to time, certain
verses of a funeral psalm.

Miss Roxy and Miss Ruey Toothacre were two brisk old bodies of the
feminine gender and singular number, well known in all the region of
Harpswell Neck and Middle Bay, and such was their fame that it had even
reached the town of Brunswick, eighteen miles away.

They were of that class of females who might be denominated, in the Old
Testament language, "cunning women,"--that is, gifted with an infinite
diversity of practical "faculty," which made them an essential
requisite in every family for miles and miles around. It was impossible
to say what they could not do: they could make dresses, and make shirts
and vests and pantaloons, and cut out boys' jackets, and braid straw,
and bleach and trim bonnets, and cook and wash, and iron and mend, could
upholster and quilt, could nurse all kinds of sicknesses, and in default
of a doctor, who was often miles away, were supposed to be infallible
medical oracles. Many a human being had been ushered into life under
their auspices,--trotted, chirruped in babyhood on their knees, clothed
by their handiwork in garments gradually enlarging from year to year,
watched by them in the last sickness, and finally arrayed for the long
repose by their hands.

These universally useful persons receive among us the title of "aunt" by
a sort of general consent, showing the strong ties of relationship which
bind them to the whole human family. They are nobody's aunts in
particular, but aunts to human nature generally. The idea of restricting
their usefulness to any one family, would strike dismay through a whole
community. Nobody would be so unprincipled as to think of such a thing
as having their services more than a week or two at most. Your country
factotum knows better than anybody else how absurd it would be

"To give to a part what was meant for mankind."

Nobody knew very well the ages of these useful sisters. In that cold,
clear, severe climate of the North, the roots of human existence are
hard to strike; but, if once people do take to living, they come in time
to a place where they seem never to grow any older, but can always be
found, like last year's mullein stalks, upright, dry, and seedy,
warranted to last for any length of time.

Miss Roxy Toothacre, who sits trotting the baby, is a tall, thin,
angular woman, with sharp black eyes, and hair once black, but now well
streaked with gray. These ravages of time, however, were concealed