work in a factory in the town, and she went to live with an old woman
in the slums, a very bad old woman Anna said.

Anna was never easy in her mind about the fate of Molly. Sometimes she
would see or hear of her. Molly was not well, her cough was worse, and
the old woman really was a bad one.

After a year of this unwholesome life, Molly was completely broken
down. Anna then again took her in charge. She brought her from her
work and from the woman where she lived, and put her in a hospital to
stay till she was well. She found a place for her as nursemaid to a
little girl out in the country, and Molly was at last established and
content.

Molly had had, at first, no regular successor. In a few months it was
going to be the summer and Miss Mathilda would be gone away, and old
Katie would do very well to come in every day and help Anna with her
work.

Old Katy was a heavy, ugly, short and rough old german woman, with a
strange distorted german-english all her own. Anna was worn out now
with her attempt to make the younger generation do all that it should
and rough old Katy never answered back, and never wanted her own
way. No scolding or abuse could make its mark on her uncouth and aged
peasant hide. She said her "Yes, Miss Annie," when an answer had to
come, and that was always all that she could say.

"Old Katy is just a rough old woman, Miss Mathilda," Anna said, "but
I think I keep her here with me. She can work and she don't give me
trouble like I had with Molly all the time."

Anna always had a humorous sense from this old Katy's twisted peasant
english, from the roughness on her tongue of buzzing s's and from the
queer ways of her brutish servile humor. Anna could not let old Katy
serve at table--old Katy was too coarsely made from natural earth for
that--and so Anna had all this to do herself and that she never liked,
but even then this simple rough old creature was pleasanter to her
than any of the upstart young.

Life went on very smoothly now in these few months before the summer
came. Miss Mathilda every summer went away across the ocean to be gone
for several months. When she went away this summer old Katy was so
sorry, and on the day that Miss Mathilda went, old Katy cried hard
for many hours. An earthy, uncouth, servile peasant creature old Katy
surely was. She stood there on the white stone steps of the little red
brick house, with her bony, square dull head with its thin, tanned,
toughened skin