"
"Lord sakes! Me loved by a preacher? Couldn't I never stay home from the
preachin'? But then, to hear your own ole man a-barkin' away at the
other gals, I think it would be right good!"
The subject had now gone to that length that in a few days, to
Grandmother Tilghman's slight indignation, Rhoda called the rector
"William," and he answered her, "Dear Rhoda."
The triple widow, however, had one lane to her consideration, up which
the artful Rhoda strayed as soon as she saw the gate ajar.
"Misc Tilghman," she said one day, "I been a-lookin' at you. I 'spect
you was a real beauty. If you wasn't a little quar, nobody would see you
was a ole woman now."
"I was a belle," spoke the blind old lady, emphatically. "General John
Eager Howard said he would rather talk with me than hear an oration from
Fisher Ames. Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, proposed to me when I was
old enough to be your grandmother, and after Susan Decatur, the
commodore's widow, had tried in vain to get an offer from him. Said I,
'Carroll, is this another Declaration of Independence? No,' said I,
'Carroll, I won't reduce the last signer, it may be, to obedience on a
wife going blind. That would be worse slavery than George the Third's!'
He said I was a Spartan widow."
"Every widow I ever see was a sparkin' widow," Rhoda naively concluded,
at which Mrs. Tilghman had to join in the laughter, and there was no
evil feeling.
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