y." Her dear old heart
is pure gold, and such her quick sympathy that if I want to cry I have
to lock myself in my room where she won't see me, for if she sees tears
in my eyes she comes and puts her arms around me and weeps, too,
without even knowing why, but just with the heavenly pity of one of
God's own, although before her eyes are dry she may be damning the
butcher in language which curdles the blood.

She abhors profanity, and never mingles holy names in her sentences
which contain fluent d's, but being an excellent Catholic enables her
to accentuate her remarks with exclamations which she says are prayers;
and as these are never denunciatory her theory is most conscientiously
lived up to.

In our first housekeeping, our rawness in all matters practical wrung
Mary's heart. She had grown up from a slip of a girl in the employ of
one family, and ours was only her second experiment in "living out."
As her first employers were people of wealth and with half-grown
grandchildren when their magnificent home was finally broken up, you
can imagine the change to Mary of living with newly married people,
engaged in their first struggle with the world. But ours was just the
problem which appealed to the motherly heart of our spinster Mary, for
she yearned over us with an exceeding great yearning, and of her value
to us you yourselves shall be the judge.

The first thing I remember which called my attention to Mary's firm
manner of doing business was one day when I was writing letters in the
Angel's study. We had only moved in the day before, and the ink on the
lease was hardly dry, when I heard a great noise in the kitchen as of
moving chairs on a bare floor and Mary's voice raised in fluent
denunciation. I flew to the scene and saw a strange man standing on
the table with his hands on the electric light metre over the door,
while Mary had one hand on his left ankle, and the other on his
coat-tails. Her very spectacles were bristling with anger.

"Come down out of that, young feller!" she was crying, jerking both
coat-tails and ankle of the unhappy man.

"Leggo my leg!" he retorted.

"_I'll_ pull your leg for you," cried Mary, "old woman that I am, more
than any of your young jades, if you don't drop that metre. Come down,
I say!"

"What is the trouble, Mary?" I asked.

"Missis! The impidence of that brat! He's come to shut off the
electric light without a word of warning, and you going to have company
th