“Oh, a woman’s rules of evidence are very different from what you lawyers find in your great, dusty, dull volumes. See how _I_ should state the case. I see a great, strapping, fine-looking fellow, to borrow your language, coming here, day after day, from I know not how far, or at how great inconvenience to himself, with no other object, so far as I can divine, save that of enjoying the affectionate greetings of a little child of less than four years of age, whom he met by chance, and who, though nothing to him, in one sense seems everything to him, in that her childish love has gone out to him. What kind of a home must this man have, do you think? He can have _no_ home. And yet you wonder that I am sorry for him!” “No,” said I, gladly seizing the opportunity of changing the current of her thoughts; “it is true that the views you hold of evidence do not coincide with those of Greenleaf; but I have long since ceased to wonder at your feeling sorry for anybody or anything. The number of kettles that, of my certain knowledge, have, through your intercession, _not_ been tied to stray dogs’ tails, and the hosts of cats that have escaped twine cravats—” “How cruel you boys used to be!” “Why, Lucy, how long have you been there?” cried Alice, leaning out of the window. “Come here, Mary, and look at them,—it is a clear case. Laura,” added she, looking back into the parlor, but speaking loud enough for us to hear,—“Laura, for one so juvenile, your diagnosis is singularly accurate.” “H’m? Whose noses?” asked Laura, looking up from the doll she was dressing. ----- [1] In my occasional attempts at representing the negro dialect I shall (as I have already done in the case of Laura’s prattle) hold a middle course between the true and the intelligible. CHAPTER VIII. I think it will be allowed that, whatever else this story may be, it has been, so far, genteel. It is with regret, therefore, that, in the very opening of this eighth chapter, I find myself driven to the use of a word which hardly seems to comport with the previous dignity of our narrative. But, after turning the matter over in my mind again and again, I have found it impossible to discover any satisfactory synonyme, or invent any delicately-phrased equivalent for the very plebeian vocable in question. With the reader’s kind permission, therefore—