l comfortable, persuasive
old chair, and worth, in the way of honest, homely enjoyment, a dozen of
your plush or _brochetelle_ drawing-room gentry; and in the chair, gently
swaying back and forward, her eyes bent on some fine sewing, sat our
fine old friend Eliza. Yes, there she is, paler and thinner than in her
Kentucky home, with a world of quiet sorrow lying under the shadow of
her long eyelashes, and marking the outline of her gentle mouth! It
was plain to see how old and firm the girlish heart was grown under
the discipline of heavy sorrow; and when, anon, her large dark eye was
raised to follow the gambols of her little Harry, who was sporting, like
some tropical butterfly, hither and thither over the floor, she showed a
depth of firmness and steady resolve that was never there in her earlier
and happier days.
By her side sat a woman with a bright tin pan in her lap, into which
she was carefully sorting some dried peaches. She might be fifty-five or
sixty; but hers was one of those faces that time seems to touch only
to brighten and adorn. The snowy lisse crape cap, made after the strait
Quaker pattern,--the plain white muslin handkerchief, lying in placid
folds across her bosom,--the drab shawl and dress,--showed at once the
community to which she belonged. Her face was round and rosy, with
a healthful downy softness, suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair,
partially silvered by age, was parted smoothly back from a high placid
forehead, on which time had written no inscription, except peace on
earth, good will to men, and beneath shone a large pair of clear,
honest, loving brown eyes; you only needed to look straight into them,
to feel that you saw to the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever
throbbed in woman's bosom. So much has been said and sung of beautiful
young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women? If
any want to get up an inspiration under this head, we refer them to
our good friend Rachel Halliday, just as she sits there in her little
rocking-chair. It had a turn for quacking and squeaking,--that chair
had,--either from having taken cold in early life, or from some
asthmatic affection, or perhaps from nervous derangement; but, as she
gently swung backward and forward, the chair kept up a kind of subdued
"creechy crawchy," that would have been intolerable in any other chair.
But old Simeon Halliday often declared it was as good as any music to
him, and the children all avowed t
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