that lives in this house.  It’s him I ’ll speak to about the minister’s carry’in’s on.  He knows about his talking sweet to our Susan, and he’ll put things to rights!  He’s a master hand when he does once take hold of anything, I tell you that!  Jest get him to shet up them books of his, and take hold of anybody’s troubles, and you’ll see how he ’ll straighten ’em out.”

There was a pattering of little feet on the stairs, and the two small twins, “Sossy” and “Minthy,” in the home dialect, came hand in hand into the room, Miss Susan leaving them at the threshold, not wishing to interrupt the two ladies, and being much interested also in listening to Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who was reading some of his last poems to her, with great delight to both of them.

The good woman rose to take them from Susan, and guide their uncertain steps.  “My babies, I call ’em, Miss Cynthy.  Ain’t they nice children?  Come to go to bed, little dears?  Only a few minutes, Miss Cynthy.”

She took them into the bedroom on the same floor, where they slept, and, leaving the door open, began undressing them.  Cynthia turned her rocking-chair round so as to face the open door.  She looked on while the little creatures were being undressed; she heard the few words they lisped as their infant prayer, she saw them laid in their beds, and heard their pretty good-night.

A lone woman to whom all the sweet cares of maternity have been denied cannot look upon a sight like this without feeling the void in her own heart where a mother’s affection should have nestled.  Cynthia sat perfectly still, without rocking, and watched kind Mrs. Hopkins at her quasi parental task.  A tear stole down her rigid face as she saw the rounded limbs of the children bared in their white beauty, and their little heads laid on the pillow.  They were sleeping quietly when Mrs. Hopkins left the room for a moment on some errand of her own.  Cynthia rose softly from her chair, stole swiftly to the bedside, and printed a long, burning kiss on each of their foreheads.

When Mrs. Hopkins came back, she found the maiden lady sitting in her place just as she left her, but rocking in her chair and sobbing as one in sudden pangs of grief.

“It is a great trouble, Miss Cynthy,” she said,—­“a great trouble to have such a child as Myrtle to think of and to care for.  If she was like our Susan Posey, now!—­but we must do the best we can; and if Mr. Gridley once sets himself to it, you may depend upon it he ’ll make it all come right.  I wouldn’t take on about it if I was you.  You let me speak to our Mr. Gridley.  We all have our troubles.  It is n’t everybody that can ride to heaven in a C-spring shay, as my poor husband used to say; and life ’s a road that ‘s got a good many thank-you-ma’ams to go bumpin’ over, says he.”

Miss Badlam acquiesced in the philosophical reflections of the late Mr. Ammi Hopkins, and left it to his widow to carry out her own suggestion in reference to consulting Master Gridley.  The good woman took the first opportunity she had to introduce the matter, a little diffusely, as is often the way of widows who keep boarders.