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 If she had been of a brooding nature she would have taken a mournful pleasure ever after in the pattering rain upon the tin roof. But she was indulgent neither to herself nor to others, and as she entered upon her widowhood she deliberately composed her mind to a calm acquiescence, which, like the shingled roof, gave forth the least possible vibration to reminders of her sorrow.

Her four sons and her two married daughters had all escaped the quicksands of youth, and were now well launched upon their several careers. She could not but take pride in her successful guidance, to which she justly attributed a share in this happy consummation. She had now but one child remaining with her in her spacious house, the "little Lucy," as she still was called, a good, obedient girl of eighteen, who had never given her mother a moment's trouble. Hers was a figure that was rarely present to her mother's mind during the anxious vigils which that responsible woman kept. Hers was the name least often mentioned in her mother's prayers; for Harriet was, in her way, a religious woman. She was not as zealous a church member as one would have expected so active and capable a woman to be. Indeed, her own affairs might well absorb her energies. But her private devotions were none the less earnest. She did much of what her mother once called "thinking on her knees." She was sometimes vaguely aware, after a longer maintenance of this attitude than was usual, that