. He wanted to get your money, and if he had gotten it he would have left you with a pocketbook worth about a quarter, with nothing but old paper and a dollar bill in it, and maybe he would have taken the dollar bill out, too."
"Well, I never!" cried Mrs. Balberry. "Did you ever hear of such a swindle!"
"They play all sorts of games in a big city like this. You've got to keep your eyes open."
"I know it," groaned Abner Balberry. "Yesterday, a cabman cheated me out o' fifty cents, an' a boy got a quarter from me by a bogus telegram. I thought something had happened to hum, and when I opened the telegram it had nuthin but a sheet o' blank paper inside!"
"That was too bad."
There was an awkward pause. Now that the farmer had found Nat he hardly knew what to say. He had expected to upbraid his nephew for running away, but the pocketbook episode rather flustered him.
"So you come to New York, didn't you?" he said, slowly.