Grim Silas Foster, all this while, had been busy at the supper-table, pouring out his own tea and gulping it down with no more sense of its exquisiteness than if it were a decoction of catnip; helping himself to pieces of dipt toast on the flat of his knife blade, and dropping half of it on the table-cloth; using the same serviceable implement to cut slice after slice of ham; perpetrating terrible enormities with the butter-plate; and in all other respects behaving less like a civilized Christian than the worst kind of an ogre.  Being by this time fully gorged, he crowned his amiable exploits with a draught from the water pitcher, and then favored us with his opinion about the business in hand.  And, certainly, though they proceeded out of an unwiped mouth, his expressions did him honor.

“Give the girl a hot cup of tea and a thick slice of this first-rate bacon,” said Silas, like a sensible man as he was.  “That’s what she wants.  Let her stay with us as long as she likes, and help in the kitchen, and take the cow-breath at milking time; and, in a week or two, she’ll begin to look like a creature of this world.”

So we sat down again to supper, and Priscilla along with us.

V. UNTIL BEDTIME

Silas Foster, by the time we concluded our meal, had stript off his coat, and planted himself on a low chair by the kitchen fire, with a lapstone, a hammer, a piece of sole leather, and some waxed-ends, in order to cobble an old pair of cowhide boots; he being, in his own phrase, “something of a dab” (whatever degree of skill that may imply) at the shoemaking business.  We heard the tap of his hammer at intervals for the rest of the evening.  The remainder of the party adjourned to the sitting-room.  Good Mrs. Foster took her knitting-work, and soon fell fast asleep, still keeping her needles in brisk movement, and, to the best of my observation, absolutely footing a stocking out of the texture of a dream.  And a very substantial stocking it seemed to be.  One of the two handmaidens hemmed a towel, and the other appeared to be making a ruffle, for her Sunday’s wear, out of a little bit of embroidered muslin which Zenobia had probably given her.

It was curious to observe how trustingly, and yet how timidly, our poor Priscilla betook herself into the shadow of Zenobia’s protection.  She sat beside her on a stool, looking up every now and then with an expression of humble delight at her new friend’s beauty.  A brilliant woman is often an object of the devoted admiration—­it might almost be termed worship, or idolatry—­of some young girl, who perhaps beholds the cynosure only at an awful distance, and has as little hope of personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of heaven.  We men are too gross to comprehend it.  Even a woman, of mature age, despises or laughs at such a passion.  There occurred to me no mode of accounting for Priscilla’s behavior,