heartless fun of seeing me enduring the pangs of mental pins and needles. So I resolved that I would not get up that morning. The breakfast-bell rang three times; mother came up to knock at my door. "Oh, I am so sleepy, mother!" I answered, with a big yawn; "you knew I was up last night. Don't want any breakfast, just another little nap." So the good soul went down, leaving me to my wretched thoughts. At noon she came up again. "John, you had better rise now. Father can't come to dinner there's so many customers in the[156] store. Seems as if there was going to be a ball to-night again; every girl in town is after ribbon, or lace, or hair-pins, or something." [156] "I can't get up to-day, mother. I'm awfully unwell—got a high fever—you'll have to go in and lend father a helping hand"; and so she brought me a cup of tea and a piece of toast, and then went up to take father's place while he ate his dinner. I guess she suspected I'd been done for again by the way those young women laughed when she told them I was sick in bed: for she was pretty cross when I sneaked down to tea, and didn't seem to worry about how I felt. Well, I kept pretty quiet the rest of the season. There were dances and sleighing parties, but I stayed away from them, and attended strictly to business. I don't know but that I might have begun to enjoy some peace of mind, after the winter and part of the spring had passed without any very awful catastrophe having occurred to me; but, some time in the latter part of May, when the roses were just beginning to bloom, and everything was lovely, a pretty cousin from some distant part of the State came to spend a month at our house. I had never seen her before, and you may imagine how I felt when she rushed at me and kissed me, and called me her dear cousin John, just as if we had known each other all the days of our lives. I think it was a constant sur[157]prise to her to find that I was bashful. She wasn't a bit so. It embarrassed me a thousand times more to see how she would slyly watch out of the corner of her laughing eye for the signs of my diffidence. [157] Well, of course, all the girls called on her, and boys too, as to that, and I had to take her to return their visits, and I was in hot water all the time. Before she went away, mother gave her a large
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