“‘You better take good care of her, Jim; she’s not a strong woman like your mother; she can’t stand everything,’ an’ no more she couldn’t, pore little thing.
“Well, the very nex’ Sunday, here came Jim and Rhody to see us. An’ I tell you the ole man an’ me was that glad he would have Rhody sing for us, an’ she sang some of the songs he liked, but not many; she said she hadn’t sung any fur so long it tired her.
“‘Why don’t you sing, Rhody?’ says the ole man; ‘you used to sing like a bird.’
“‘I guess I’m not like a bird any more, Uncle Jonathan,’ she says. An’ then she sighed, but catchin’ Jim lookin’ at her, she lightened up and says, ‘I am an old married woman now.’
“After a while Jim an’ the ole man they went out to the stable, and then the pore little darlin’ says,
“‘Oh, Aunt Nancy, I’d be the happiest woman in the world if Jim and me was livin’ by ourselves! Mother Curtis is a good woman, but somehow I can’t please her, an’ I try so hard. Sometimes I’m so tired I can’t sleep or eat, an’ she thinks I’m puttin’ on airs, she calls it, an’ she’s allus saying she pities a man with a do-nothin’, whiny wife.’
“‘It’s a shame!’ says I; ‘why don’t you tell Jim, and coax him to get another place?’
“‘Oh, Aunt Nancy,’ she says, wipin’ her purty eyes, ‘I can’t bear to make trouble, and what would Pap Curtis do? He’s awful good to us. He brings me candy and sometimes oranges from town, and gives ’em to me when she don’t see him, and he often helps me, too; gets wood and water and milks the cows—but there’s Jim with the buggy,’ and off she went.
“I made up my mind to have another talk with Jim Curtis, but laws! we never can tell. The ole man he 229 took the bed with rheumatiks in October, and I never seen anybody much fur three months, and then our Sarah’s baby was born, and I was over there awhile, an’ my own worriments drove other people’s clean out of my head, till one day ’long the last of February Jonathan came in (he’d be’n to town for somethin’ or other), an’ says he,