e kitchen, and lost the stoppers, as it was a shame to see in a
Christian house?' Ann, the third girl, being privately questioned,
blamed Biddy on Monday and Kate on Tuesday; on Wednesday, however, she
exonerated both; but on Thursday, being in a high quarrel with both, she
departed, accusing them severally not only of all the evil practices
aforesaid, but of lying, and stealing, and all other miscellaneous
wickednesses that came to hand. Whereat the two thus accused rushed in,
bewailing themselves and cursing Ann in alternate strophes, averring
that she had given the baby laudanum, and, taking it out riding, had
stopped for hours with it in a filthy lane, where the scarlet fever was
said to be rife,--in short, made so fearful a picture, that Marianne
gave up the child's life at once, and has taken to her bed. I have
endeavored all I could to quiet her, by telling her that the
scarlet-fever story was probably an extemporaneous work of fiction, got
up to gratify the Hibernian anger at Ann, and that it wasn't in the
least worth while to believe one thing more than another from the fact
that any of the tribe said it. But she refuses to be comforted, and is
so Utopian as to lie there, crying,--'Oh, if I only could get one that I
could trust,--one that really would speak the truth to me,--one that I
might know really went where she said she went, and really did as she
said she did!' To have to live so, she says, and bring up little
children with those she can't trust out of her sight, whose word is good
for nothing,--to feel that her beautiful house and her lovely things are
all going to rack and ruin, and she can't take care of them, and can't
see where or when or how the mischief is done,----in short, the poor
child talks as women do who are violently attacked with housekeeping
fever tending to congestion of the brain. She actually yesterday told me
that she wished, on the whole, she never had got married, which I take
to be the most positive indication of mental alienation."

"Here," said I, "we behold at this moment two women dying for the want
of what they can mutually give one another,--each having a supply of
what the other needs, but held back by certain invisible cobwebs,
slight, but strong, from coming to each other's assistance. Marianne has
money enough, but she wants a helper in her family, such as all her
money has been hitherto unable to buy; and here close at hand is a woman
who wants home-shelter, healthy, va