--and a geography and atlas
which had formed part of the school outfit of one of the younger
children she seemed interested to retain for some time. "It is my
opinion," said my mother, "that she is studying,--perhaps with a view
to getting some better situation."

"Pray keep her with us," said I, "if you can. Why don't you raise her
wages? You know that she does more than any other girl ever did before
in her place, and is so trustworthy that she is invaluable to us.
Persons of her class are worth higher wages than common uneducated
servants."

My mother accordingly did make a handsome addition to Mary's wages,
and by the time she had been with us a year the confidence which her
quiet manner had inspired was such that, if my mother wished to be
gone for a day or two, the house, with all that was in it, was left
trustingly in Mary's hands, as with a sort of housekeeper. She was
charged with all the last directions, as well as the keys to the
jellies, cakes, and preserves, with discretionary power as to their
use; and yet, for some reason, such was the ascendency she contrived
to keep over her Hibernian friends in the kitchen, all this confidence
evidently seemed to them quite as proper as to us.

"She ain't quite like us," said Biddy one day, mysteriously, as she
looked after her. "She's seen better days, or I'm mistaken; but she
don't take airs on her. She knows how to take the bad luck quiet like,
and do the best she can."

"Has she ever told you anything of herself, Biddy?" said my mother.

"Me? No. It's a quiet tongue she keeps in her head. She is ready
enough to do good turns for us, and to smooth out our ways, and hear
our stories, but it's close in her own affairs she is. Maybe she don't
like to be talkin', when talkin' does no good,--poor soul!"

Matters thus went on, and I amused myself now and then with
speculating about Mary. I would sometimes go to her to ask some of
those little charities of the needle which our sex are always needing
from feminine hands; but never, in the course of any of these little
transactions, could I establish the slightest degree of confidential
communication. If she sewed on a shirt-button, she did it with as
abstracted an air as if my arm were a post which she was required to
handle, and not the arm of a good-looking youth of twenty-five,--as I
fondly hoped I was. And certain remarks which I once addressed to her
in regard to her studies and reading in her own apartment were