supper dishes attacking them so ferociously that I should have broken
them all, I guess, had not mother said gently,

"Let me wash them, Emily, your hands tremble so." Then I tried to
exorcise the demon within, and I said:

"How can we have a stranger here, putting on airs, and Hal going away,
and our home probably too homely for her. I know she never washed her
hands in a blue wash-bowl in the world, much less in a pewter basin such
as we use. She'll want everything we haven't got, and I shall tip
everything over, and be as awkward as--oh, dear! Mother, how I do wish I
could be ground over and put in good shape before to-morrow night." I
never saw my mother laugh so heartily in my life; she laughed till I was
fairly frightened and thought she had a hysteric fit, and when she could
speak, said:

"Emily, don't borrow trouble, it may make Hal's departure easier for us.
It must be right for her to come, else it would not have happened. You
are growing so like a careful woman, I doubt not you will be the very
one to please her."

Those words were a sort of strengthening cordial, and before I went to
sleep I had firmly determined to receive my cousin as I would one of my
neighbors, and not allow my spirit to chafe itself against the wall of
conditions, whatever they might be.

So when the stage came over the hill, and round the turn in the road
leading to our house, I stood quietly with mother in the doorway waiting
to give the strange guest welcome in our midst. I was the first to take
her hand, for the blundering stage-driver nearly let her fall to the