But because Miss Lucinda Manners was reserved and “unsociable,” as the neighbors pronounced her, I did not, therefore, mean to imply that she was inhuman.  No neighbor of hers, local or Scriptural, fell ill, without an immediate offer of aid from her:  she made the best gruel known to Dalton invalids, sent the ripest fruit and the sweetest flowers; and if she could not watch with the sick, because it interfered with her duties at home in an unpleasant and inconvenient way, she would sit with them hour after hour in the day-time, and wait on all their caprices with the patient tenderness of a mother.  Children she always eyed with strange wistfulness, as if she longed to kiss them, but didn’t know how; yet no child was ever invited across her threshold, for the yellow cur hated to be played with, and children always torment kittens.

So Miss Lucinda wore on happily toward the farther side of the middle Ages.  One after another of her pets passed away and was replaced, the yellow cur barked his last currish signal, the cat died and her kittens came to various ends of time or casualty, the crow fell away to dust and was too old to stuff, and the garden bloomed and faded ten times over, before Miss Manners found herself to be forty-six years old, which she heroically acknowledged one fine day to the census-taker.  But it was not this consciousness, nor its confession, that drew the dark brows so low over Miss Lucinda’s eyes that day; it was quite another trouble, and one that wore heavily on her mind, as we shall proceed to explain.  For Miss Manners, being, like all the rest of her sex, quite unable to do without some masculine help, had employed, for some seven years, an old man by the name of Israel Slater, to do her “chores,” as the vernacular hath it.  It is a mortifying thing, and one that strikes at the roots of Women’s Rights terribly sharp blows, but I must even own it, that one might as well try to live without one’s bread-and-butter as without the aid of the dominant sex.  When I see women split wood, unload coal-carts, move wash-tubs, and roll barrels of flour and apples handily down cellar-ways or up into carts, then I shall believe in the sublime theories of the strong-minded sisters; but as long as I see before me my own forlorn little hands, and sit down on the top stair to recover breath, and try in vain to lift the water-pitcher at table, just so long I shall be glad and thankful that there are men in the world, and that half a dozen of them are my kindest and best friends.  It was rather an affliction to Miss Lucinda to feel this innate dependence, and at first she resolved to employ only small boys, and never any one of them more than a week or two.  She had an unshaped theory that an old maid was a match for a small boy, but that a man would cheat and domineer over her.  Experience sadly put to flight these notions for a succession of boys in this cabinet-ministry for the first three years of her stay in Dalton would have driven her