s:

"After all, will Herman be pleased?"

Yet when the neighbors saw this general renovation, of the estate, which
could not have been accomplished without considerable expenditure of
time, money, and labor, they shook their heads in strong disapprobation,
and predicted that that woman's extravagance would bring Herman
Brudenell to beggary yet.

She sought to raise the condition of the negroes, not only by giving
them neat cottages, but by comfortably furnishing their rooms, and
encouraging them to keep their little houses and gardens in order,
rewarding them for neatness and industry, and established a school for
their children to learn to read and write. But the negroes--hereditary
servants of the Brudenells--looked upon this stranger with jealous
distrust, as an interloping foreigner who had, by some means or other,
managed to dispossess and drive away the rightful family from the old
place. And so they regarded all her favors as a species of bribery, and
thanked her for none of them. And this was really not ingratitude, but
fidelity. The neighbors denounced these well-meant efforts of the
mistress as dangerous innovations, incendiarisms, and so forth, and
thanked Heaven that the Brudenell negroes were too faithful to be led
away by her!

She went out among the poor of her neighborhood and relieved their wants
with such indiscriminate and munificent generosity as to draw down upon
herself the rebuke of the clergy for encouraging habits of improvidence
and dependence in the laboring classes. As for the subjects of her
benevolence, they received her bounty with the most extravagant
expressions of gratitude and the most fulsome flattery. This was so
distasteful to Berenice that she oftened turned her face away, blushing
with embarrassment at having listened to it. Yet such was the gentleness
of her spirit, that she never wounded their feelings by letting them see
that she distrusted the sincerity of these hyperbolical phrases.

"Poor souls," she said to herself, "it is the best they have to offer
me, and I will take it as if it were genuine."

Berenice was right in her estimate of their flattery. Astonished at her
lavish generosity, and ignorant of her great wealth, which made
alms-giving easy, her poor neighbors put their old heads together to
find out the solution of the problem. And they came to the conclusion
that this lady must have been a great sinner, whose husband had
abandoned her for some very good reas