and Mary,
for the first time, felt the bitter curse of hopeless poverty; and a
sense of her own weakness and helplessness fell heavily on her soul.

In this emergency, Mrs. Mason offered her a trifling weekly stipend, to
attend during the day upon the customers, and to assist her in washing
glass and crockery, and keeping the house in order. She knew her to be
honest and faithful, and she was too homely to awaken any interest in
the heart of her dissipated worthless son.

Mary hesitated a long time before she accepted the offer of her
repulsive neighbour; but her mother's increasing infirmities, and the
severe illness of her youngest sister Charlotte, left her no choice. Day
after day you might see the patient hunchback performing the menial
drudgeries of the little inn, silent and self-possessed--an image of
patient endurance, in a house of violence and crime. It was to her care
that the house owed its appearance of neatness and outward
respectability. It was her active industrious spirit that arranged and
ordered its well-kept household stuff, that made the walls so cheery,
the grate so gay with flowers, that kept the glittering array of pewter
so bright. It was her taste that had arranged the branches of the wild
rose to twine so gracefully over the rustic porch that shaded her sick
mother's dwelling; who, forbidden by the nature of her disease to walk
abroad, might yet see from her pillow the fragrant boughs of the brier
bud and blossom, while she inhaled their fragrance in every breeze that
stirred the white cotton curtains that shaded her narrow casement.

Mary's native sense of propriety was constantly shocked by unseemly
sights and sounds; but their impurity served to render vice in her eyes
more repulsive, and to strengthen that purity of heart from which she
derived all her enjoyment. Night always released her from her laborious
duties, and brought her back to be a ministering angel at the sick bed
of her mother and sister.

These sisters I must now introduce to my readers, for with one of them
my tale has mostly to do. Unlike Mary, they were both pretty,
delicate-looking girls, ready of speech and remarkably pleasing in
person and manners.

Mr. Rollins had paid for the instruction of these girls at the village
school, in which they had been taught all sorts of plain work; had
mastered all the difficulties of Mavor's Spelling-book, had read the
Bible, the Dairyman's Daughter, Pilgrim's Progress, and Golds