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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
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