I listened as I waited on the table.  The talk varied from farming to mining and the state of the river, merging at last into the politics of the country, and through the whole of it I watched the stranger:  noticed how different was his language from anything I had ever heard before; marked the clear tones of his voice and the distinctness of his utterance, contrasting with the heavy, thick gutturals, the running of words into each other, the slovenly drawl of my father and his men; watched his manner of eating, his neat disposition of his food on his plate; saw him move his chair back with a slight expression of annoyance, unmarked by any one else, as Will Foushee spit on the floor beside him.  All this I observed, in a mood half envious, half sullen,—­a mood which pursued me that night into my little attic, as I peevishly questioned with myself wherein lay the difference between us.

“Why is this man any better than Will Foushee or Ned Burgess?  He is no stronger nor better able to do a day’s work.  Why am I afraid of him, when I don’t care an acorn for the others?  Why do my father and the men listen to him and crowd round him?  What makes him stand among them as if he did not belong to them, even when he talks of what they know better than he?  There is not a man round Sandy that could make me feel as ashamed as that gentleman did when he spoke to me this afternoon.  Is it because he is a gentleman?” And sullenly I resolved that I would be put down by no airs.  I was as good as he, and would show him to-morrow morning that I felt so.  Then came the bitter acknowledgment, “I am not as good as he is.  I am a stupid, ugly girl, who knows nothing but hateful housework and a little of the fields and trees; and he,—­I suppose he has been to school, and read plenty of books, and lived among quality.”  And I cried myself to sleep before I had made up my mind fully to acknowledge his superiority.

It was one of my greatest pleasures to get up early.  Our people were not early risers, except when work pressed upon them, and I often secured my only leisure hour for the day by stealing down the staircase, out into the woods, by early sunrise, when, wrapped in an old shawl, and sheltered from the dew by climbing into the lower branches of my pet maple, I would watch the fog reaching up the opposite hills, putting forth as it were an arm, by which, stretched far out over the trees, it seemed to lift itself from the valley,—­or perhaps carrying with me one of the few books which made my library, I would spell out the sentences and attempt to extract their meaning.