"Well, you can read it for yourself, now you've got your glasses on."

"I can't read. You see, I'm old--seventy-six years, and when I were
little we were very poor and I couldn't get no schooling. I've got these
glasses to do my sewing, and only put them on to get this stuff out so's
you could read it. I'd like to hear you read it."

I began to get interested in the old dame who talked to me so freely.
She was small and weak-looking, and appeared very thin in her limp, old,
faded gown; she had a meek, patient expression on her face, and her
voice, too, like her face, expressed weariness and resignation.

"But if you have always lived here you must know what is said on this
stone?"

"No, I don't; nobody never read it to me, and I couldn't read it because
I wasn't taught to read. But I'd like to hear you read it."

It was a long inscription to a person named Ash, gentleman, of this
parish, who departed this life over a century ago, and was a man of a
noble and generous disposition, good as a husband, a father, a friend,
and charitable to the poor. Under all were some lines of verse, scarcely
legible in spite of the trouble she had taken to remove the old moss
from the letters.

She listened with profound interest, then said, "I never heard all that
before; I didn't know the name, though I've known this stone since I was
a child. I used to climb on to it then. Can you read me another?"