Miss Ann’s pleasant round face turned even redder than it had been as she bent over the blackberries, and she seemed too astonished to speak, for a moment; then she put an arm about each of the children, and gave each a hearty kiss, and somehow, although Johnny had begun to think he was too old to be kissed, he did not mind it at all.
“You dear little souls!” said Miss Ann, and Tiny thought there was a sort of quaver in her voice, “it’s only your own good-nature that makes you feel that way. Why, I’ve never been able to hold a candle to mother for work, nor to father and Julia and the boys for smartness, and there was a time, five or six years ago, when I felt sort of all discouraged. They couldn’t help laughing at me when I said silly things, and made stupid blunders, and my ugly face worried me every time I looked in the glass.”
“But you’re not ugly at all!” burst in both the children, indignantly.
Again the color swept over Miss Ann’s face, but she laughed in a pleased, childlike way, as she said,—
“There you go, again! What sweet little souls you are. I’m real glad you feel that way, dears, but I know too well it’s only your kind hearts that make you think so. And it seemed to me that I might about as well give up, I couldn’t make myself pretty, no matter how hard I tried, nor how I fixed my molasses-candy-colored hair—every way seemed to make me a little uglier than the last. And I was so slow,—I was always thinking about that poor man in the Bible, that wanted so to get into the pool, and while he was coming somebody else would step down before him. Mother would lose her patience, and Julia and the boys would laugh, a dozen times a day, and then I would get all of a tremble with nervousness, and like as not say something I’d be sorry for the minute it was said, and maybe wind up with a crying spell. They didn’t any of them know how I really felt, or they wouldn’t have laughed and joked about it, for kinder folks than mine you couldn’t find in a day’s walk, and somehow, though it sounds crooked to say so, that very thing made it hurt all the more. And when mother said she calculated to take boarders that summer, for we’d had two or three bad years, and things were getting behindhand, I came near running away, and taking a service place where nobody knew me. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to that, and I can’t tell you how thankful I’ve been ever since, that I couldn’t, for I’d have missed the best thing that ever happened to me, besides shirking a plain duty, like a coward. The first boarders that came that season were a dear old lady and her husband. He was real nice, and not a bit of trouble, but she! I lost my heart to her the first time I saw her, and I kept losing it more and more all the time she stayed. She hadn’t very good health, but most well people will give twice the trouble she did, and never stop to think of it. She was going to stay all summer, and the way I came to begin waiting on her was a sort of an accident. Julia made me take up the pail of fresh water to fill her pitcher, just to plague me, and I found her with her trunk and the top bureau drawer open, and she sitting down between them, looking very white and weak.
“‘I’m not good for much, my dear, you see,’ she said, with that sweet, gentle smile I grew to love so, ‘I thought I would begin to unpack and settle things a little, but it’s too soon after the journey; I must have patience for a day or two—there is nothing here that will not keep.’
“I wouldn’t have believed it, if anybody’d told me beforehand that I would do it, but I said, just as free as if I’d known her all my life, ‘If you don’t mind my big rough hands, ma’am, I’ll take out your things for you. There’s a real nice closet, and your dresses will be all creased if they stay too long in the trunk.’