more or less, the shy look in her face.

"That's your name, isn't it? I've got something for you. Won't you come
and get it?'" Leslie paused, waiting; fearing lest a further advance on
her own part might put Prissy altogether to flight. Nothing answered in
the girl's eyes to her words; there was no lighting up of desire or
curiosity, however restrained; she stood like one indifferent or
uncomprehending.

"She's awful deef!" cried a new voice from the doorway. "She ain't that
scared. She's sarcy enough, sometimes."

A woman, middle-aged or more, stood on the rough, slanting door-stone.
She had bare feet, in coarse calf-skin slippers, stringy petticoats
differing only from the child's in length, sleeves rolled up to the
shoulders, no neck garniture,--not a bit of anything white about her.
Over all looked forth a face sharp and hard, that might have once been
good-looking, in a raw, country fashion, and that had undoubtedly always
been, what it now was, emphatically Yankee-smart. An inch-wide stripe of
black hair was combed each way over her forehead, and rolled up on her
temples in what, years and years ago, used to be called most
appropriately "flat curls,"--these fastened with long horn side-combs.
Beyond was a strip of desert,--no hair at all for an inch and a half
more toward the crown; the rest dragged back and tied behind with the
relentless tightness that gradually and regularly, by the persistence of
years, had accomplished this peculiar belt of clearing. It completed her
expression; it was as a very halo of Yankee saintship crowning the woman
who in despite of poverty and every discouragement had always hated, to
the very roots of her hair, anything like what she called a "sozzle;"
who had always been screwed up and sharp set to hard work. She couldn't
help the tumbledown fence; she had no "men-folks" round; and she
couldn't have paid for a hundred pickets and a day's carpentering, to
have saved her life. She couldn't help Prissy's hair even; for it would
kink and curl, and the minute the wind took it "there it was again;" and
it was not time yet, thank goodness! to harrow it back and begin in her
behalf the remarkable engineering which had laid out for herself that
broad highway across all the thrifty and energetic bumps up to
Veneration (who knows how much it had had to do with mixing them in one
common tingle of mutual and unceasing activity?) and down again from ear
to ear. Inside the poor little house you