A TRANSPLANTING.
ALICE WINSTON.
IT WAS the kitten who did it, though no one knew but Martha. Aunt Jenny thought it was the work of Providence and Aunt Amy thought it was the result of her own smiles and caresses. Aunt Mary never thought about it at all, of course. But really it was the kitten. And what was this thing that the kitten accomplished? The taming of Martha. And why did Martha need taming? Because she came at twelve, a very barbarian, with freckles and unmanageable hair, under the dominion of three smooth-locked ladies, who never had a freckle and whose hair had always been smooth.
Perhaps it would be better to begin at the beginning which was twenty years before there was any kitten. Most serene and happy would have been the lives of the three Miss Clarkes, if it had not been for Arthur. Arthur was their brother, and the combination of prim, blonde girls and harum-scarum black-eyed boy, made a most surprising family. The son and heir was not looked on as a success by his sisters and the other staid and respectable citizens of Summerfield. He did not join the church and he did not go to college, he wedded no one of the many eligible town's daughters, and, lastly, on his father's death he did not settle down at home, to take care of his property and his sisters.
This last of his misdeeds had made a breach between himself and his sisters. The more serious, because of the very deep affection which lay at the bottom of their half apologetic demeanor toward their brother. The difference between them was augmented by his removal to a far western town and his marriage with one of the natives. For the next twelve or thirteen years they never saw him and heard of him but seldom. Then he died suddenly, after accomplishing his task of wasting all his money.
So it happened that Martha saw her aunts for the first time on the day of her father's funeral, and her dim recollection was of cold faces and mannerisms which worried her mother. Martha was the eldest of four and her mother was one of the ornamental of earth, and her father one of the restless. So the first eleven years of her existence was wandering up and down through many cities, attended with much care for her slender shoulders, and an amount of worldly experience such as forty years of life had not given to the elder generation. Then her father died and they all went to share the spendthrift poverty of the home, whence her mother drew her ideas of domestic economy.
Through wifehood and widowhood, to her deathbed, Mrs. Clarke clung to an unreasoning hate of her sisters-in-law, and a dread of the time when her children must come into their hands kept her struggling against death for months.
But just one month after her pitiful fight was over, Martha started for Summerfield.