boiled--to-day, next week, another
week; the years stretched out into one wearisome, endless washing-day.
O, the dreadful years! She grew a little blind and dizzy, sat down on a
heap of table-cloths, and held up her arms.

"Mother, don't be cross to me this morning,--_don't_ O mother, mother,
mother! I wish there were anybody to help me!"

* * * * *

The battle-fields of life lie in ambush. We trip along on our smiling
way and they give no sign. We turn sharp corners where they hide in
shadow. No drum-beat sounds alarum. It is the music and the dress-parade
to-night, the groaning and the blood to-morrow.

Sharley had been little more than a child, in her unreasoning young
joy, when she knotted the barbe at her throat on Saturday night. "I am
an old woman now," she said to herself on Monday morning. Not that her
saying so proved anything,--except, indeed, that it was her first
trouble, and that she was very young to have a trouble. Yet, since she
had the notion, she might as well, to all intents and purposes, have
shrivelled into the caps and spectacles of a centenarian. "Imaginary
griefs _are_ real." She took, indeed, a grim sort of pleasure in
thinking that her youth had fled away, and forever, in thirty-six hours.

However that might be, that October morning ushered Sharley upon
battle-ground; nor was the struggle the less severe that, she was so
young and so unused to struggling.

I have to tell of nothing new or tragic in the child's days; only of the
old, slow, foolish pain that gnaws at the roots of things. Something was
the matter with the sunsets and the dawns. Moonrise was an agony. The
brown and golden grass had turned dull and dead. She would go away up
garret and sit with her fingers in her ears, that she might not hear the
frogs chanting in the swamp at twilight.

One night she ran away from her father and mother. It chanced to be an
anniversary of their wedding-day; they had kissed each other after tea
and talked of old times and blushed a little, their married eyes
occupied and content with one another; she felt with a sudden, dreary
bitterness that she should not be missed, and so ran out into the field
and sat down there on her stone in the dark. She rather hoped that they
would wonder where she was before bedtime. It would be a bit of comfort.
She was so cold and comfortless. But nobody thought of her; and when she
came weakly up the yard at ten o'clock, the door