“I declare if I was made of sugar, you’d have me eaten!” she would say; a cannibalistic possibility I made it a point of earnestly disclaiming.
The linen room was where she sat, in a quaint, painted, high-backed armchair by the window. She gazed straight out across a yard to a shrubbery dominated by three large Fir trees over which the evening star would peep, a tremulous yellow. She called those Fir trees her Three Kings, and never failed to lift her hands in wonder and gratitude over the beauty of the star. Poetry goes deep into the hearts of the Irish.
I can see that room now. The whole of one side was filled with cupboards—presses, we called them—where, behind buff wire gratings and beautifully fluted bright pink calico, the linen was stored. A few nursery groceries, biscuit and dessert oddments were kept in a cupboard just at the entrance; and there was always a faint fragrance of raisins and spice in the atmosphere. I can see the dear occupant of the room too; the picture of beautiful old age, with banded silver hair beneath the snow-white cap which was tied with muslin strings under her chin. I can see her apple-blossom cheeks and her blue eyes, clear and innocent as a child’s, yet so wise! She had a white starched kerchief folded across her black bodice, and her black skirt was gathered with a great many pleats round the comfortable rotundity of her figure. We used to find her sitting by the casement in the twilight, gazing out. If the mood took me, I would sit on her knee and stare out too. Every few minutes or so she would sigh, not with sadness, but gently, as the woods sigh, with scarcely perceptible movement on a still night. But though I knew it to be no sigh of distress, it nevertheless troubled me. I would ask anxiously:
Her name was Mrs. O’Brien, which was interpreted Mobie by our baby lips.
In same fashion the first nurse, whom I only vaguely remember, erect, small, severe, and kind, had degenerated from Mrs. Hughes into Shuzzie; and the queer, tiny head housemaid, baptized Bridget, was Dadgie. A unique personage this, minute as she was active, with bobbing bunches of grey curls on each side of her grey net cap with purple ribbons which were tied under her chin. Upon the rare occasions when some damage occurred to the china or glass under her hands, she would trot into my mother with the announcement: