Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 June 1892 — What Satisfied Her. [ARTICLE]

What Satisfied Her.

“Uncle" Obed Wilson never could bear to hear evil spoken of any one. His wife used to say sometimes, “Sakes alive, Obed, folks’ll think ye don’t know what’s what es ye aint keerful.” The old man had a nephew who was famed throughout the neighborhood of Jeffstown for his “shif’lessness.” His farm was capable of yielding good returns, but it amounted to nothing in his hands, and Uncle Obed’s soul was greatly tried; but no one, not even Aunt Polly, could get him to say anything severe about his nephew Frank. The only response he made to Aunt Polly’s vigorous and scornful remarks was to say, gently, “Easy there, naow, Polly; easy there, my gal. Frank does lack jedgment, mebbe; but then, who don’t?” “Lack jedgment!” Aunt Polly would say, incapacitated by her wrath for' further speech; and there the conversation always dropped. But one day Aunt Polly had her reveuge, and was forever after contented. Whatever her husband might say, she knew that for once she had heard his real opinion in regard to his shiftless relations. Uncle Obed came home from his nephew’s late in the afternoon, drove Into the barn, and stopped to attend to the milking before coming into the house. Aunt Polly went, out to speak to him in great vexation of spirit. She had planned to ask him if he “really cal’lated any of Frank’s folks was wuth losin’ a hot supper fer;” but when she crossed the barn threshold she changed her mind. There, seated on the milking-stool before old Bess in a most dejected attitude, looking abstractedly at the big lantern which stood beside him on the floor, was Uncle Obed. He did not hear her approach, and as she stood for a moment in the doorway she heard him say: “The farm’s lookin’—an’ they’re lookin’, th’ whole lot on ’em—l mustn’t say so, o’ course—mustn’t let Polly know, in special—but they suttinly air lookin’ like th’ last o’ pea time over t’ Frank’s!” As he settled to his milking with a sigh, Aunt Polly stole softly from the barn, and when Uncle Obed’s work was done he had a good supper and not a cross word with it. Aunt Polly never found any fault with “Frank’s folks” to her husband after that, and whenever she heard Uncle Obed defending what she termed the “reckless doin’s” at his nephew’s, her face wore a calm and inscrutably satisfied smile which greatly puzzled her mild-spoken old spouse. “I aint never grudged him his d’sires to speak well of ’em,” she would say to herself at such times, “but I was sca’t f’r fear he was losin’ his sense; an’ naow I’m sat’sfled he aint lost it no more’n I hev.”