should wait instead for a man of good family, wealth, honor, and courage. “Test ’em,” her mama said.
Now since her papa had made a fortune selling stale bread crumbs . . .
“Oh, come on, Mia,” somebody said. “Who’d want to buy stale bread crumbs?”
“I’ll tell you exactly, Stu,” I said. “It was to children to make trails behind them when they went into the woods so they could find their way out again.”
Anyway, her papa had left her enough money that she could afford to sit year after year waiting for her regular Sunday afternoons and her suitors to come calling. She always disqualified them, however, if not on one ground then on another. She spent a good many years this way, sitting in her parlor getting odder and odder, and having great fun turning down suitors on Sunday afternoons. In time, there wasn’t a single eligible man in forty miles that she hadn’t said no to at least once. In fact, it finally got so that when a stranger was in town on a Sunday afternoon, the local fellows would send him out to be turned down. The town was small and this provided them with at least one consistent amusement.
Finally, however, it happened that on one particular Sunday there were two young men drinking in town. One was a lieutenant with a plumed hat and a fancy coat with several shiny medals. The other was a sea captain who had sailed around the world no less than three times, for all that he was young. Both were of quite unexceptionable families, were more than full in the pocket, were men of honor and had medals or other testimony to their courage—and both were single. They were, in point of fact, by a good margin the likeliest candidates that had ever been in Carlisle. The local fellows didn’t even try to choose between them. They simply laid the situation straight out, and both young men had drunk enough to find the idea appealing as well as a quite sensible method of settling the age-old rivalry between the Army and the Navy. So they went off to pay court.
They found the lady at home and quite disposed to receive them. In fact, it put her in quite a flutter. And she turned out to be, even after all these years, as fine looking a woman as either of these well-traveled young men had ever seen. She, on her side, found them both to be exactly the sort of men that her mother had told her to watch and wait for, for she quizzed them quite closely. That they had both shown up on the very same day, however, gave her quite a problem to resolve, and she finally determined to settle it by her mama’s method. “I will set you both a test,” she said, “and the man that passes it will be the man I wed.”
She had a span—which means a pair—of horses and a carriage brought around, and they all climbed in. The young bloods who had sent them in were all waiting in the yard and they followed the carriage down the road, sporting and making bets. The carriage went over the hill and down the road, and in time it came to the den of those lions that had been offending the local people, and there the fair young lady brought the horses to a stop. She’d no sooner done that than she fell rigid to the ground. They picked her up and dusted her off, but she didn’t say a word to anybody for upwards of a quarter hour. The two young fellows asked the local boys about that and they were told that it was the sort of thing she was likely to do from time to time.
“Well, what happened to her?”
“That’s the way the original story goes,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it meant that she was an hysteric.”
“Now, hush,” somebody said, “and let her get on with it.”
When the lady came to her senses again, after a manner of speaking, she threw her fan down in the den among the lions. That stirred them up, as you can imagine, and they began growling and prowling around. Then, quite satisfied with herself, the young lady said, “Now which of you gentlemen will win my hand by returning my fan to me?”
That really got the local boys to laying bets. The two young men looked down at the lions’ den and then