tight little
French boots that used to stand outside his door to be blacked, and
stickin' round schoolma'am, and follerin' of her with his eyes; but
then he was always fond of ladies, and used to sing with my daughter,
and wrote his name out in a blank book she keeps,--them that has
daughters of their own will keep their eyes on 'em,--and I've often
heerd him say he was fond of music and picters,--and she worked a
beautiful pattern for a chair of his once, that he seemed to set a
good deal by; but I ha'n't no fault to find, and there is them that
my daughter likes and them that likes her.

As to schoolma'am, I ha'n't a word to say that a'n't favorable, and
don't harbor no unkind feelin' to her, and never knowed them that did.
When she first come to board at my house, I hadn't any idee she'd
live long. She was all dressed in black; and her face looked so
delicate, I expected before six months was over to see a plate of
glass over it, and a Bible and a bunch of flowers layin' on the lid
of the--well, I don't like to talk about it; for when she first come,
and said her mother was dead, and she was alone in the world, except
one sister out West, and unlocked her trunk and showed me her things,
and took out her little purse and showed me her money, and said that
was all the property she had in the world but her courage and her
education, and would I take her and keep her till she could get some
scholars,--I couldn't say not one word, but jest went up to her and
kissed her and bu'st out a-cryin' so as I never cried since I buried
the last of my five children that lays in the buryin'-ground with
their father, and a place for one more grown person betwixt him and
the shortest of them five graves, where my baby is waitin' for its
mother.

[The landlady stopped here and shed a few still tears, such as poor
women who have been wrung out almost dry by fierce griefs lose calmly,
without sobs or hysteric convulsions, when they show the scar of a
healed sorrow.]

--The schoolma'am had jest been killin' herself for a year and a
half with waitin' and tendin' and watchin' with that sick mother
that was dead now and she was in mournin' for. _She_ didn't say so,
but I got the story out of her, and then I knowed why she looked so
dreadful pale and poor. By-and-by she begun to get some scholars,
and then she would come home sometimes so weak and faint that I was
afraid she would drop. One day I handed her a bottle of camphire to
smell