"Well, you can read it for yourself, now you've got your glasses on."
"I can't read. You see, I'm old—seventy-six years, and when I were little we were very poor and I couldn't get no schooling. I've got these glasses to do my sewing, and only put them on to get this stuff out so's you could read it. I'd like to hear you read it."
I began to get interested in the old dame who talked to me so freely. She was small and weak-looking, and appeared very thin in her limp, old, faded gown; she had a meek, patient expression on her face, and her voice, too, like her face, expressed weariness and resignation.
"But if you have always lived here you must know what is said on this stone?"
"No, I don't; nobody never read it to me, and I couldn't read it because I wasn't taught to read. But I'd like to hear you read it."
It was a long inscription to a person named Ash, gentleman, of this parish, who departed this life over a century ago, and was a man of a noble and generous disposition, good as a husband, a father, a friend, and charitable to the poor. Under all were some lines of verse, scarcely legible in spite of the trouble she had taken to remove the old moss from the letters.
She listened with profound interest, then said, "I never heard all that before; I didn't know the name, though I've known this stone since I was a child. I used to climb on to it then. Can you read me another?"
I read her another and several more, then came to one which she said she knew—every word of it, for this was the grave of the sweetest, kindest woman that ever lived. Oh, how good this dear woman had been to her in her young married life more'n fifty years ago! If that dear lady had only lived it would not have been so hard for her when her trouble come!
"And what was your trouble?"
"It was the loss of my poor man. He was such a good man, a thatcher; and he fell from a rick and injured his spine, and he died, poor fellow, and left me with our five little children." Then, having told me her own tragedy, to my surprise she brightened up and begged me to read other inscriptions to her.