F. Colburn (Francis Colburn) Adams
Chapter 28
lady, my lady, my lady!" There is a cavernous air about the place,
which gives out a sickly odor, exciting the suggestion that it might
at some time have served as a receptacle for those second-hand
coffins the State buries its poor in.
"Well! who are you? And what do you want? You have brought letters,
I s'pose?" a sharp, squeaking voice, speaks rapidly.
The young man, without waiting for an invitation to sit down, takes
nervously a seat at the side-table, saying he has come on a mission
of love.
"Love! love! eh? Young man-know that you have got into the wrong
house!" Mrs. Swiggs shakes her head, squeaking out with great
animation.
There she sits, Milton's "Paradise Lost" in her witch-like fingers,
herself lean enough for the leanest of witches, and seeming to have
either shrunk away from the faded black silk dress in which she is
clad, or passed through half a century of starvation merely to
bolster up her dignity. A sharp, hatchet-face, sallow and
corrugated; two wicked gray eyes, set deep in bony sockets; a long,
irregular nose, midway of which is adjusted a pair of broad,
brass-framed spectacles; a sunken, purse--drawn mouth, with two
discolored teeth protruding from her upper lip; a high, narrow
forehead, resembling somewhat crumpled parchment; a dash of dry,
brown hair relieving the ponderous border of her steeple-crowned
cap, which she seems to have thrown on her head in a hurry; a
moth-eaten, red shawl thrown spitefully over her shoulders,
disclosing a sinewy and sassafras-colored neck above, and the small
end of a gold chain in front, and, reader, you have the august Mrs.
Swiggs, looking as if she diets on chivalry and sour krout. She is
indeed a nice embodiment of several of those qualities which the
State clings tenaciously to, and calls its own, for she lives on the
labor of eleven aged negroes, five of whom are cripples.
The young man smiles, as Mrs. Swiggs increases the velocity of her
rocking, lays her right hand on the table, rests her left on her
Milton, and continues to reiterate that he has got into the wrong