haunted her, and but for her pets she would have lived a life of profound and monotonous tranquillity.  But this was a vast exception; in her life her pets were the great item now;—­her cat had its own chair in the parlor and kitchen; her dog, a rug and a basket never to be meddled with by man or beast; her old crow, its special nest of flannel and cotton, where it feebly croaked as soon as Miss Lucinda began to spread the little table for her meals; and the three kittens had their own playthings and their own saucer as punctiliously as if they had been children.  In fact, Miss Manners had a greater share of kindness for beasts than for mankind.  A strange compound of learning and unworldliness, of queer simplicity, native penetration, and common sense, she had read enough books to despise human nature as it develops itself in history and theology, and she had not known enough people to love it in its personal development.  She had a general idea that all men were liars, and that she must be on her guard against their propensity to cheat and annoy a lonely and helpless woman; for, to tell the truth, in her good father’s over-anxiety to defend her from the snares of evil men after his death, his teachings had given her opinion this bias, and he had forgotten to tell her how kindly and how true he had found many of his own parishioners, how few inclined to harm or pain him.  So Miss Lucinda made her entrance into life at Dalton, distrustful, but not suspicious; and after a few attempts on the part of the women who were her neighbors to be friendly or intimate, they gave her up as impracticable:  not because she was impolite or unkind:  they did not themselves know why they failed, though she could have told them; for, old maid as she was, poor and plain and queer, she could not bring herself to associate familiarly with people who put their teaspoons into the sugar-bowl, helped themselves with their own knives and forks, gathered up bits of uneaten butter and returned them to the plate for next time, or replaced on the dish pieces of cake half eaten or cut with the knives they had just introduced into their mouths.  Miss Lucinda’s code of minor morals would have forbidden her to drink from the same cup with a queen, and have considered a pitchfork as suitable as a knife to eat with, nor would she have offered to a servant the least thing she had touched with her own lips or her own implements of eating; and she was too delicately bred to look on in comfort where such things were practised.  Of course these women were not ladies; and though many of them had kind hearts and warm impulses of goodness, yet that did not make up to her for their social misdemeanors, and she drew herself more into her own little shell, and cared more for her garden and her chickens, her cats and her dog, than for all the humanity of Dalton put together.