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274 "Yes, all about the same, Tom. Not many changes now at Pebblesdale. You heerd about the taking away of old Granny Gummage?"

"No; is she dead?"

"Dead she is, Tom. Cut off like a flower of the field in her ninety-seventh year."

"Ah, well, we must be reconciled to that sort of thing, mother."

"Yes, and it shows us our own time's coming. You won't have heerd the news about Ned Stover."

"No, don't tell me old Ned's dead too. I've been looking forward to meeting him."

"Dead? No, not a bit of it, and he's supporting the pub just as usual, though the old woman does drag him away every now and then, but he have had a letter yesterday morning from the London lawyers, saying that if he don't stop this pretending to be the Duke of Belmont they'll put him in jail."

"Oh, heavens, they can't do that, because we haven't a jail in Pebblesdale, and we won't allow Ned to go out of our jurisdiction. What does old Ned say about it?"

"He tried to let on that he's not frightened. He says it's against the law to put a man in jail except by habeas-corpus, or something like that. He's learned in the law, is old Ned. He was going away this morning to see a lawyer, but his wife wouldn't let him. She's in a rare stew about