Oh! how poor Dorcas, who was not very clever and had no gift of tongues
came to loathe those barbaric dialects. Still she worked away at them
like a heroine, confining herself ultimately, with a wise and practical
prescience, to learning words and sentences that dealt with domestic
affairs, as as "Light the fire." "Put the kettle on to boil." "Sister,
have you chopped the wood?" "Cease making so much noise in the
kitchen-hut." "Wake me if you hear the lion eating our cow." And so
forth.
For more than a year after their marriage these preliminaries continued
while Thomas worked like a horse, though it is true that Dorcas
slackened her attention to Swahili and Zulu grammar in the pressure of
more immediate affairs. Especially was this so after the baby was born,
a girl, flaxen-haired like her mother, whom Thomas christened by the
name of Tabitha, and who in after years became the "Little Flower" of
this history. Then as the time of departure drew near another thing
happened. Her stepmother, Mrs. Humphreys, insisted upon going to a ball
in Lent, where she caught a chill that developed into inflammation of
the lungs and killed her.
The result of this visitation of Providence, as Thomas called it, was
that Dorcas suddenly found herself a rich woman with an income of quite
2000 pounds a year, for her father had been wealthier than she knew.
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