the last sleep of the weary wife and mother; for she left behind her a
week-old baby,--a girl,--wailing prophetically in the square bedroom
where its mother died.

Judge Hyde did not marry again, and he named his baby Mehitable. She
grew up as a half-orphaned child with an elderly and undemonstrative
father would naturally grow,--shy, sensitive, timid, and extremely
grave. Her dress, thanks to Aunt Keery and the minister's wife, (who
looked after her for her mother's sake,) was always well provided and
neat, but no way calculated to cultivate her taste or to gratify the
beholder. A district school provided her with such education as it could
give; and the library, that was her resort at all hours of the day,
furthered her knowledge in a singular and varied way, since its lightest
contents were histories of all kinds and sorts, unless one may call the
English Classics lighter reading than Hume or Gibbon.

But at length the district-schoolma'am could teach Mehitable Hyde no
more, and the Judge suddenly discovered that he had a pretty daughter of
fourteen, ignorant enough to shock his sense of propriety, and delicate
enough to make it useless to think of sending her away from home to be
buffeted in a boarding-school. Nothing was left for him but to undertake
her education himself; and having a theory that a thorough course of
classics, both Greek and Latin, was the foundation of all knowledge,
half a score of dusty grammars were brought from the garret, and for two
hours every morning and afternoon little Miss Hitty worried her innocent
soul over conjugations and declensions and particles, as perseveringly
as any professor could have desired. But the dreadful part of the
lessons to Hitty was the recitation after tea; no matter how well she
knew every inflection of a verb, every termination of a noun, her
father's cold, gray eye, fixed on her for an answer, dispelled all kinds