'Come along, now,' I whispered to Annie, the moment supper was over; 'and if you can hold your tongue, Annie, I will show you something.'
She lifted herself on the bench so quickly, and flushed so rich with pleasure, that I was obliged to stare hard away, and make Betty look beyond us. Betty thought I had something hid in the closet beyond the clock-case, and she was the more convinced of it by reason of my denial. Not that Betty Muxworthy, or any one else, for that matter, ever found me in a falsehood, because I never told one, not even to my mother--or, which is still a stronger thing, not even to my sweetheart (when I grew up to have one)--but that Betty being wronged in the matter of marriage, a generation or two agone, by a man who came hedging and ditching, had now no mercy, except to believe that men from cradle to grave are liars, and women fools to look at them.
When Betty could find no crime of mine, she knocked me out of the way in a minute, as if I had been nobody; and then she began to coax 'Mistress Annie,' as she always called her, and draw the soft hair down her hands, and whisper into the little ears. Meanwhile, dear mother was falling asleep, having been troubled so much about me; and Watch, my father's pet dog, was nodding closer and closer up into her lap.
'Now, Annie, will you come?' I said, for I wanted her to hold the ladle for melting of the lead; 'will you come at once, Annie? or must I go for Lizzie, and let her see the whole of it?'
'Indeed, then, you won't do that,' said Annie; 'Lizzie to come before me, John; and she can't stir a pot of brewis, and scarce knows a tongue from a ham, John, and says it makes no difference, because both are good to eat! Oh, Betty, what do you think of that to come of all her book-learning?'
'Thank God he can't say that of me,' Betty answered shortly, for she never cared about argument, except on her own side; 'thank he, I says, every marning a'most, never to lead me astray so. Men is desaving and so is galanies; but the most desaving of all is books, with their heads and tails, and the speckots in 'em, lik a peg as have taken the maisles. Some folk purtends to laugh and cry over them. God forgive them for liars!'
It was part of Betty's obstinacy that she never would believe in reading or the possibility of it, but stoutly maintained to the very last that people first learned things by heart, and then pretended to make them out from patterns done upon paper, for the sake of astonishing honest folk just as do the conjurers. And even to see the parson and clerk was not enough to convince her; all she said was, 'It made no odds, they were all the same as the rest of us.' And now that she had been on the farm nigh upon forty years, and had nursed my father, and made his clothes, and all that he had to eat, and then put him in his coffin, she was come to such authority, that it was not worth the wages of the best man on the place to say a word in answer to Betty, even if he would face the risk to have ten for one, or twenty.