“Lawk-a-daisy me, Miss Annella, whatever do you mean?” inquired the astounded landlady.
“I mean just what I say!” exclaimed the girl, throwing down her book, and laughing gaily. “I mean that I would like to be as free as I should be if I were a boy, or rather if I were a man. I would like to go where I please, to do as I wish; to struggle with the goddess Fortune until I had made the capricious vixen my slave!” concluded the girl; and it was strange to see the fire that gleamed from her dark-gray eyes, and glowed upon her wan cheeks, as she spoke.
“La, bless my soul,” thought the terrified landlady, “what a misfortin it is for young creatures to lose their mothers, for sure, never was a woman so beset with two such luny gals as I am by these two motherless young things. The one down-stairs is a-going melancholy mad, and the one up here is gone merry mad.” Then aloud she asked:
“Miss Annella, do you remember your mother?”
“My poor, dear mother!” said the girl, in a tone of deep pathos, and with a total change of expression and manner. “No, I am very sorry that I cannot remember her. How should I, when she died while I was yet in the cradle—died broken-hearted, it is said, because my grandfather would never forgive her for having married my father.”
“Well, that was hard, too; for though it’s undutiful for a child to marry against the wishes of her parents, and never turns out to no good—as you may see yourself—still it is unnatural for a parent to hold out forever agin a child. So she died, poor woman, while you were a baby!”
“She died in the second year of her marriage, when I was but a few months old.”
“Ah, then, that accounts for all your oddities, poor child. I daresay, now, you never even had a female aunt to look after you?”
“Not since I can recollect. I never had one but my father. We used to live about in barracks, wherever his regiment might be quartered for the time, until the evil days came, and poor father was cashiered—”
“Umph, ah! for drink, I suppose,” thought the landlady; but she said nothing, and Annella continued: