--conclusions.

Kitty's departure was Beth's first great grief, and she suffered
terribly. The prop and stay of her little life had gone, the comfort
and kindness, the order and discipline, which were essential to her
nature. Mrs. Caldwell was a good woman, who would certainly do what
she thought best for her children; but she was exhausted by the
unconscionable production of a too numerous family, a family which she
had neither the means nor the strength to bring up properly. Her
husband's health, too, grew ever more precarious, and she found
herself obliged to do all in her power to help him with his duties,
which were arduous. There was a good deal that she could do in the way
of writing official letters and managing money-matters, tasks for
which she was much better fitted than for the management of children;
but the children, meanwhile, had to be left to the care of others--not
that that would have been a bad thing for them had their mother had
sufficient discrimination to enable her to choose the proper kind of
people to be with them. Unfortunately for everybody, however, Mrs.
Caldwell had been brought up on the old-fashioned principle that
absolute ignorance of human nature is the best qualification for a
wife and mother, and she was consequently quite unprepared for any
possibility which had not formed part of her own simple and limited
personal experience. She never suspected, for one thing, that a
servant's conversation could be undesirable if her appearance and her
character from her last mistress were satisfactory; and, therefore,
when Kitty had gone, she put Anne in her place without misgiving,
Anne's principal recommendation being that she was a nice-looking
girl, and had pretty deferential manners.

Anne came from one of the cabins on the Irish side of the road, where
people, pigs, poultry, with an occasional cow, goat, or donkey herded
together indiscriminately. The windows were about a foot square, and
were not made to open. Sometimes they had glass in them, but were
oftener stopped up with rags. Before the doors were heaps of manure
and pools of stagnant water. There was no regular footway, but a mere
beaten track in front of the cabins, and this, on wet days, was
ankle-deep in mud. The women hung about the doors all day long,
knitting the men's blue stockings, and did little else apparently.
Both men and women were usually in a torpid state, the result,
doubtless, of breathing a poisoned atmosphere,