Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/140

 good honest farmers, plantin' and diggin' their own sile. I spozed from his looks and mean that he had never done anything more useful than to gnaw canes and look through a glass eye onto nothin', I am glad you told me, Tamer, why his ancestors must be real congenial to Josiah and me, though of course we own more land and live better than them old Dutchmen did. But they wuz likely, though poor, and put to it for things, and a sort of beer guzzlin', ignorant set, but not to blame for not knowin' much."

Tamer didn't like it, but she turned the subject off onto her resolve to not let Anna have anything to do with Tom Willis, seemin'ly not carin' a mite what wuz goin' on in Anna's heart, no more than if she wuz one of the enchanted females she had read so much about.

But all this time, in spite of Tamer Ann's perfect indifference to the life happiness of Anna, she didn't let anything interfere with her riggin' her up in the latest fashion, she didn't let any of the "Enchanted Females of the Wild Forest; or, Petrified Dragons of the Dark Prairies," or the last of the new diseases hender her from seein' with her own eyes that Anna had the newest and curiousest kind of tattin' on her underclothin' and her dresses made in the latest fashion, and all the smaller things about her clothin' wuz in first rate order.

These Tamer Ann called the essentials of life, and she allowed nothin' to interfere with 'em, but if she had been one of the Enchanted Princesses or petrified animals she couldn't been more dumb and deef to the real soul and heart needs of her child. It is pitiful, mighty pitiful, when the door of a child's heart is blockaded day by day by the stupidity and ignorance of a mother, till at last the doors and winders are all shet