octor?"

"No," relied Honora, "but--but I can't talk any more--to-day."

She apologized on the morrow, as she held Mrs. Mayo's hand. "It--it was
your happiness," she said; "I was unstrung. I couldn't listen to it.
Forgive me."

The little woman burst into tears, and kissed her as she sat in bed.

"Forgive you, deary!" she cried. "I never thought."

"It has been so easy for you," Honora faltered.

"Yes, it has. I ought to thank God, and I do--every night."

She looked long and earnestly, through her tears, at the young lady
from the far away East as she lay against the lace pillows, her paleness
enhanced by the pink gown, her dark hair in two great braids on her
shoulders.

"And to think how pretty you are!" she exclaimed.

It was thus she expressed her opinion of mankind in general, outside
of her own family circle. Once she had passionately desired beauty,
the high school and the story of Helen of Troy notwithstanding. Now she
began to look at it askance, as a fatal gift; and to pity, rather than
envy, its possessors.

As a by-industry, Mrs. Mayo raised geraniums and carnations in her
front cellar, near the furnace, and once in a while Peggy, with the
pulled-molasses hair, or chubby Abraham Lincoln, would come puffing
up Honora's stairs under the weight of a flower-pot and deposit it
triumphantly on the table at Honora's bedside. Abraham Lincoln did not
object to being kissed: he had, at least, grown to accept the process
as one of the unaccountable mysteries of life. But something happened to
him one afternoon, on the occasion of his giving proof of an intellect
which may eventually bring him, in the footsteps of his great namesake,
to the White House. Entering Honora's front door, he saw on the hall
table a number of letters which the cook (not gifted with his brains)
had left there. He seized them in one fat hand, while with the other
he hugged the flower-pot to his breast, mounted the steps, and arrived,
breathless but radiant, on the threshold of the beautiful lady's room,
and there calamity overtook him in the shape of one of the thousand
articles which are left on the floor purposely to trip up little boys.

Great was the disaster. Letters, geranium, pieces of flower-pot, a
quantity of black earth, and a howling Abraham Lincoln bestrewed the
floor. And similar episodes, in his brief experience with this world,
had not brought rewards. It was from sheer amazement that his tears
ceased to flow--amazem