Old Lady Number 31 | Page 9

the room to make an anxious survey of his reflection in the glass. He shook his head reprovingly at the bearded countenance, as if to say: "You need not pride yourself any longer on looking like Abraham Lincoln, for you have been turned into a miserable old woman."
Picking up the hair-brush, he held it out at arm's length to Angy. "Won't yew slick up my hair a leetle bit, Mother?" he asked, somewhat shamefacedly. "I can't see extry well this mornin'."
"Why, Abe! It's slicked ez slick ez it kin be naow." However, the old wife reached up as he bent his tall, angular form over her, and smoothed again his thin, wet locks. He laughed a little, self-mockingly, and she laughed back, then urged him into the hall, and, slipping ahead, led the way down-stairs. At the first landing, which brought them into full view of the lower hall, he paused, possessed with the mad desire to run away and hide, for at the foot of the stairway stood the entire flock of old ladies. Twenty-nine pairs of eyes were lifted to him and Angy, twenty-nine pairs of lips were smiling at them. To the end of his days Abraham remembered those smiles. Reassuring, unselfish, and tender, they made the old man's heart swell, his emotions go warring together.
He wondered, was grateful, yet he grew more confused and afraid. He stared amazed at Angeline, who seemed the embodiment of self-possession, lifting her dainty, proud little gray head higher and higher. She turned to Abraham with a protecting, motherly little gesture of command for him to follow, and marched gallantly on down the stairs. Humbly, trembling at the knees, he came with gingerly steps after the little old wife. How unworthy he was of her now! How unworthy he had always been, yet never realized to the full until this moment. He knew what those smiles meant, he told himself, watching the uplifted faces; they were to soothe his sense of shame and humiliation, to touch with rose this dull gray color of the culmination of his failures. He passed his hand over his eyes, fiercely praying that the tears might not come to add to his disgrace.
And all the while brave little Angy kept smiling, until with a truly glad leap of the heart she caught sight of a blue ribbon painted in gold shining on the breast of each one of the twenty-nine women. A pale blue ribbon painted in gold with--yes, peering her eyes she discovered that it was the word "WELCOME!" The forced smile vanished from Angeline's face. Her eyes grew wet, her cheek white. Her proud figure shrank. She turned and looked back at her husband. Not for one instant did she appropriate the compliment to herself. "This is for you!" her spirit called out to him, while a new pride dawned in her working face.
Forty years had she spent apologizing for Abraham, and now she understood how these twenty-nine generous old hearts had raided him to the pedestal of a hero, while she stood a heroine beside him. Angy it was who trembled now, and Abe, gaining a manly courage from that, took hold of her arm to steady her--they had paused on a step near the foot of the stairs--and, looking around with his whimsical smile, he demanded of the bedecked company in general, "Ladies, be yew 'spectin' the President?"
Cackle went the cracked old voices of the twenty-nine in a chorus of appreciative laughter, while the old heads bobbed at one another as if to say, "Won't he be an acquisition?" And then, from among the group there came forward Blossy--Blossy, who had sacrificed most that this should come to pass; Blossy, who had sat till midnight painting the gold-and-blue ribbons; Blossy, the pride and beauty of the Home, in a delicate, old, yellow, real lace gown. She held her two hands gracefully and mysteriously behind her back as she advanced to the foot of the stairs. Looking steadily into Abraham's eyes, she kept a-smiling until he felt as if the warmth of a belated spring had beamed upon him.
"The President!" Her mellow, well-modulated voice shook, and she laughed with a mingling of generous joy and tender pity. "Are we expecting the President? You dear modest man! We are welcoming--you!"
Abe looked to Angy as if to say, "How shall I take it?" and behold! the miracle of his wife's bosom swelling and swelling with pride in him. He turned back, for Blossy was making a speech. His hand to his head, he bent his good ear to listen. In terms poetical and touching she described the loneliness of the life at the Home as it had been with no man under the roof of the house and only a deaf-and-dumb gardener, who hated her