"How is 'Life?"

"Hearty as would anyway be consistent--with one-leggedness. He'd never
'a' got back, we all know, if you hadn't gone after him." It was a young
man's voice that spoke these last sentences, and it grew tender at the
end.

"You're to trim the cake," began one of the young girls again, crowding
up. "She says nobody else can. Nobody else _ever_ can. And"--with a
little more mystery--"there's the veil to fix. She says you're used to
wedd'n's and know about veils; and you was down to Lawrence at Lorany's.
And she wants things in _real style_. She's dreadful _pudjicky_, Emma
Jane is; she won't have anything without it's exactly right."

The plain face was full of beaming sympathy and readiness. The
stiff-looking spinster woman, with the "grass in the eaves of her
bonnet,"--grass grown, also, over many an old hope in her own life, may
be,--was here in the midst of young joy and busy interest, making them
all her own; had come on purpose, looked for and hailed as the one
without whom nothing could ever be done,--more tenderly yet, as one but
for whom some brave life and brother love would have gone down. In the
midst of it all she had had ear and answer, to the very last, for the
stranger she had comforted on her way. What difference did it make
whether she wore an old bonnet with green grass in it, or a round hat
with a gay feather? whether she were fifteen or forty-five, but for the
good she had had time to do? whether Lorany's wedding down at Lawrence
had been really a stylish festival or no? There was a beauty here which
verily shone out through all; and such a life should have no time to be
tempted.