was a long, slow, wearisome process
of puckering and dimming and stiffening. But when she told me how she
had carried my mother in her arms, as she had carried me, and had made
the proud discovery of her first tooth, as, piously exploring among my
tender gums with her little finger, she had found mine, I stared at the
Pacific of her possible nursings, in a wild surmise, silent upon a peak
of wonder. "Well, then, Auntie," I asked, "do you think you're much more
than a thousand?"

She was not noticeably little as a woman, but wonderfully little as a
bundle, to contain so many great virtues,--rather below the medium
stature, slender, and bent with age, rather than with burdens; for she
had had no heartless master to lay heavy packs upon her. Her face, far
from unpleasing in its lines, was lovely in its blended expression of
intelligence, modesty, the sweetest guilelessness, an almost heroic
truthfulness, devoted fidelity, a dove-like tranquillity of mind, and
that abiding, reposeful trust in God which is equal to all trials, and
can never be taken by surprise. Her voice was soft and soothing, her
motions singularly free from clumsiness or fretfulness, her manners so
beautifully blended of unaffected humility, patience, and self-respect
as to command, in cheerful reciprocity, the deference they tendered; in
which respect she was a severe ordeal to the sham gentlemen and ladies
who had the honor to be presented to her,--the slightest trace of
snobbery betraying itself at once to the sensitive test-paper of Aunt
Judy's true politeness. Her ways were ways of pleasantness, and all her
paths were peace. Faith, hope, and charity were met in her dusky,
shrunken bosom,--more at home there, perhaps, than in a finer dwelling.

A sneering philosophy was never yet challenged to contemplate a piety
more complete than that which made this venerable "nigger" a lady on
earth, and a saint in heaven; but on her knees she found it, and on her
knees she held it fast,--watching, praying, trembling.

"When she sat, her head was, prayer-like, bending;
When she rose, it rose not any more.
Faster seemed her true heart grave-ward tending
Than her tired feet, weak and travel-sore."

She was, indeed, a living prayer, a lying-down and rising-up, a
going-out and coming-in prayer,--a loving, longing, working, waiting
prayer,--a black and wrinkled, bent and tottering incense and
aspiration. With her to labor was literally to worshi