Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/205

 of fashionable display, she didn't git mothered at all, and that gin her the wistful, longin' look in her eyes, that and her late hours and the stuff her nurse gin her. And she had a sort of pitiful, skairful look in her eyes, and that come, I found out, from her nurse skairin' her nights ever sence she wuz a baby to make her lay still, tellin' her that somebody would jump at her, or that there wuz great green eyes lookin' out at her from different places, and there wuz wicked men ready to appear to her, and ghosts and everything, and as the nurse had always told her that she would eat her up alive, if she told anything about it, why, it had gin her a dretful subdued look and afraid to say her little soul wuz her own. But I spoze the deep, silent, constant love of this little thing wuz a rock of support for her Ma to think on in her fashionable career, I spoze so.

Well, I put my arm round her, and she laid her little cheek up aginst me real confidin' and sweet, and I told her stories and mothered her jest as well as I could till my Josiah appeared drivin' up the long avenoo with the mair and colt. And I told her to have her Ma let her come down and stay a week with us, and she brightened up real bright and said she would.

Josiah had made the dicker, so he told me, as we drove home, and had swapped five hundred feet of spruce lumber for white fish put down in sweet pickle. And I sez, "For mercy sake! what do you want of so many fish!"

And he sez, "I love 'em dearly, Samantha."

"But," sez I, "you may love anything and not want to be swamped by it, run over and drownded in it."

"Well," he said, fish agreed with his stomach and wuz nourishin' to the brain.