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 of, and she took a smell of it, and I thought she’d have fainted right away.—­Oh, says she, when she come to, I’ve breathed that smell for a whole year and more, and it kills me to breathe it again!

The fust thing that ever I see pass between the gentleman inquiries is made about, and her, was on occasion of his makin’ some very searchin’ remarks about griefs, sech as loss of friends and so on.  I see her fix her eye steady on him, and then she kind of trembled and turned white, and the next thing I knew was she was all of a heap on the floor.  I remember he looked into her face then and seemed to be seized as if it was with a start or spasm-like,—­but I thought nothin’ more of it, supposin’ it was because he felt so bad at makin’ her faint away.