it's goin' to cost three hundred dollars.
Three hundred dollars!--it's easy enough to talk--three hundred
dollars! Adoniram has been laid up with jaundice half the winter.
I've bound shoes, and I've knit these fine stockin's for Mis' Doctor
Prescott. They go towards the doctor's bill, but they're a drop in
the bucket. She'd allow considerable on them, but it ain't _her_ say.
Three hundred dollars!"

"It's a sight of money," said Belinda Lamb. "I s'pose you could
mortgage the house, Paulina Maria, and then when Henry got his
eyesight back he could work to pay it off."

A deep red transfused Paulina Maria's transparent pallor, but before
she could speak Ann Edwards interposed. "Mortgage!" said she, with a
sniff of her nostrils, as if she scented battle. "Mortgage! Load a
poor horse down to the ground till his legs break under him, set a
baby to layin' a stone wall till he drops, but don't talk to me of
mortgages; I guess I know enough about them. My poor husband would
have been alive and well to-day if it hadn't been for a mortgage. It
sounds easy enough--jest a little interest money to pay every year,
an' all this money down; but I tell you 'tis like a leech that sucks
at body and soul. You get so the mortgage looks worse than your sins,
an' you pray to be forgiven that instead of them. I know. Don't you
have a mortgage put on your house, Paulina Maria Judd, or you'll rue
the day. I'd--steal before I'd do it!"

Paulina Maria made no response; she was quite pale again.

"I should think you'd be afraid Henry would go entirely blind if you
didn't have something done for him," said Belinda Lamb.

"I be," replied Paulina Maria, sternly. She rose to go, and Belinda
also, with languid response of motion, as if Paulina Maria were an
upstirring wind.

When Paulina Maria opened the outer door there was a rush of dank
night air.

"Don't you want me to walk home with you and Aunt Belinda?" asked
Jerome. "It's pretty dark."

"No, thank you," replied Paulina Maria, grimly, looking back, a pale,
wavering shape against the parallelogram of night; "the things I'm
afraid of walk in the light as much as the dark, an' you can't keep
'em off."

"You make me creep, talkin' so," Belinda Lamb said, as she and
Paulina Maria, two women of one race, with their souls at the
antipodes of things, went down the path together.

"I hope Paulina Maria won't put a mortgage on her house; Henry 'd
better be blind," said Ann Edwards, when they