She and hers, her “ould man,” her sons and her daughters, were thenceforth our ready and devoted retainers, dexterous and efficient in all manner of service, generous in acknowledging any return that we could make them; respectful and self-respectful; true men and women in their place, not unfit for a higher, and showing the same by their demeanor in a low one.

They came in and went out among us for a long time, in casual employments, until, with elaborate prefaces and doubtful apologetic circumlocutions, shyly and hesitatingly, Mrs. O’Reilly managed to prefer her petition that her youngest girl, Bridget, by name,—­there were a few junior boys,—­might be taken into my family as a servant.  I asked the old woman a few questions about her daughter’s experiences and attainments in the household graces and economies; could not remember her; thought I had seen all the “childher”; found that she had been living with Mrs. Deacon Adams, and had not been at my house.  It was only for form’s sake that I catechized; Bridget came, of course.

She was such a maiden as her mother must have been, one of Nature’s own ladies, but more refined in type, texture, and form, as the American atmosphere and food and life always refine the children of European stock,—­slenderer, more delicate, finer of complexion, and with a soft, exquisite sweetness of voice, more thrilling than her mother’s, larger and more robust heartfeltness of tone,—­and with the same, but shyer ways, and swift blushes and smiles.  In one thing she differed:  she was a silent, reticent girl:  her tears were not so quick as her mother’s, nor her words; she hid her thoughts.  She had learned it of us secretive Americans, or had inherited it of her father, a silent, though cheery man.

Her glossy wealth of dark-brown hair, her great brown eyes, long eyelashes, sensitive, delicately cut, mobile red lips, oval face, beautifully formed arms and hands, and lithe, graceful, lady-like movements, were a sweet household picture, sunshiny with unfailing good-will, and of a dexterous neat-handedness very rare in her people.  My husband was looking at her one day, and as she tripped away on some errand he observed,—­

“She is a graceful little saint.  All her attitudes are beatitudes.”

Bridget was pure and devout enough for the compliment; and I had not been married so long but that I could excuse the evidence of his observation of another, for the sake of the neatness of his phrase.  I should have thought the unconscious child incongruously lovely amongst brooms and dust-pans, pots and kettles, suds and slops and dishwater, had I not been about as much concerned among them myself.

Bridget had been with me only a day or two, when a friend and fellow-matron, in the course of an afternoon call, apprised me that there were reports that Bridget O’Reilly was a thief,—­in fact, that she had been turned away by Mrs. Adams for that very offence, which she told me “out of kindness, and with no desire to injure the girl; but there is so much wickedness among these Irish!” She had heard this tale, through only one person, from Mrs. Adams herself.