ore rapidly as his square
sense and upright character became known.

The girl, in her retirement, heard of her lover's advancement with
pride and fear. She distrusted her worth, and found the hard menial
duties of life more irksome than before. Not that she shrank from
labor, but she feared its unfitting her for the refinement required by
her lover's new social position. She had few examples to teach her
the small proprieties of small minds, but a native delicacy helped her
more than she was conscious of. She read her Bible a great deal, and
used to wonder if Mary and "the other Mary" were ladies. She thought
Peter was probably an East Tennesseean, or like one, for when he
denied his Lord they said he did not talk like the others. It seemed
hard that to say "we-uns" and "you-uns," as she habitually did, though
she tried not, and to use the simple phrases of her childhood, should
be thought coarse or wrong. Such matters were puzzles to her which she
could not solve. She got an old thumbed Butler's _Grammar_ and tried
hard to correct the vocables of her truant tongue. I am afraid she
made poor progress. She had a way of defying that intolerable tyrant,
the nominative singular, and put all her verbs in the plural, under an
impression, not without example, that it was elegant language. She had
enough hard work to do, poor girl! to have been quit of these mental
troubles. Her brother was away, her parents were old, and all the
irksome duties of farm-house and garden fell upon her. She had to hunt
the wild shoats on the range, and to herd them; to drive up the cows,
and milk them; to churn and make the butter and cheese. She tapped
the sugar trees and watched the kettles, and made the maple syrup and
sugar; she tended the poultry, ploughed and hoed the corn field and
garden, besides doing the house-work. Her old parents could help but
little, for the "rheumatiz," which attacks age in the mountains, had
cramped and knotted their limbs, and they were fit for nothing except
in fine dry weather. Surely, life was hard with her, without
her anxieties about her lover's constancy and her own defects.
Letter-writing was a labor not to be thought of. She tried it, and got
as far as "I am quite well, and I hope these few lines will find you
the same," and there stopped. She ascribed the difficulty to her own
mental and clerical defects, but I think it lay quite as much in the
nature of the relation. How was she to express confidence whe