Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/150

140 "Pshaw!" she exclaimed, as she finished the fast line. "If that is n't just like Molly Wilder; she always was a silly little thing," and Susan crumpled up the paper, and tossed it on the bed. Then she put back the clothes, locked the drawer, and put the key in her pocket. The morning was slipping away fast, and she was in a hurry to be about her work. She had been cutting out some unbleached cotton shirts for John the day before, and as she left the room, she noticed a few of the yellow threads and bits of cloth on the floor; she stopped and picked them up; then she took "The Wife's Reverie" from the bed, and rolling it and the rags together in a tight ball, hurried down-stairs to oversee the churning. At the foot of the stairs, behind the door which opened into the kitchen, hung a big rag-bag made of bed-tick. It was so full that the mouth bulged open.

"Dear me," thought Susan, "I do wish that peddler 'd come round. The bag 's running over full;" and as she impatiently crammed in her little ball of ravelings and paper, and her eye fell again on a line of "The Wife's Reverie," she said to herself complacently:— "It 's the queerest thing, when a man marries again, how sure he is to pick out such a different kind of a woman from his first wife. I suppose they find out what they really do want."