a cripple, having lost a
leg at Antietam. He had married a second wife, and had a house
overflowing with children. He was poor as a squirrel, having a nest in
these woods and the corn for nuts, and little else besides. He was as
brave as a lion, courteous as an old cavalier, hot-headed when aroused,
but generally easy-tempered and cheery. He went to church every Sunday,
got down on his one knee and confessed his sins honestly; then he came
home in the old red wagon, sat on the piazza, and watched the corn grow.
Honor was his niece, she shared in his love and his poverty like his own
children. Mrs. Eliot, a dimpled, soft-cheeked, faded woman, did not
quite like Honor's office of librarian, even if it did add two hundred
dollars to their slender income: none of Honor's family, none of her
family, had ever been librarians.

"But we are so poor now," said Honor.

"None the less ladies, I hope, my dear," said the elder woman, tapping
her niece's shoulder with her pink-tipped, taper fingers.

Honor's hands, however, showed traces of work. She had hated to see them
grow coarse, and had cried over them; and then she had gone to church,
flung herself down upon her knees, offered up her vanity and her
roughened palms as a sacrifice, and, coming home, had insisted upon
washing out all the iron pots and saucepans, although old Chloe stood
ready to do that work with tears in her eyes over her young mistress's
obstinacy. It was when this zeal of Honor's was burning brightest, and
her self-mortifications were at their height--which means that she was
eighteen, imaginative, and shut up in a box--that an outlet was suddenly
presented to her. The old library at Ellerby Mill was resuscitated,
reopened, endowed with new life, new books, and a new floor, and the
position of librarian offered to her.

In former days the South had a literary taste of its own unlike anything
at the North. It was a careful and correct taste, founded principally
upon old English authors; and it would have delighted the soul of
Charles Lamb, who, being constantly told that he should be more modern,
should write for posterity, gathered his unappreciated manuscripts to
his breast, and declared that henceforth he would write only for
antiquity. Nothing more unmodern than the old-time literary culture of
the South could well be imagined; it delighted in old editions of old
authors; it fondly turned their pages, and quoted their choice passages;
it built little li