dn't do for
him any longer, and he didn't seem inclined to do for himself. Well,
that is the story, Hilda dear. He has been here ever since, and he has
been no comfort, no pleasure to us, I must say; but we have tried to do
our duty by him, and I hoped he might feel in his heart some gratitude
to his uncle, though he showed none in his actions. And now to think of
it! to think of it! How shall I tell my poor man?"

"What was his mother like?" asked Hildegarde, trying to turn for the
moment the current of painful thought.

Nurse Lucy gave a little laugh, even while wiping the tears from her
eyes. "Poor Eliza!" she said. "She was a good woman, but--well, there!
she had no _faculty_, as you may say. And homely! you never saw such a
homely woman, Hilda; for I don't believe there could be two in the
world. I never think of Eliza without remembering what Jacob said after
he saw her for the first time. He'd been over to see Simon; and when he
came back he walked into the kitchen and sat down, never saying a word,
but just shaking his head over and over again. 'What's the matter,
Jacob?' I said. 'Matter?' said he. 'Matter enough, Marm Lucy' (he's
always called me Marm Lucy, my dear, since the very day we were married,
though I wasn't _very_ much older than you then). 'Simon's married,' he
said, 'and I've seen his wife.' Of course I was surprised, and I wanted
to know all about it. 'What sort of a girl is she?' I asked. 'Is she
pretty? What color is her hair?' But Jacob put up his hand and stopped
me. 'Thar!' he says, 'don't ask no questions, and I'll tell ye. Fust
place, she ain't no gal, no more'n yer Aunt Saleny is!' (that was a
maiden aunt of mine, dear, and well over forty at that time.) 'And what
does she look like?' 'Wal! D'ye ever see an old cedar fence-rail,--one
that had been chumped out with a blunt axe, and had laid out in the sun
and the wind and the snow and the rain till 'twas warped this way, and
shrunk that way, and twisted every way? Wal! Simon's wife looks as if
she had swallowed one o' them fence-rails, and _shrunk to it_! Dear,
dear! how I laughed. And 'twas true, my dear! It was just the way she
did look. Poor soul! she led a sad life; for when Simon found he'd made
a mistake about the money, there was no word too bad for him to fling at
her."

At this moment Farmer Hartley's step was heard in the porch, and Nurse
Lucy rose hurriedly. "Don't say anything to him, Hilda dear," she
whispered,--"anything abo