"Strike! I want to maul some of 'em! Oh, if them courts was only little boys, and I the law, wouldn't they come down on their marrow bones and beg her pardon for thinking of such a thing. Besides, do you see, Paul, I don't believe she killed the baby. Anyway, them little creatures, with long flannel petticoats a hanging over their feet, are always doing things to torment grown folks, catching the rash, and measles, and chickenpox, to say nothing of a habit they get into of hiccuping right in a feller's face when he's told to tend 'em. Babies! They're the only thing I ever raly had agin marm—she always would be keeping one on hand, just for us to rock, and tend, and hush up. Par never would make a fuss about it, as a man aught ter with such goings on in the house."
"Perhaps he rather liked them!" suggested Paul.
"Liked 'em. Well, maybe he did, there's no saying; besides, they're well enough in their place, and that, according to my notion, is sound asleep in the cradle. Anyhow, what's the use of making sich a time about it when one of 'em stops crying for good and all, and what on airth could anybody think that ere young gal wanted with one of 'em a tagging after her?"
"I don't know," replied Paul, tenderly; "but from the way she looks at the empty cradle sometimes, it seems to me as if she wanted it there very much."
"Of course she does. It's a way of the wimmen folks have. I don't know about marm, for our cradle never is empty; but some wimmen make such fools of themselves, it's enough to set a feller agin the whole pack and boodle on 'em."
"You don't mean all the beautiful ladies," said Paul, thinking sadly of his own sweet mother.
"There's marm—she's a purty good kind of a woman after all, and Miss Mason, harnsome as a pictur. Then, little Rose—oh, my! don't you wish you could see her, with her white aprons ruffled all around, and her long curls, just like a wax doll. But then the generality of 'em—well, I don't want to say nothin'."
"That was a very nice little lady that gave me one apple with the brown coat."
"She? yes, she'll do; but we're going off the handle, you and I. What's the good of talking about the best on 'em if Katharine Allen has got to be hung! As I was a saying—when you would go on about wimmen folks in gineral, as if I cared any thing about them—as I was a saying, she never hurt that baby no more than I did. It went off and buried itself up in the snow—stealing Katy's shawl to wrap itself up in, then took cold and went into a conniption fit just out of spite. Them little sojers are up to all sorts of tricks; don't I know 'em!"
"I am sure it died of its own accord," said Paul.