However, it was, at least, an honorable independence, poorly remunerated though it was, and she went to work with a will.

Her first boarding place was at the house of an aged couple, by the name of Wynn, who lived a short distance from the school house.  Their appearance struck her as extremely peculiar.  Mrs. Wynn’s tall, stooping figure, spoke plainly of a hard, laborious life.  Her sharp features and keen, piercing eyes, made more prominent by the unusual lowness of the forehead, told more surely than language, of their owner’s propensity to investigate the affairs of her neighbor, and proved her claim to the complimentary title, they had bestowed upon her, viz:—­“That prying old mother, Wynn.”  But what was still more strange, was the silver hair of both these old people, and which their age did not seem to warrant.  The lady, however, with a little lingering of feminine vanity in her heart, had made an awkward attempt at hair dye of home manufacture, and from a too plentiful use of sulphur and copperas, had succeeded in producing a band of vivid yellow upon each side of her temple, while the hair at the back and upon the crown of her head, was white as snow.  Clemence learned afterwards that these worthy people had seen a great deal of trouble, and that their prematurely aged appearance was from that source alone.

She was not aware that they had more than one daughter, who was her pupil, but as she went into the “spare room” assigned her, and carelessly took up a “carte de visite” that lay upon the table, she saw underneath the picture of a buxom damsel, in a feeble, trembling hand, “My own sweet Rose.”

She had before this noticed another queer trait of the people among whom her lot was so strangely cast, and that was their singular penchant for fancy and high-sounding names.  Among her scholars there were, for the girls, respectively—­Alcestine Alameda, Boadicea Beatrice, Claudia Clarinda, Eugenia Eurydice, Venetia Ignatia, and so on, indefinitely; and among a group of ragged, bare-footed boys, a number of time-honored Bible names, and such distinguished modern ones as George Washington, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Edward Everett, and even down to one little shock-headed, lisping, Abraham Lincoln.

“My own sweet Rose,” proved, unhappily for Clemence, to possess more of the characteristics of a stinging nettle, than of the flower whose name she bore, and she was glad when her week was out, and she could leave her charming society, for that which she fondly hoped might be more congenial.

Clemence had begun to try her strength, and she prayed fervently that she might not “faint by the way.”  What other alternative had she than this?  It was too sadly true, as she had told her friend, she was all alone in the world.  What mattered it where the rest of her life was spent?  She tried bravely to do her duty “in that station in life to which it had pleased God to call her.”  That was enough for the present.  The future stretched out, dreary and hopeless, before her.