Mrs. Johnson's spectacles, meantime, were with eager curiosity peering over the letter. "Dear heart!" cried she. "Do tell! My! What a providence! There's Sister Nancy Newcome's Elviry jest got home this arternoon from her situation to the South, scairt off with the insurrections as unexpected as any_thing_. She's as smart a teacher as ever was; an' the committee'd ha' gin her the school in a minute, an' thank you, too; but she wuz alwuz a kind o' lookin' up'ards; an' I s'pose she cal'lated it might for'ard her prospects to go down an' show herself among the plantations. There's better opportoonities, they say, sometimes for young ladies to git settled in life down there, owin' to the scurcity on 'em. She'll be glad enough to fill your place, I guess, till somethin' else turns up, for a fortni't or a month, or a term. It'll give her a chance to see her folks, an' fix up her cloes, an' look round her a spell. An' you can step into the cars o' Monday mornin' an' go right off an' close that poor young creator's eyes, an' take your time for 't. Seems as if I hearn tell your ma went off in a kind of a gallopin' decline, didn't she?" "No, she did not!" cried I, springing up with a renewal of energy that must have surprised Mrs. Johnson. "Nothing of the kind! I will take my letter again, if you please. My sister has a cold,--only a cold. But where can I see Miss Newcome?" "To home; but I declare, you can't feel hardly fit to start off ag'in. Jest you step in an' sup your tea afore it's any colder, I've had mine; an' I'll step right back over there, an' see about it for ye." Mrs. Johnson, if coarse, was kind; and that time it would be hard to say whether her kindness or her coarseness did me the most good; for the latter roused me, between indignation and horror, to a strong reaction. Mrs. Johnson, I said to myself, knew no more of the matter than I. Nobody said a word, in the letter, of Fanny's being very ill; and there had been, as I now considered, to the best of my recollection and information, no consumption in our family. My father died when I was five years old, as I had always heard of chronic bronchitis and nervous dyspepsia, or, in other words, of over-work and under-pay. An early marriage to a clergyman, who had no means of support but a salary of five hundred dollars dependent on his own health and the tastes of a parish, early widowhood, two helpless little girls to rear, years of hard work, anxieties, and embarrassments, a typhoid fever, with no physician during the precious first few days, during which, if she had sent for him, Dr. Physick always believed he might have saved her, a sudden sinking and no rallying,--it took all that to kill poor, dear, sweet mamma! She had a magnificent constitution, and bequeathed much of it to me.