her, agreeing to tend her shop most of the time, and help her to wash and iron, when she was hurried, for fifty cents a week.

Of the history of my mistress, before I went with her, I have never been particularly informed. My mother said she was of an ancient and worthy family, and had always borne a respectable name. I remember I kept calling her "Mother Carey" for a week or so, and the first question I asked her was, if she was the mother or owner of the chickens of which I had heard the sailors talk. I would have been glad of an affirmative answer, for I would have liked the care of a little peeping brood.

I found Ma'm Carey by no means the worst woman on the street. She did not at that age pretend to any fascinating ways. She said they called her fair when she was a girl, and I will add that she may have been prim and dainty, but now, while her face was agreeable, she was rather coarse and fat. She was both bronchial and asthmatic, and if she attempted to utter a kindly word, the tones were broken, and were frequently taken for the opposite of her good intention. She had an unpleasant way of shrugging her shoulders and pursing her lips, which repelled many persons from her sympathy and trade. She knew all these misfortunes, and told me I would find that people were more shocked by the smallest personal blemish than by any deformity of the heart. Her sentiments were on the side of goodness: she endeavored to be honest as her business would allow. In sickness and distress she was very kind, and by her potent teas and syrups she gave much comfort, and wrought

many cures. But, as she had been twice robbed of her last shilling, she felt that she ought to be more suspicious of the world, and conduct her business with more tact and prudence.

She kept a tidy shop. You would not have found more than a dozen flies in her windows on the latest days of August, and these were not of that corpulent and officious kind which swarm in our large cities. Her bread, her cakes, her candies, milk, eggs, yeast, and fruit, were as clean and fresh as any on that street. I had my instructions on the first morning. I was shown where every article was placed, and I soon held the contents of the little shop in my eye; but I could not help trembling under the orders she gave me concerning the trade I had engaged to conduct. I feared I could not please my employer; and yet, like George Primrose, I had a good knack of hoping, and went about my business. The first I did was to go and bring green bushes to hang around the shop, to give it a smell of freshness, and allure the flies away from the sugar and cheese. I found time to help Ma'm Carey a good deal in her laundry, and to knit and sew for myself occasionally in the shop.

When a customer came, I met him or her with as pleasant a smile as I had, and gave children and all the best attention I could bestow. I could dip a pint of milk in the smallest moment, and give a measure full. I did up seeds and spices in the neatest papers and with the cleanest strings I could find. My radishes and turnips looked and tasted as if fresh from the garden, my shelves had no dust, my glass cases were unspotted, my counters and

floor were tidy as a parlor, and my mistress acknowledged that I was quick and accurate in making change.

But six months had not passed, before Ma'm Carey paid me the last of my wages, and told me I might go home, and she would look out for another girl. And it was not without sorrow that I heard this notice; I liked the business very well, and had visited my mother an hour every night, and at the end of each week, laid money in her lap, to pay a portion of her rent, and saved enough besides to clothe myself.

I claim no merit for this, but I took satisfaction from these little earnings, and this use to which I applied them, and wept in fear that my pleasure would not soon return. Ma'm Carey found no fault with my services, excepting that I was a little too frank with her customers. If night's milk was mixed with morning's, I felt that I must tell them so, and not lie for the world. If the bread or cake was sometimes two days old; if the radishes were not fresh pulled; if the yeast was stale or the butter rancid; if our Roxbury crackers were made in Lynn, and our Spanish cigars in Salem, I knew that my looks would confess it if my tongue were tied, and so I allowed my tongue its own honest way, and a trade was often lost, when perhaps no one would have been censured for making a good bargain. But so it went, and while Ma'm Carey praised me for some things more than I deserved, she insisted that she must have a smoother tongue to recommend her articles, and a smoother tongue she procured within two days of the time I left her.

VI.

WHILE I was at service with Ma'm Carey, my brother Jesse was not idle. He had a situation as errand-boy in a grocery store, and carried home more wages than one would expect from a lad of his age. It was a grief to my mother to put us to service so young, yet such were her circumstances, she grieved still more when my wages ceased. Then the anguish of her bereavement was revived. And to this another grief was added, which made the bitter cup run over.

It was told her, at last, as a current report, that she had not been kind to my father, and every wound on her heart was torn open, to bleed and ache with fresh agony, which no power on earth could soothe. She was assured again and again, that none of her friends believed it, or heard it without offence. But the rumor of a thing so abhorrent to her heart, was more than she could bear. Her faith and will were still firm and resolute, but her nerves were too much shattered, and after a struggle and a prayer for strength and patience, she fell beneath the burden of her woe. A quick consumption seized her, and she knew her end was nigh. For herself, she welcomed the event, and was eager to taste the relief it would bring

her; but there were her precious children to be left without a parent or a home!

There was Walter, the tender, the helpless, the specially beloved, and how could she leave him to the sorrows and temptations of this world? Inexpressible was my mother's grief as she thought of parting with her children, and grief at last deprived her of her reason, and in that way seemed to work its own cure. After that she appeared to be unconscious of our situation, except for brief and distant intervals, when she would call us to her bed, and pity us, and drench us with tears. After that, for most of the time, she imagined she was with father, and enjoying her former bliss. Sometimes she returned to her happy girlhood, and was walking with father hand in hand to school; or off a Maying at Orne's Point, or on Derby's Farm. Again, she welcomed his return from sea, and talked with him as if we were all living in the new home we had expected to enjoy. Sometimes she was spreading her cloth for a family pic-nic on Baker's Island, and again she would cry out, “It is not so! he is not dead, I know I shall see him home to-day!" And from all these dreams she would waken and weep to find the sweet visions were not true. At last, they said her face kindled up with a bright and heavenly smile, and she rose from her pillow and threw up her arms as if to embrace some person, and exclaimed, "Joy! joy! we meet in heaven now, and Walter is with us, and Mercy, and Jesse! —all our troubles are over! joy! joy! joy! we meet in heaven!" and after a moment, in which she sat entranced, she fell back on her pillow, and closed her eyes in death.