child, and that is the reason her aunts had invited
her to Riverboro to be a member of their family and
participate in all the advantages of their loftier
position in the world. It was several years since
Miranda and Jane had seen the children, but they
remembered with pleasure that Hannah had not
spoken a word during the interview, and it was
for this reason that they had asked for the pleasure
of her company. Rebecca, on the other hand, had
dressed up the dog in John's clothes, and being
requested to get the three younger children ready
for dinner, she had held them under the pump and
then proceeded to "smack" their hair flat to their
heads by vigorous brushing, bringing them to the
table in such a moist and hideous state of shininess
that their mother was ashamed of their appearance.
Rebecca's own black locks were commonly pushed
smoothly off her forehead, but on this occasion she
formed what I must perforce call by its only name,
a spit-curl, directly in the centre of her brow, an
ornament which she was allowed to wear a very
short time, only in fact till Hannah was able to call
her mother's attention to it, when she was sent
into the next room to remove it and to come back
looking like a Christian. This command she interpreted
somewhat too literally perhaps, because she
contrived in a space of two minutes an extremely
pious style of hairdressing, fully as effective if not
as startling as the first. These antics were solely
the result of nervous irritation, a mood born of Miss