hildher"; found that she had been
living with Mrs. Deacon Adams, and had not been at my house. It was only
for form's sake that I catechized; Bridget came, of course.

She was such a maiden as her mother must have been, one of Nature's own
ladies, but more refined in type, texture, and form, as the American
atmosphere and food and life always refine the children of European
stock,--slenderer, more delicate, finer of complexion, and with a soft,
exquisite sweetness of voice, more thrilling than her mother's, larger
and more robust heartfeltness of tone,--and with the same, but shyer
ways, and swift blushes and smiles. In one thing she differed: she was a
silent, reticent girl: her tears were not so quick as her mother's, nor
her words; she hid her thoughts. She had learned it of us secretive
Americans, or had inherited it of her father, a silent, though cheery
man.

Her glossy wealth of dark-brown hair, her great brown eyes, long
eyelashes, sensitive, delicately cut, mobile red lips, oval face,
beautifully formed arms and hands, and lithe, graceful, lady-like
movements, were a sweet household picture, sunshiny with unfailing
good-will, and of a dexterous neat-handedness very rare in her people.
My husband was looking at her one day, and as she tripped away on some
errand he observed,--

"She is a graceful little saint. All her attitudes are beatitudes."

Bridget was pure and devout enough for the compliment; and I had not
been married so long but that I could excuse the evidence of his
observation of another, for the sake of the neatness of his phrase. I
should have thought the unconscious child incongruously lovely amongst
brooms and dust-pans, pots and kettles, suds and slops and dishwater,
had I not been about as much concerned among them myself.

Bridget had been with me only a day or two, when a friend and
fellow-matron, in the course of an afternoon call, apprised me that
there were reports that Bridget O'Reilly was a thief,--in fact, that she
had been turned away by Mrs. Adams for that very offence, which she told
me "out of kindness, and with no desire to injure the girl; but there is
so much wickedness among these Irish!" She had heard this tale, through
only one person, from Mrs. Adams herself.

This troubled me; yet I should have quickly forgotten it. I met the same
story in several other directions within a few days; and now it troubled
me more. Women are suspicious creatures. I don't like to confess it