, stitching with the nimblest of fingers by the light of
one candle, he finds her dispensing with the light of a candle
altogether. She is softly pacing up and down by the red firelight,
holding in her arms little Walter, the year-old baby, who looks over her
shoulder with large wide-open eyes, while the patient mother pats his
back with her soft hand, and glances with a sigh at the heap of large and
small stockings lying unmended on the table.

She was a lovely woman--Mrs. Amos Barton, a large, fair, gentle Madonna,
with thick, close, chestnut curls beside her well-rounded cheeks, and
with large, tender, short-sighted eyes. The flowing lines of her tall
figure made the limpest dress look graceful, and her old frayed black
silk seemed to repose on her bust and limbs with a placid elegance and
sense of distinction, in strong contrast with the uneasy sense of being
no fit, that seemed to express itself in the rustling of Mrs. Farquhar's
_gros de Naples_. The caps she wore would have been pronounced, when off
her head, utterly heavy and hideous--for in those days even fashionable
caps were large and floppy; but surmounting her long arched neck, and
mingling their borders of cheap lace and ribbon with her chestnut curls,
they seemed miracles of successful millinery. Among strangers she was shy
and tremulous as a girl of fifteen; she blushed crimson if any one
appealed to her opinion; yet that tall, graceful, substantial presence
was so imposing in its mildness, that men spoke to her with an agreeable
sensation of timidity.

Soothing, unspeakable charm of gentle womanhood! which supersedes all
acquisitions, all accomplishments. You would never have asked, at any
period of Mrs. Amos Barton's life, if she sketched or played the piano.
You would even perhaps have been rather scandalized if she had descended
from the serene dignity of _being_ to the assiduous unrest of _doing_.
Happy the man, you would have thought, whose eye will rest on her in the
pauses of his fireside reading--whose hot aching forehead will be soothed
by the contact of her cool soft hand who will recover himself from
dejection at his mistakes and failures in the loving light of her
unreproaching eyes! You would not, perhaps, have anticipated that this
bliss would fall to the share of precisely such a man as Amos Barton,
whom you have already surmised not to have the refined sensibilities for
which you might have imagined Mrs. Barton's qualities to be destine