The griefs for any such misfortune were, however, obscure and shallow in comparison with my sorrow for the untimely quenching of Bridget’s young life, and my sympathy with her poor old mother.  When I reasoned about the affair, I could see that I had done nothing which would not be commended by careful housekeepers.  I could see it, but, in spite of me, I could not feel it.  I was tormented by vain wishes that I had done otherwise.  I could not help feeling as if her people charged me with her blood,—­as if I had been in some sense aiding in her death.  Nor do I even now escape obscure returns of the same inexpressibly sad pain.

The garnishing of sepulchres is an employment which by no means went out with the Scribes and Pharisees.  Under the circumstances, the death of my pretty young maid, although she was only an Irish girl, produced a deep impression in the village.  Very soon, now that it could do no good, it was generally agreed that the imputations against her were wholly unfounded.  It was pretty distinctly whispered that they had arisen out of things said by Mrs. Deacon Adams, in her wrath, because Bridget had left her service to enter mine; and I now ascertained that this Mrs. Adams was a woman of bitter tongue, and enduring, hot, and unscrupulous in anger and in revengefulness.  I have inquired sufficiently; I know it is true.  The vulgar malice of a hard woman has murdered a fair and good maiden with the invisible arrows of her wicked words.

But she begins already to be punished, coarse cast-iron as she is.  People do not exactly like to talk with her.  She is growing thin.  She has been ill,—­a thing, I am told, never dreamed of before.  Of course she reported to her husband the reproaches with which I had surprised her on the very day of Bridget’s death.  She had called in by chance, and had not even heard of her illness; had herself begun to retail to me the kind of talk with which she had poisoned the village, not knowing that her evil work was finished; and it was the scornful carelessness of her reply to my first reproof that stung me to answer her so bitterly.  It was two weeks before good, white-haired, old Deacon Adams came to the house of his pastor.  His face looked careworn enough.  He stayed long in the study with my husband, and went away sadly.  I happened to pass through our little hall just as the Deacon opened the study-door to depart; and I caught his last words, very sorrowful in tone,—­

“She might git well, ef she could stop dreamin’ on’t, and git the weight off ’m her mind.  But words that’s once spoken can’t be called back as you call the cows home at night.”

SHALL WE COMPROMISE?

In that period of remote antiquity when all birds of the air and beasts of the field were able to talk, it befell that a certain shepherd suffered many losses through the constant depredations of a wolf.  Fearing at length that his means of subsistence would be quite taken away, he devised a powerful trap for the creature, and set it with wonderful cunning.  He could hardly sleep that night for thinking of the matter, and early next morning took a stout club in his hand, and set forth to learn of his success; when, lo! on drawing near the spot, there he saw the wolf, sure enough, a huge savage, fast held in the trap.