Don't leave us, Ariel!
Maker of music, bringer of blossoms, stay!"
CHAPTER V
"THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF"
Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, with an uplift of his fine black brows and a
satirical smile, once diagnosed the case of Great-Aunt Sophronisba
Scarlett as "congenital Hyndsitis"; Doctor Richard Geddes said you'd
only to take a glance at her house to see that she was predestined
to be damned. _I_ know that she was so hidebound in her prejudices,
so virulently conservative, so constitutionally opposed to change,
that anything savoring of modernity was anathema to her.
That old woman would as lief have had what remained of her teeth
pulled out as have parted with anything once brought into Hynds
House. She preserved everything, good, bad, indifferent. You'd find
luster cider jugs, maybe a fine toby, old Chinese ginger jars, and
the quaintest of Dutch schnapps bottles, cheek by jowl with an iron
warming-pan, a bootjack, a rusty leather bellows, and a box packed
with empty patent-medicine bottles, under the pantry shelf. A
helmet creamer would be full of little rolls of twine, odd buttons,
a wad of beeswax, a piece of asafetida, elastic bands, and corks.
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