But her ways and her talk were so
indescribably grotesque that she made me again and again quiver with
suppressed laughter.
But there was a pitiable and even a melancholy meaning underlying the
burlesque.
This creature, with no more education than a dairy-maid, I gradually
discovered had fine natural aptitudes for accomplishment--a very sweet
voice, and wonderfully delicate ear, and a talent for drawing which quite
threw mine into the shade. It was really astonishing.
Poor Milly, in all her life, had never read three books, and hated to
think of them. One, over which she was wont to yawn and sigh, and stare
fatiguedly for an hour every Sunday, by command of the Governor, was a
stout volume of sermons of the earlier school of George III., and a drier
collection you can't fancy. I don't think she read anything else. But she
had, notwithstanding, ten times the cleverness of half the circulating
library misses one meets with. Besides all this, I had a long sojourn
before me at Bartram-Haugh, and I had learned from Milly, as I had heard
before, what a perennial solitude it was, with a ludicrous fear of learning
Milly's preposterous dialect, and turning at last into something like her.
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