As
far as she can, she shows us what she really was. Leaker's heart beats
against the sides of the little books just as I used to hear it when I
was a child in her arms, either in need of consolation, with toothache
or growing-pains, or else trying to give consolation, for she was often,
like all fierce people, melancholy and depressed after her own fierce
outbursts of anger.
Here is the very striking and characteristic exordium to her
autobiography:
I have not had an unpleasant life, although I was an old maid, and was a
servant for fifty years. I was a nurse and no mother could have loved
her children more than I loved those I nursed. I had three dear, good
mistresses, two of whom I left against their will.
The third and last was my mother, whom the old nurse outlived for many
years.
Here is her account of the miseries endured by the poor after Waterloo--
miseries which I often think of in these days, when I note the foolish,
the demented way in which we are approaching our economic difficulties
and dangers:
I am writing of the time a little after Waterloo. We were living at
Dartmouth. Everything was very dear. We lived mostly on barley bread. We
children were so used to it that we did not mind it, but my poor mother
could never eat it without repugnance, and we always tried to make her
get white bread, not knowing that she could not properly afford it.
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