Dalton invalids, sent the ripest fruit and the sweetest flowers; and if
she could not watch with the sick, because it interfered with her duties
at home in an unpleasant and inconvenient way, she would sit with them
hour after hour in the day-time, and wait on all their caprices with the
patient tenderness of a mother. Children she always eyed with strange
wistfulness, as if she longed to kiss them, but didn't know how; yet no
child was ever invited across her threshold, for the yellow cur hated to
be played with, and children always torment kittens.

So Miss Lucinda wore on happily toward the farther side of the middle
Ages. One after another of her pets passed away and was replaced, the
yellow cur barked his last currish signal, the cat died and her kittens
came to various ends of time or casualty, the crow fell away to dust and
was too old to stuff, and the garden bloomed and faded ten times over,
before Miss Manners found herself to be forty-six years old, which she
heroically acknowledged one fine day to the census-taker. But it was not
this consciousness, nor its confession, that drew the dark brows so low
over Miss Lucinda's eyes that day; it was quite another trouble, and one
that wore heavily on her mind, as we shall proceed to explain. For Miss
Manners, being, like all the rest of her sex, quite unable to do without
some masculine help, had employed, for some seven years, an old man by
the name of Israel Slater, to do her "chores," as the vernacular hath
it. It is a mortifying thing, and one that strikes at the roots of
Women's Rights terribly sharp blows, but I must even own it, that one
might as well try to live without one's bread-and-butter as without the
aid of the dominant sex. When I see women split wood, unload coal-carts,
move wash-tubs, and roll barrels of flour and apples handily down
cellar-ways or up into carts, then I shall believe in the sublime
theories of the strong-minded sisters; but as long as I see before me
my own forlorn little hands, and sit down on the top stair to recover
breath, and try in vain to lift the water-pitcher at table, just so long
I shall be glad and thankful that there are men in the world, and that
half a dozen of them are my kindest and best friends. It was rather an
affliction to Miss Lucinda to feel this innate dependence, and at first
she resolved to employ only small boys, and never any one of them more
than a week or two. She had an unshaped theory that an old maid