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SKETCHES. 287
old, not married, who lived there in poverty and content-
ment, earning her bread with the labor of her hands, and
who had never received or asked assistance from anybody.
“She bakes a kind of small cakes, which she sells to
hucksters at four stivers apiece. Well,—I would’nt eat
them,” said, with a significant grin, the well-to-do old
wonian who told me this (the osvner of the kitchen stove,
the tree, and the spider-web bower), “but boys and such
like buy them, I believe, and thus she manages to pay
her rent and her food. And as to clothes— poor old
body !— she has no others than those she stands and walks
in; but content she is with them, and then she is so kind,
and always merry.”
But would you believe it, that this poor old woman had
her pride? And in what did this pride, concealed under
that only garment, and in that dark, solitary room, consist ?
—“T have never been a burden to anybody, and nobody
shall ever be able to say that I have been a burden to the
State either!” said the old maid, and her pale seventy-
years’ old eyes sparkled at these words with a noble self-
consciousness, also a kind of patriotism as good as any
other !
Are you tired of my wanderings? I was by this time
fatigued myself, and therefore I returned home. From it
I wish you farewell! May God grant you clear eyes, the
wish, the time, and liberty to look about you in the world,
and somebody at home to whom you can relate what you
have seen, who smiles at your conceits, sheds a tear at
your sorrows, and takes an interest in your impressions, —
somebody to love,—and you will see how pleasant, how
blissful life can be at forty years !
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