While engaged in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like a
turban upon her head and about her person those mystical swathings in
which old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured our
sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed and
the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her stand
at the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air with its pungent odors. If
we surprised her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe from her
lips, and put it behind her, with a low mellow chuckle, and a look of
half-defiant consciousness; never guessing that none of her merits took us
half so much as the cheerful vice which she only feigned to conceal.

Some things she could not do so perfectly as cooking, because of her
failing eyesight; and we persuaded her that spectacles would both become
and befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a pair of steel-bowed
glasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at first, but had clearly
no pride in them. Before long she laid them aside altogether, and they had
passed from our thoughts, when one day we heard her mellow note of
laughter and her daughter's harsher cackle outside our door, and, opening
it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spectacles of massive frame. We then
learned that their purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made long ago, in
the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore glasses, they should
be gold-bowed; and I hope the manes of the dead were half as happy in
these votive spectacles as the simple soul that offered them.

She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of whom
were dead, and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. During his
life-time she had kept a little shop in her native town; and it was only
within a few years that she had gone into service. She cherished a natural
haughtiness of spirit, and resented control, although disposed to do all