The wretched creature would stalk into my bed-room--which I was
particularly dainty about--fresh from shooting or fishing, with pounds of
mud clinging to his boots, bristling all over with cockleburs, his hands
grimed with gunpowder; and helping himself to water from my ewer, he would
begin dabbling in my china basin until he had reduced its originally pure
contents into a compound of mud and ink, and would wind up by making a
finish of my fresh damask towel, and throwing it on the bed or a chair
instead of returning it to the rack, as he should have done.
"Charlie," said I one day, saucily inviting a dose of "what mother did,"
"what did mother used to do when you came into her room and turned it into
a pig-stye, and then left it for her to clean up again?"
"She never let me do it," said Charlie with a laugh. "I'll tell you how
she did. She had a tin basin on a shelf on the back gallery, and one of
those great big rolling towels that lasted about a week; and after her
washstand was fixed up in the morning, we knew better than to upset it, I
can tell you."
"Very well, sir: I intend you shall know better than to upset mine, I'll
show you."
In fact, things had come to that pass that I had mentally resolved to
"show" Charlie a great many things. I firmly believed that the secret of
the power that Charlie's mother had exercised over her household, and
still exercised over him in memory, lay in the fact that she made them all
afraid of her: so I firmly resolved that they should all be afraid of me,
poor little me! It is true, I was but twenty, and she was fifty; I was but
a pocket edition of a woman, and she was a _Webster Unabridged_; I had
little meek blue eyes, that dropped to the ground in the most shamefaced
manner if a body did but look at me, and she had hard, cold gray eyes,
that not only looked straight at you, but right through you.
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