* * * * *
"I'm late this mornin', I am," she says, in her shrill fashion, standing
right against the fire like a demon that no flame can consume, and
vigorously rubbing at the grate with her black-lead brush. "The cause is
_'im_," she continues, turning to point the brush at the cat sleeping
on her bed, after she has rubbed the red tip of her long nose with a
portion of her knuckles and a portion of the brush. "Oh, he's a villain,
a dreadful villain he is," she cries, with exasperation, returning to
her work; "he worries my life out, he do, the 'orrid varmint. Last night
he didn't come home, he didn't. I set up for him, but he didn't come.
'Oh,' I says, 'if you're keepin' low company again,' I says, 'you can
stop out all night,' I says, 'for I'll sit up for you no longer; so
there, my ugly beauty.' And then in the middle of the night I wake up, I
do, feeling that cold, and sneezin' and snuffin', and irritatin' I was
from top to toe; and blest if Master Tom hadn't got upon the
window-sill, bust open that there piece of brown paper I had pasted over
the broken pane, I had, and let hisself in Yankee-doodle fashion, and
left me to perish with the cold."
Her lined and wrinkled face, when she turns it to us, is not without the
vestiges of attraction.
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