she found the bed empty, and
poor Dainty gone.

CHAPTER XXXV.

GRAND COMPANY.

A strange chance, or, perhaps, a kindly Providence, brought Sarah Ann
Peters and old black mammy together that spring at the railway station
near Ellsworth, where both were then living.

The indefatigable white woman was laid low with la grippe, and her
husband, in seeking a maid-of-all-work to fill her place, could find no
one to take the situation but the aged Virginia.

As six of the large brood of sons were away at school, mammy undertook
"to do for the rest," as she expressed it; and the last of March found
her domesticated at the six-roomed frame house on the edge of the woods,
a mile from the station.

Here the thrifty Peters family had lived for ten years throughout the
winters, removing each spring to the lonely saw-mill in the mountains,
where by hard, unremitting toil they succeeded in earning enough money
to send their children to good schools in the cold weather.

Already Peters was making his arrangements to remove to the woods in
April, when his good wife was stricken with a heavy cold that laid her
low during the last three weeks of March; though her sturdy constitution
triumphed then, and she sat up the first day of April, a little pale and
wasted, but, as she expressed it, "feeling just as stout as ever, but
glad to have mammy there awhile yet to take the heft of the work off her
tired shoulders."

In her secret heart black mammy felt cruelly hurt at having come down,
in her old age, to work for ordinary "po' w'ite trash;" but she had
fallen on evil days in this latter end of her pilgrimage.

After the terrible misfortune that had befallen Love Ellsworth, his
heartless step-mother had made full use of her power to oppress all who
had taken the part of poor Dainty Chase.

For many years mammy, with her son and her daughter-in-law, had
inhabited rent free, their cabin on the Ellsworth estate, Love also
allowing them the use of a patch of ground for their garden. The negroes
having belonged to his ancestors in slavery times, he felt that this
kindness was but their honest due.

But no sooner had Mrs. Ellsworth usurped the reins of government than
she proceeded to drive away the poor negroes from the cabin. Thereupon
mammy's son and his wife removed to the coal mines of Fayette County,
and left the old woman to shift for herself.

Though she did her work faithfully for Mrs. Peters, she did not fail to
imp