she was. "He went out there to
publish a proslavery paper. But when he found out what the Border
Ruffians really were, he turned against them. He used to be very bitter
about my uncle's having become an Abolitionist; they had had a quarrel
about it; but father wrote to him from Kansas, and they made it up; and
before father died he was able to tell mother that we were to go to
uncle's. But mother was sick then, and she only lived a month after
father; and when my cousin came out to get us, just before she died,
there was scarcely a crust of cornbread in our cabin. It seemed like
heaven to get to Eriecreek; but even at Eriecreek we live in a way that
I am afraid you wouldn't respect. My uncle has just enough, and we are
very plain people indeed. I suppose," continued the young girl meekly,
"that I haven't had at all what you'd call an education. Uncle told me
what to read, at first, and after that I helped myself. It seemed to
come naturally; but don't you see that it wasn't an education?"

"I beg pardon," said Mr. Arbuton, with a blush; for he had just then
lost the sense of what she said in the music of her voice, as it
hesitated over these particulars of her history.

"I mean," explained Kitty, "that I'm afraid I must be very one-sided.
I'm dreadfully ignorant of a great many things. I haven't any
accomplishments, only the little bit of singing and playing that you've
heard; I couldn't tell a good picture from a bad one; I've never been to
the opera; I don't know anything about society. Now just imagine," cried
Kitty, with sublime impartiality, "such a girl as that in Boston!"

Even Mr. Arbuton could not help smiling at this comic earnestness, while
she resumed: "At home my cousins and I do all kinds of things that the
ladies whom you know have done for them. We do our own work, for one
thing," she continued, with a sudden treacherous misgiving that what she
was saying might be silly and not heroic, but bravely stifling her
doubt. "My cousin Virginia is housekeeper, and Rachel does the sewing,
and I'm a kind of maid-of-all-work."

Mr. Arbuton listened respectfully, vainly striving for some likeness of
Miss Ellison in the figure of the different second-girls who, during
life, had taken his card, or shown him into drawing-rooms, or waited on
him at table; failing in this, he tried her in the character of daughter
of that kind of farm-house where they take summer boarders and do their
own work; but evidently the Ellis