My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street, and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out for us as if he knew.
"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."
My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph. But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.
"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be up to talk to you in a day or two--I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can spell like the minister."
I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!" Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of--shall I say?--brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I have seldom known this divination to fail me--though I am chary of using it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I _knew_ that it would be Miggy.
"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the imminent; "_why_ Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.