Mrs. Fishley believed she was one of the most amiable, self-denying, self-sacrificing, benevolent women in the world. Nobody else believed it. She had to endure more trials, bear more crosses, undergo more hardships, than any other housekeeper in town. She had to work harder, to think of more things, stagger under more burdens, than all her female neighbors put together. If she ever confessed [16]that she was sometimes just a little cross, she wanted to know who could wonder at it, when she had so much to do, and so many things to think of. Job could be patient, for he had not her family to look after. The saints and martyrs could bow resignedly at the stake in the midst of the flaming fagots; but none of them had to keep house for a husband and three children, and two of them not her own.To make a fair and just division of Mrs. Fishley's cares, one tenth of them were real, and nine tenths of them were imaginary; and the imaginary ones were more real to her than the actual ones. They soured her temper, -or, more properly, her temper soured them, -and she groaned, complained, snarled, snapped, and fretted, from very early on Sunday morning to very late on Saturday evening. Nothing ever went right with her; nothing ever suited her. If a thing was one way, that was the especial reason why it ought to have been some other way.She always wanted her own way; and when she had it-which she generally did-it did not suit her any better. I am inclined to think that Captain Fishley himself, at some remote period, long before I was [17]born, had been a more decent man than he was at the time of which I write. If he ever had been, his degeneracy was easily explained; for it would not have been possible for a human being, in daily contact with such a shrewish spitfire as his wife, to exist untainted in the poison which floated in the atmosphere around her.This was the woman who inflicted herself upon the world, and upon me, though I was by no means the greatest sufferer. If the mischief had stopped here, I could have borne it, and the world could not have helped itself. To me there was something infinitely worse and more intolerable than my own trials-and they were the trials of my poor, dear, deformed, invalid sister. Tender, loving, and patient as she was under them, her sufferings made my blood boil with indignation. If Mrs. Fishley had treated Flora kindly, she would have been an angel in my sight, however much she snapped and snarled, and "drove me from pillar to post." The shrew did not treat her kindly, and as the poor child was almost always in the house, she was constantly exposed to the obliquities of her temper.[18]My mother, for several years before her death, had been of feeble constitution, and Flora had the "rickets" when she was a babe. She was now twelve years old, but the effects of the disease still lingered in her frame. Her limbs were weak, her breast-bone projected, and she was so drawn up that she looked like a "humpback." But what she lacked in body she more than made up in spirit, in the loveliness of an amiable disposition, in an unselfish devotion to others, in a loving heart, and a quick intelligence. She endured, without complaint, the ill nature of Mrs. Fishley, endeavoring, by every means in her power, to make herself useful in the house, and to lighten the load of cares which bore down so heavily upon her hostes