Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/34

Rh ladies." I exclaimed, conforming my phrase to the taste of our cottage-dames. "They ben't ladies," she replied. "Indeed! what are they?" "They be's woman's." Would such a disclaimer bare been put in from one end of the United States to the other, unless in the shanty of adopted citizens?

I will spare you all the particulars of my wayside acquaintance with a sturdy little woman whom I met coming out of a farmyard, staggering under a load of dry furze, as much as could be piled on a wheelbarrow. A boy not more than five years old was awaiting her at the gate, with a compact little parcel in his arms snugly done up. "Now take she," he said, extending it to the mother, and I found the parcel was a baby not a month old; so I offered to carry it, and did for a quarter of a mile, while the mother, in return, told me the whole story of her courtship, marriage, and maternity, with the fast incident in her domestic annals, the acquisition of a baking of meal, some barm, and the loan of her husband's mother's oven, and, lastly, of the gift of the furze to heat the oven. The woman seemed something more than contented—happy. I could not but congratulate her. "It does not signify," I said, "being poor when one is so healthy and so merry as you appear." "Ah, that's natural to me," she replied; "my mother had red cheeks in her coffin!" Happy are those who bare that "natural to them," that princes, and fine ladies, and half the world are sighing for and running after.