Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/53

 and feel 'em agin in memory. The impatience with Destiny, the hopes, the uncertainty, the roads that branch off in so many different ways before the hasty impatient feet. Setting at rest at eventide in the long cool shadows, don't let us forget the blazing skies, the heart beats, the ardent hopes, the ambitions, the perplexing cares of the forenoon.

Well, if you'll believe it, the very next Sunday after that Marion's Pa married the Widder Lummis, stood up after meetin' and married her in a good, sensible, middle-aged way, and brung her home, and Josiah and I wuz invited there the next week a-visitin'. We're highly thought on in Jonesville.

I found Marion's stepma quite a good lookin' woman, full of animal sperits and dressed handsome; she seemed good enough to Marion on the outside, but I could see that home wuzn't what it had been to Marion in any way; her new Ma wanted to go ahead and be mistress, and thought she had a right to, and she didn't keep the house as Marion did; things wuzn't dirty, but if the house resembled any poem at all it wuz a poem of Disorder and Tumult. She wanted the two boys and the twins to like her, and she humored 'em, gin 'em candy and indigestible stuff that Marion never approved of, but they did highly, and they seemed kinder weaned from Marion and took up with their good natered, indulgent new Ma. And of course Marion's Pa, as wuz nateral, wuz all engrossed in his new wife; she wuz healthy, handsome, and a good cook. Poor Marion! in the new anthem they wuz all jinin' in there didn't seem to be any part for her voice. She looked like a mournin' dove; my heart ached for her.

Towards night I see her leanin' up against the west