of
home-misery through long years, always with a disposition to lay the
blame on the wife rather than on the husband, and to reproach Mrs. Raynor
for encouraging her daughter's faults by a too exclusive sympathy. But
old Mrs. Dempster had that rare gift of silence and passivity which often
supplies the absence of mental strength; and, whatever were her thoughts,
she said no word to aggravate the domestic discord. Patient and mute she
sat at her knitting through many a scene of quarrel and anguish;
resolutely she appeared unconscious of the sounds that reached her ears,
and the facts she divined after she had retired to her bed; mutely she
witnessed poor Janet's faults, only registering them as a balance of
excuse on the side of her son. The hard, astute, domineering attorney was
still that little old woman's pet, as he had been when she watched with
triumphant pride his first tumbling effort to march alone across the
nursery floor. 'See what a good son he is to me!' she often thought.
'Never gave me a harsh word. And so he might have been a good husband.'

O it is piteous--that sorrow of aged women! In early youth, perhaps, they
said to themselves, 'I shall be happy when I have a husband to love me
best of all'; then, when the husband was too careless, 'My child will
comfort me'; then, through the mother's watching and toil, 'My child will
repay me all when it grows up.' And at last, after the long journey of
years has been wearily travelled through, the mother's heart is weighed
down by a heavier burthen, and no hope remains but the grave.

But this morning old Mrs. Dempster sat down in her easy-chair without any
painful, suppressed remembrance of the pre-ceding night.

'I declare mammy looks younger than Mrs. Crewe, who is only sixty-five,'
said Janet. 'Mrs. Crewe will come to see you today, mammy, and tell you
all about her troubles with the Bishop and the collation. She'll bring
her knitting, and you'll have a regular gossip together.'

'The gossip will be all on one side, then, for Mrs. Crewe gets so very
deaf, I can't make her hear a word. And if I motion to her, she always
understands me wrong.'

'O, she will have so much to tell you today, you will not want to speak
yourself. You, who have patience to knit those wonderful counterpanes,
mammy, must not be impatient with dear Mrs. Crewe. Good old lady! I can't
bear her to think she's ever tiresome to people, and you know she's very
ready to fancy herself in t