From the stitch in her back she has most of the time it wouldn't surprise me any day to hear that she'd come down with kidney trouble, and she breathes so short that consumption has crossed my mind mo' than once when I was talkin' to her." Miss Polly, having, as she expressed it, "an eye for symptoms," possessed an artistic rather than a scientific interest in disease; and the vivid realism of her descriptions had often, on her "sewing days" at home, reduced Gabriella to faintness, though Mrs.Carr, with her more delicate sensibilities, was able to listen with apparent enjoyment to the ghastly recitals.

Not only had Miss Polly achieved in her youth a local fame as a "sick nurse," but, in the days when nursing was neither sanitary nor professional, she was often summoned hastily from her sewing machine to assist at a birth or a burial in one of the families for whom she worked.

And happy always, as befits one whose life, stripped bare of ephemeral blessings, is centred upon the basic realities, she was never happier than when she put down her sewing, took off her spectacles, exchanged her apron for a mantle, and after carefully tying her bonnet strings, departed for a triumphant encounter with the Eternal Issues.
"I am so anxious about mother," said Gabriella.

"Did she tell you she was going to Florida ?" "She cert'ny did.

She was real full of it, and she talked a lot about you all up here--the baby and you and Mr.George.You know I ain't laid my eyes on Mr.George mo' than three times in my life.