"
Aunt Molly's _asides_ were often amusing. She was so very deaf that
she could not hear her own voice, and often imagined she was
whispering, when she could be heard across the room.
On one occasion she saw a gentleman who was a stranger to her, in the
parlor, when she went to visit one of the ladies who were kind and
attentive to her. She sat a few minutes looking keenly at him, and
then whispered, "Who's that?" "Mr. Jay." "Who?" "MR. JAY." "Who?"
"MR. JAY." "Oh-o-oh! Mr. Jay. Well, what does he do for a living?"
"He's a tutor, Ma'am." "What?" "A TUTOR." "What?" "A TUTOR."
"Oh-o-oh! I thought you said a suitor!"
Aunt Molly owned the little brown cottage, where her widowed mother,
she said, had lived, and there she died. As soon as she was laid in
her grave, it was torn down, and the precious damson-tree was
felled. I was rather glad that the school-house was so ugly, that I
might have a double reason for hating the usurper. If Nemesis cared
for school-boys, she doubtless looks on with a grin, now, to see them
scampering at their will round the precincts of the former enemy of
their race, and listens with pleasure while they "make _day_ hideous"
where once the bee and the humming-bird only broke the quiet of the
little garden.
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