moist places always makes folks lazy
Benella’s father was an itinerant preacher, her mother the daughter of a Vermont farmer; and although she was left an orphan at ten years, educating and supporting herself as best she could after that, she is as truly a combination of both parents as her name is a union of their two names.
"I’m so ‘fraid I shan’t run across any of grandmother’s folks over here, after all," she said yesterday, "though I ask every nice-appearin’ person I meet anywheres if he or she’s any kin to Mary Boyce of Trim; and then, again, I’m scared to death for fear I shall find I’m own cousin to one of these here critters that ain’t brushed their hair nor washed their apurns for a month o’ Sundays! I declare, it keeps me real nerved up… I think it’s partly the climate that makes ’em so slack," she philosophised, pinning a new bag on her knee, and preparing to backstitch the seam. "There’s nothin’ like a Massachusetts winter for puttin’ the git-up-an’-git into you. Land! you’ve got to move round smart, or you’d freeze in your tracks. These warm, moist places always makes folks lazy; and when they’re hot enough, if you take notice, it makes heathen of ’em. It always seems so queer to me that real hot weather and the Christian religion don’t seem to git along together. P’r’aps it’s just as well that the idol-worshippers should get used to heat in this world, for they’ll have it consid’able hot in the next one, I guess! And see here, Mrs. Beresford, will you get me ten cents’–I mean sixpence–worth o’ red gingham to make Miss Monroe a bag for Mr. Macdonald’s letters? They go sprawlin’ all over her trunk; and there’s so many of ’em I wish to the land she’d send ’em to the bank while she’s travellin’!"
Chapter 20 We Evict A Tenant
‘Soon as you lift the latch, little ones are meeting you,
Soon as you’re ‘neath the thatch, kindly looks are greeting you;
Scarcely have you time to be holding out the fist to them–
Down by the fireside you’re sitting in the midst of them.’
Francis Fahy.
Roothythanthrum Cottage,
Knockcool, County Tyrone.
Of course, we have always intended sooner or later to forsake this life of hotels and lodgings, and become either Irish landlords or tenants, or both, with a view to the better understanding of one burning Irish question.
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