The sight of _her_ tears brought forth answering ones from me, for, with all her peculiarities, I loved Aunt Betsey, and I remembered that when sickness and death were among us, she had left her own home to stay with us, ministering as far as she was able to our comfort. Many a night had she watched with me, and though she invariably placed the lamp so that its rays glared full in my face, though she slept three-fourths of the time, _snoring_ so loudly as to keep me awake, and though at the slightest change for the worse in my symptoms she always routed the whole household, telling them, “Rosa was dyin’ now, if she ever was,” thereby almost frightening me to death, I knew that she meant well, and in my heart I liked her far better than I did my Boston aunt, who, after bidding her sister-in-law good-bye, went back to the parlor, saying to her husband in a tone loud enough for us to hear, “What a vulgar creature! Did you notice her hands? Why, they are as coarse and black as a servant girl’s.” “And she’s none the worse for that,” interposed grandma, warming up in the defence of her son’s wife. “She has now and then an odd streak, but on the whole she’s better than they’ll average.” After this, Aunt Charlotte relapsed into silence, which she did not break until she overheard Herbert proposing to Anna a ride on the morrow. Then she roused up, and while her little black eyes snapped, she said, “I am going home to-morrow afternoon, and so are you. Consequently, there’ll be no time for a ride.” In a twinkling, Herbert’s thumb and finger went up to his nose, a gesture which I did not then understand, but it struck me disagreeably, and had also the effect of silencing Aunt Charlotte, who made no further remark on the subject until they chanced to be alone, when I, who was in the hall, heard her say, “What can induce you to talk so much with that raw country girl? Your city friends would laugh well if they knew it.” Consigning his “city friends” to the care of the old gentleman supposed to preside over the lower regions, Herbert walked off in quest of the “raw country girl,” by whose side he sat the remainder of the evening, talking to her so low that Lizzie whispered to me her private opinion that “they were courting.” The next morning Aunt Charlotte did not appear at breakfast, it being so much earlier than her usual hour of rising that she felt wholly unequal to the task. Accordingly, though we did not wait, the table did until ten o’clock, when, pale and languid, she came down, seeming much disturbed to find that Herbert had coaxed Anna into going with him to call on Aunt Betsey, to whom he had taken quite a fancy, and who had asked him to visit her “if he didn’t feel too smart.”