“Yes, ma’am, all the time! If I find him loose again, I’ll tie a bag of rocks to his neck and drop him in the deepest hole in the brook. He’d oughter been drowned by that man when he was a pup.”
After this awful threat, Prince lived a precarious existence, and his mistress was much worried for him. Never, when Uncle Joe was at home, could the dog have a run. Aunty Rose said nothing, but she saw that both the little girl and her canine friend were very unhappy.
Mrs. Kennedy, however, had watched Mr. Joseph Stagg for years. Indeed, she had known him as a boy, long before she had closed up her own little cottage around on the other road and come to the Stagg place to save the hardware merchant from the continued reign of those “trifling creatures” of whom Mrs. Gormley had spoken.
As a bachelor, Joseph Stagg had been preyed upon by certain female harpies so prevalent in a country community. Some had families whom they partly supported out of Mr. Stagg’s larder; some were widows who looked upon the well-to-do merchant as a marrying proposition.
Aunty Rose Kennedy did not need the position of Mr. Stagg’s housekeeper and could not be accused of assuming it from mercenary motives. Over her back fence she had seen the havoc going on in the Stagg homestead after Hannah Stagg went to the city and Joseph Stagg’s final female relative had died and left him alone in the big house.
One day the old Quaker-like woman could stand no more. She put on her sunbonnet, came around by the road to the front door of the Stagg house, which she found open, and walked through to the rear porch on which the woman who then held the situation of housekeeper was wrapping up the best feather bed and pillows in a pair of the best home-spun sheets, preparatory to their removal.
The neighbours enjoyed what followed. Aunty Rose came through the ordeal as dignified and unruffled as ever; the retiring incumbent went away wrathfully, shaking the dust of the premises from her garments as a testimony against “any sich actions.”
When Mr. Stagg came home at supper time he found Aunty Rose at the helm and already a different air about the place.
“Goodness me, Aunty Rose,” he said, biting into her biscuit ravenously, “I was a-going down to the mill-hands’ hotel to board. I couldn’t stand it no longer. If you’d stay here and do for me, I’d feel like a new man.”
“You ought to be made over into a new man, Joseph Stagg,” the woman said sternly. “A married man.”