I tried. The
last year of my mother's life was the first of his married life. His
father-in-law hired, at the end of the town opposite to ours, a
furnished house for him and his wife. My mother called upon her by the
Doctor's particular invitation. The visit was sweetly received, and
promptly returned by the bride; but she was pretty and popular, and had
many other visits to pay, especially when she could catch her husband at
leisure to help her. He was seldom at leisure at all, but, as he
self-reproachfully said, "too busy to think except of his patients and
his wife"; and poor mamma, with all her real dignity, had caught
something of the shy, retiring ways of a reduced gentlewoman, and was,
besides, too literally straining every nerve to pay off the mortgage on
her half-earned house, so that, if anything happened, she might "not
leave her girls without a home." Therefore he saw her seldom.

After he heard she was ill, he was with her daily, and often three or
four times a day; and his wife came too, and made the nicest broths and
gruels with her own hands, and begged Fanny not to cry, and cried
herself. He promised my mother that we should never want, if he could
help it, and that he would be a brother to us both, and my guardian. She
told him that, if she died, this promise would be the greatest earthly
comfort to her in her death; and he answered, "So it will to me!"

Then after she was gone, when the lease of his house was up, as no other
tenant offered for ours, he hired it, furniture and all, and offered
Fanny and me both a home in it for an indefinite time; but our affairs
were all unsettled. We knew the rent, as rents were then, would not pay
our expenses and leave us anything to put by for the future, which my
mother had taught us always to think of. Therefore I thought I had
better take care of myself, as I was much the strongest, and perfectly
able to do so. "And a very pretty business you made of it, didn't you,
miss?" reflected and queried I, parenthetically, as I afterwards
reviewed these circumstances in my own mind.

The best we had to hope from my older and our only brother George was,
that he should join us in paying the interest on the mortgage till real
estate should rise,--as everybody said it soon must,--and then the rise
in rents should enable us to let the house on better terms, and thus, by
degrees, clear it of all encumbrances, and have it quite for our own, to
let, sell, or live in. The wor