lifted herself on the bench so quickly, and flushed so rich with
pleasure, that I was obliged to stare hard away, and make Betty look
beyond us. Betty thought I had something hid in the closet beyond the
clock-case, and she was the more convinced of it by reason of my denial.
Not that Betty Muxworthy, or any one else, for that matter, ever found
me in a falsehood, because I never told one, not even to my mother--or,
which is still a stronger thing, not even to my sweetheart (when I grew
up to have one)--but that Betty being wronged in the matter of marriage,
a generation or two agone, by a man who came hedging and ditching, had
now no mercy, except to believe that men from cradle to grave are liars,
and women fools to look at them.

When Betty could find no crime of mine, she knocked me out of the way in
a minute, as if I had been nobody; and then she began to coax 'Mistress
Annie,' as she always called her, and draw the soft hair down her hands,
and whisper into the little ears. Meanwhile, dear mother was falling
asleep, having been troubled so much about me; and Watch, my father's
pet dog, was nodding closer and closer up into her lap.

'Now, Annie, will you come?' I said, for I wanted her to hold the ladle
for melting of the lead; 'will you come at once, Annie? or must I go for
Lizzie, and let her see the whole of it?'

'Indeed, then, you won't do that,' said Annie; 'Lizzie to come before
me, John; and she can't stir a pot of brewis, and scarce knows a tongue
from a ham, John, and says it makes no difference, because both are
good to eat! Oh, Betty, what do you think of that to come of all her
book-learning?'

'Thank God he can't say that of me,' Betty answered shortly, for she
never cared about argument, except on her own side; 'thank he, I says,
every marning a'most, never to lead me astray so. Men is desaving and so
is galanies; but the most desaving of all is books, with their heads
and tails, and the speckots in 'em, lik a peg as have taken the maisles.
Some folk purtends to laugh and cry over them. God forgive them for
liars!'

It was part of Betty's obstinacy that she never would believe in reading
or the possibility of it, but stoutly maintained to the very last that
people first learned things by heart, and then pretended to make them
out from patterns done upon paper, for the sake of astonishing honest
folk just as do the conjurers. And even to see the parson and clerk was
not enough to convince her;