nd
sat by her bedside. Cruel and infinitely happy little woman, filled with
compassion, who brought delicacies in the making of which she had spent
precious hours, and which Honora could not eat! The Lord, when he had
made Mrs. Mayo, had mercifully withheld the gift of imagination. One
topic filled her, she lived to one end: her Alpha and Omega were husband
and children, and she talked continually of their goodness and badness,
of their illnesses, of their health, of their likes and dislikes, of
their accomplishments and defects, until one day a surprising thing
happened. Surprising for Mrs. Mayo.

"Oh, don't!" cried Honora, suddenly. "Oh, don't! I can't bear it."

"What is it?" cried Mrs. Mayo, frightened out of her wits. "A turn? Shall
I telephone for the doctor?"

"No," relied Honora, "but--but I can't talk any more--to-day."

She apologized on the morrow, as she held Mrs. Mayo's hand. "It--it was
your happiness," she said; "I was unstrung. I couldn't listen to it.
Forgive me."

The little woman burst into tears, and kissed her as she sat in bed.

"Forgive you, deary!" she cried. "I never thought."

"It has been so easy for you," Honora faltered.

"Yes, it has. I ought to thank God, and I do--every night."

She looked long and earnestly, through her tears, at the young lady from
the far away East as she lay against the lace pillows, her paleness
enhanced by the pink gown, her dark hair in two great braids on her
shoulders.

"And to think how pretty you are!" she exclaimed.

It was thus she expressed her opinion of mankind in general, outside of
her own family circle. Once she had passionately desired beauty, the high
school and the story of Helen of Troy notwithstanding. Now she began to
look at it askance, as a fatal gift; and to pity, rather than envy, its
possessors.

As a by-industry, Mrs. Mayo raised geraniums and carnations in her front
cellar, near the furnace, and once in a while Peggy, with the
pulled-molasses hair, or chubby Abraham Lincoln, would come puffing up
Honora's stairs under the weight of a flower-pot and deposit it
triumphantly on the table at Honora's bedside. Abraham Lincoln did not
object to being kissed: he had, at least, grown to accept the process as
one of the unaccountable mysteries of life. But something happened to him
one afternoon, on the occasion of his giving proof of an intellect which
may eventually bring him, in the footsteps of his great namesake, to the
White Hou