Mary and Mrs. O’Brien became great friends; for Mary’s sympathetic nature and marvellous control of countenance at once drew the old lady out, and prevented her discovering how intensely amused her listener was. Amongst other topics, she was very eloquent upon the subject of the Prince of Wales’ recovery from his serious illness, declaring how she, “as is a nurse myself, know well what a fine healthy man he must have been born ever to have got over the like of that. And now, sure, we must pray that nothing may happen to the blessed, darlint prince; for if he were to be taken, the country would be just ruined, and nothing left us but the constitution!” She would talk by the hour of her “darlint” young ladies, sometimes blaming their conduct, sometimes extolling them to the skies. Occasionally, to tease her, they would pretend to walk lame, and tell her that was all the fashion, and was called the Alexandra limp. “Och! now, honeys, you, with straight limbs as God has made you, mocking at the darlint princess, as may be isn’t lame at all. If I saw you mocking at me, as is no princess, but is blind, and me groping round the table, don’t you think, honeys, as I should feel it?” Then turning to Mary: “Ah! your honor, they was always as wild as a litter o’ pigs on a windy day, good luck to them. I’ve seen them all come into the world, bless their hearts, one after the other, pretty nigh as fast as nature would let them. And a nice handful I’ve had wid them, too, bringing the most of them up by hand like a weaned calf. Children’s stomachs is just like sponges. But if you overdo the binding, may be you’ll give them obdurate bowels.” Mary bore even this without a smile; but we all laughed together when the morning after her arrival she found the nice little boy Celestin, who brought in the lamp and the basket of wood, and helped in the house generally, and who could not have been above fifteen, innocently aiding Marie, the housemaid, in making the beds. She could not understand a word of French, and of course he knew no English; but she seized him by the collar, and ejected him violently from the room, exclaiming, “Get out o’ that, you young varmint!” and protesting that he should never touch one of her “darlints’ sheets in this heathenish land, where they made no difference between a man and a woman, but put the men to make the beds and the women to tend the cattle.” The end of it was that she took the bed‐making into her own hands, though she never got reconciled to the mattresses stuffed with the outer sheaths of the Indian corn, or the pillows with wool. “That pillow is as hard as a dog’s head, and won’t do for my young lady; and the other’s as limp as a dead cat,” she remarked aloud to herself one day that Elina was going to bed early with a bad headache.