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moves me one way, I cannot go another. But I will try my best, for may-be it's the last time some of you will ever listen to old Thusa's tales. She's never felt just right since they tangled up her heart-strings with that whitened thread. Oh! that was a vile, mean trick!" "Forget and forgive, Miss Thusa," cried Louis; "I dare say Mittie has repented of it in dust and ashes." "I have forgiven, long ago," resumed Miss Thusa, "but as for _forgetting_, that is out of the question. Ever since then, when the bleaching time comes, it keeps me perfectly miserable till it is over. I've never had any thread equal to it, for I'm afraid to let it stay long enough to be as powerful white as it used to be. Well, well, let it rest. You want me to tell you a story, do you?" Miss Thusa had an auditory assembled round her that might have animated a spirit less open to inspiration than hers. There was Mr. and Mrs. Gleason, the latter a fine, dignified-looking lady, and the young doctor, with his countenance of grave sweetness, and Louis, with an expression of resolute credulity, and Helen and Alice, with their arms interlaced, and the locks of their hair mingling like the tendrils of two forest vines. And what perhaps gave a glow to her spirit, deeper than the presence of all these, Mittie, her arch enemy, was _not there_, to mock her with her deriding black eyes. "You've talked to me so much about not telling you any terrible things," said she, with a troubled look, "that you've made me like a candle under a bushel, instead of a light upon a hill-top. I've never told such stories since, as I used to tell when the first Mrs. Gleason was alive, and I spun in the nursery all the evening, and little Helen was the only one to listen to what I had to say. There was something in the child's eyes that kept me going, for they grew brighter and larger every word I said." Helen looked up, and met the glance of the young doctor, riveted upon her with so much pity and earnestness, she looked down again with a blending of gratitude and shame. She well knew that, notwithstanding her reason now taught her the folly and madness of her superstitious terrors, the impressions of her early childhood were burnt into her memory and never could be entirely obliterated. "I remember a story about a blind child, which I heard myself, when a little girl," said Miss Thusa, "and if I should live to the age of Methuselah, I never should forget it. I don't
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