Were it not better to lie down and die by your side than to return safe and say this to Dorcas?"
No merely selfish motive, nor even the desolate condition of Dorcas, could have induced him to desert his companion at such a moment--but his wishes seized on the thought that Malvin's life might be preserved, and his sanguine nature heightened almost to certainty the remote possibility of procuring human aid.
Tom Loker we left groaning and touzling in a most immaculately clean Quaker bed, under the motherly supervision of Aunt Dorcas, who found him to the full as tractable a patient as a sick bison.
"I must request thee, Thomas, not to use such language," says Aunt Dorcas, as she quietly rearranged the bed.
"What should there be?" Then catching sight of
Dorcas, the parlourmaid, going into the dining-room, she called to her to bring some stamps into the boudoir.
His shrieks had brought both his father and herself flying to the hog barn to find him dancing up and down as, frightened and aghast, he vainly attempted to beat off old Dorcas, a mammoth sow, from one of her day-old litter on which, having crushed it by accident, she was now quite deliberately feasting.
When once more the child was cuddled against her, she realized that in some mystical way there was a new bond between them, and as the days passed, she discovered it was not so much the whipping, but the unnatural perfidy of Dorcas that had scarred his mind.
He hasn't any faults much, and is charming and sweet, like Buffalo Bill, and Thunder-Bird, and Mammy
Dorcas, and Soldier Boy, and Shekels, and Potter, and Sour-Mash, and - well, they're ALL that, just angels, as you may say.
"At the next meeting of the
Dorcas Society, of which I am an unworthy member," continued Maria, without listening to his remonstrance.
"When
Dorcas Sloane got married last summer she said if she'd had enough money to live on she'd never have been bothered with a man, but even a widower with eight children was better'n living with a sister-in-law."
With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of "Female Scripture Characters," unfolding the private experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and
Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir--with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted.
Do any of you wish to take articles home, to do at odd times?" said Fan, who was president of this energetic
Dorcas Society.