The widow and daughter (the latter twenty years of age, healthy, and finely educated) applied to the two brothers of the deceased for assistance, and were at once kindly received into their families, and sat upon sofas and ate from tables purchased with money (never repaid) of the late Mr. Pillbody.  The two brothers, upon application to the proper tribunal, were appointed executors of the estate, and were not long in discovering that it was insolvent.  Mother and daughter were shifted about with almost monthly regularity from one house to the other; and, though they tried to make themselves useful in every capacity except that of a servant, they could not disguise the conviction that their departure was an event a great deal more welcome than their coming.  The widow’s talent for dressmaking (she had been a milliner’s apprentice before marriage), though of a high order, and exerted to the utmost, failed to please.  Miss Pillbody’s thorough knowledge of French, and the higher branches of an elegant education, as well as her proficiency on the piano, and her sweet, simple style of ballad singing, were worse than useless acquirements in her uncles’ families.

Her uncles were cold, stern, ignorant men, who had an intense hatred for the mere accomplishments of life.  Each had two daughters, who, with the natural tastes of the sex, were not averse to the graces of education, in the abstract, but could not bear to see them displayed by their “stuck-up, pauper cousin,” as they often termed that hapless young lady in private conversation.  A kind offer, which she was imprudent enough, to make, to teach them all she knew, had set them against her from the first.

The widow endured the cold looks and cutting words of her husband’s relatives, and even the reproaches which they heaped upon his folly, with a widow’s patience, and seemed content to remain a poor, broken-down, dependent creature.  Miss Pillbody, on the contrary, was quick to discern and to resent, mentally, the uncivil treatment daily experienced by her mother and herself.  Had she been alone in the world, she would have left those inhospitable roofs when the unkind hints first began to be dropped, and trusted to the cold charity of strangers; but she could not bear the thought of being separated from her mother.  So she endured her wretched state of dependence as best she could, while she quietly sought for some means of employment that would yield them a living.

Profiting by the lessons she had learned from her uncles, she did not apply to any person who had known her father and received favors from him in their better days.  She asked no favor from any one—­only work, at a fair price.  By diligent hunting, she found several opportunities.  She could earn four dollars a week by embroidering (at which she was skilful, and had taken premiums); or two dollars and a half for teaching French, twice a week, in a country seminary; or her board and washing for inducting a family of four little musical prodigies into all the mysteries of the piano.  But these tempting offers would still have left her mother with her uncles, and she spurned them all.