She wiped away her tears, and Mr. Whitelock told her to proceed. He was so much interested in her tale, told in her simple manner, in her soft voice--a voice so full of that low intonation, which is distinct even in its murmurs--that he could not help wishing some one of his favorite novelists, people who, long ago, wrote the most innocent tales in five or seven volumes, were there to hear it. By his own dreamy abstraction, she was transformed into a young shepherdess, tying a blue ribbon round a lamb’s neck; and the vision, with its adjuncts of green fields and purling brooks--which he never saw more than twice a-year--with an enraptured youth leaning over a stile, and the village church steeple peering above the distant trees, was only dispelled by her resuming her unaffected narrative.
“And speaking as I was, sir, of understanding the feelings, I know that to the last I never quite understood those of my husband. I can’t tell if it was because of the difference of our birth, or of our bringing up, or of both; though, as to the birth, his father had been a poor man once, and got rich, some said, not over rightly--though I can’t quite believe _that_ of my dear husband’s father. I never, as I said, quite understood my husband; for, to the last, I know I gave him pain, by little ways which he never complained of, and I knew not how to change; but what I could understand was his PIETY. He lived the last year of his life, a life of such faith and hope, that the world seemed to fold itself away from him like a vapor, and he looked upon all that stood between Christ and him as evil. He delighted to teach our child texts of Scripture; and even the wise-like copies which he used to set him from Poor Richard’s Almanac faded from his memory toward the last, though Bible words remained with him, and scraps of Watts’s hymns, and long passages of holy poetry; but what he dwelt upon was the future of his child. At that time I got constant work as an embroideress. But the last year he might be said to be more in heaven than on earth: the world was not with him; only hour by hour he used to call me to him and say--‘Remember our great salvation,’ and the next minute he would pray me, clasping my hands within his, not to care about the little lad’s learning, so that he could win Christ. He would go on, adding scripture to scripture, to prove that all this world is nothing worth without that which insures eternal life. He desired neither riches, nor honors, nor wealth, nor learning for that boy--nothing but his becoming wise unto salvation. Sir, I understood _that_--_that_ came home to me. Now, sir, the lad is a good lad--tender and loving to me his mother, and, I believe, dutiful to you, sir, though the person below did hint, rather than say, things which I own gave me concern just now--things which make me fear he may not be altogether what I hope; but he is young, and--”