I do not remember that she was ever too unwell to help us in this way
except when she was actually in bed. She was very fond of us boys,

and was always ready to take our side and to further our plans
in any way whatever. We would get her to steal off with us,

and translate our Latin for us by the fire. This, of course, made us
rather fond of her. She was so much inclined to take our part and to help us

that I remember it used to be said of her as a sort of reproach,
"Cousin Fanny always sides with the boys." She used to say it was because

she knew how worthless women were. She would say this sort of thing herself,
but she was very touchy about women, and never would allow any one else

to say anything about them. She had an old maid's temper. I remember that
she took Doug up short once for talking about "old maids". She said that

for her part she did not mind it the least bit; but she would not allow him
to speak so of a large class of her sex which contained some of the best women

in the world; that many of them performed work and made sacrifices that
the rest of the world knew nothing about. She said the true word for them

was the old Saxon term "spinster"; that it proved that they performed
the work of the house, and that it was a term of honor of which she was proud.

She said that Christ had humbled himself to be born of a Virgin, and that
every woman had this honor to sustain. Of course such lectures as that

made us call her an old maid all the more. Still, I don't think
that being mischievous or teasing her made any difference with her.

Frank used to worry her more than any one else, even than Joe,
and I am sure she liked him best of all. That may perhaps have been

because he was the best-looking of us. She said once that he reminded her
of some one she used to know a long time before, when she was young.

That must have been a long time before, indeed. He used to
tease the life out of her.

She was extraordinarilycredulous -- would believe anything on earth
anyone told her, because, although she had plenty of humor,

she herself never would deviate from the absolute truth a moment,
even in jest. I do not think she would have told an untruth to save her life.

Well, of course we used to play on her to tease her. Frank would tell her
the most unbelievable and impossible lies: such as that he thought he saw

a mouse yesterday on the back of the sofa she was lying on
(this would make her bounce up like a ball), or that he believed he heard --

he was not sure -- that Mr. Scroggs (the man who had rented her old home)
had cut down all the old trees in the yard, and pulled down the house because

he wanted the bricks to make brick ovens. This would worry her excessively
(she loved every brick in the old house, and often said she would rather live

in the kitchen there than in a palace anywhere else), and she would get
into such a state of depression that Frank would finally have to tell her

that he was just "fooling her".
She used to make him do a good deal of waiting on her in return,

and he was the one she used to get to dress old Fashion's back
when it was raw, and to put drops in her eyes. He got quite expert at it.

She said it was a penalty for his worrying her so.
She was the great musician of the connection. This is in itself

no mean praise; for it was the fashion for every musical gift among the girls
to be cultivated, and every girl played or sang more or less, some of them

very well. But Cousin Fanny was not only this. She had a way of playing
that used to make the old piano sound different from itself;

and her voice was almost the sweetest I ever heard except one or two
on the stage. It was particularly sweet in the evenings,

when she sat down at the piano and played. She would not always do it;
she either felt "not in the mood", or "not sympathetic", or some such thing.

None of the others were that way; the rest could play just as well
in the glare of day as in the twilight, and before one person as another;

it was, we all knew, just one of Cousin Fanny's old-maid crotchets.
When she sat down at the piano and played, her fussiness was all forgotten;

her first notes used to be recognized through the house,
and people used to stop what they were doing, and come in. Even the children

would leave off playing, and come straggling in, tiptoeing as they crossed
the floor. Some of the other performers used to play a great deal louder,

but we never tiptoed when they played. Cousin Fanny would sit at the piano
looking either up or right straight ahead of her, or often with

her eyes closed (she never looked at the keys), and the sound used to rise
from under her long, thin fingers, sometimes rushing and pouring forth

like a deep roar, sometimes ringing out clear like a band of bugles,
making the hair move on the head and giving strange tinglings down the back.

Then we boys wanted to go forth in the world on fiery, black chargers,
like the olden knights, and fight giants and rescue beautiful ladies and

poor women. Then again, with her eyes shut, the sound would almost die away,
and her fingers would move softly and lingeringly as if they loved

the touch of the keys, and hated to leave them; and the sound would come from
away far off, and everything would grow quiet and subdued, and the perfume

of the roses out of doors would steal in on the air, and the soft breezes
would stir the trees, and we were all in love, and wanted to see

somebody that we didn't see. And Cousin Fanny was not herself any longer,
but we imagined some one else was there. Sometimes she suddenly began to sing

(she sang old songs, English or French); her voice might be weak
(it all depended on her whims; SHE said, on her health), in that case

she always stopped and left the piano; or it might be "in condition".
When it was, it was as velvety and mellow as a bell far off,

and the old ballads and chansons used to fill the twilight.
We used even to forget then that she was an old maid. Now and then

she sang songs that no one else had ever heard. They were her own;
she had composed both the words and the air. At other times

she sang the songs of others to her own airs. I remember the first time
I ever heard of Tennyson was when, one evening in the twilight,

she sang his echo song from "The Princess". The air was her own,
and in the refrain you heard perfectly the notes of the bugle,

and the echoes answering, "Dying, dying, dying." Boy as I was,
I was entranced, and she answered my enthusiasm by turning

and repeating the poem. I have often thought since how musical her voice was
as she repeated

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.

She had a peculiarlysentimentaltemperament. As I look back at it all now,
she was much given to dwelling upon old-time poems and romances,

which we thought very ridiculous in any one, especially in a spinster
of forty odd. She would stop and talk about the branch of a tree

with the leaves all turning red or yellow or purple in the common way
in which, as everyone knows, leaves always turn in the fall;

or even about a tangle of briers, scarlet with frost, in a corner
of an old worm-fence, keeping us waiting while she fooled around a brier patch

with old Blinky, who would just as lief have been in one place as another,
so it was out of doors; and even when she reached the house

she would still carry on about it, worrying us by telling over again
just how the boughs and leaves looked massed against the old gray fence,

which she could do till you could see them precisely as they were.
She was very aggravating in this way. Sometimes she would even take

a pencil or pen and a sheet of paper for old Blinky, and reproduce it.
She could not draw, of course, for she was not a painter; all she could do

was to make anything look almost just like it was.
There was one thing about her which excited much talk; I suppose it was only

a piece of old-maidism. Of course she was religious. She was really
very good. She was considered very high church. I do not think,

from my recollection of her, that she really was, or, indeed, that she
could have been; but she used to talk that way, and it was said that she was.

In fact, it used to be whispered that she was in danger of becoming
a Catholic. I believe she had an aunt that was one, and she had visited

several times in Norfolk and Baltimore, where it was said there were
a good many. I remember she used to defend them, and say she knew

a great many very devout ones. And she admitted that she sometimes went
to the Catholic church, and found it devotional; the choral service, she said,