“Where is your Aunt Cassandra’s girl? That pretty girl I see to your house once?”
“That girl is in the lunatick asylum.”
“Serepta Pester,” sez I, “be you tellin’ the truth?”
“Yes, I be, the livin’ truth. She went to New York to buy millinery goods for her mother’s store. It wuz quite cool when she left home and she hadn’t took off her winter clothes, and it come on brilin’ hot in the city, and in goin’ about from store to store the heat and hard work overcome her and she fell down in a sort of faintin’ fit and wuz called drunk and dragged off to a police court by a man who wuz a animal in human shape. And he misused her in such a way that she never got over the horror of what befell her when she come to to find herself at the mercy of a brute in a man’s shape. She went into a melancholy madness and wuz sent to the asylum.”
I sithed a long and mournful sithe and sot silent agin for quite a spell. But thinkin’ I must be sociable I sez: “Your aunt Cassandra is well, I spoze?”
“She is moulderin’ in jail,” sez she.
“In jail? Cassandra in jail!”
“Yes, in jail.” And Serepta’s tone wuz now like worm-wood and gall.
“You know she owns a big property in tenement houses and other buildings where she lives. Of course her taxes wuz awful high, and she didn’t expect to have any voice in tellin’ how that money, a part of her own property that she earned herself in a store, should be used. But she had been taxed high for new sidewalks in front of some of her buildin’s. And then another man come into power in that ward, and he naterally wanted to make some money out of her, so he ordered her to build new sidewalks. And she wouldn’t tear up a good sidewalk to please him or anybody else, so she wuz put to jail for refusin’ to comply with the law.”
Thinkses I, I don’t believe the law would have been so hard on her if she hadn’t been so humbly. The Pesters are a humbly lot. But I didn’t think it out loud, and didn’t ophold the law for feelin’ so. I sez in pityin’ tones, for I wuz truly sorry for Cassandra Keeler: