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cox once been obliged to call in her aid on a dress sent to her from Paris? and did not Miss Prissy work three days and nights on that dress, and make every stitch of that trimming over with her own hands, before it was fit to be seen? And when Mrs. Governor Dexter's best silver-gray brocade was spoiled by Miss Pimlico, and there wasn't another scrap to pattern it with, didn't she make a new waist out of the cape and piece one of the sleeves twenty-nine times, and yet nobody would ever have known that there was a joining in it?
In fact, though Miss Prissy enjoyed the fair average plain-sailing of her work, she might be said to revel in difficulties. A full pattern with trimming, all ample and ready, awoke a moderate enjoyment; but the resurrection of anything half-worn or imperfectly made, the brilliant success, when, after turning, twisting, piecing, contriving, and, by unheard-of inventions of trimming, a dress faded and defaced was restored to more than pristine splendor,--that was a triumph worth enjoying.
It was true, Miss Prissy, like most of her nomadic compeers, was a little given to gossip; but, after all, it was innocent gossip,--not a bit of malice in it; it was only all the particulars about Mrs. Thus-and-So's wardrobe,--all the statistics of Mrs. That-and-T'other's china-closet,--all the minute items of Miss Simpkins's wedding-clothes, --and how her mother cried, the morning of the wedding, and said that she didn't know anything how she could spare Louisa Jane, only that Edward was such a good boy that she felt she could love him like an own son,--and what a providence it seemed that the very ring that was put into the bride-loaf was one that he gave her when he first went to sea, when she wouldn't be engaged to him because she thought she loved Thomas Strickland better, but that was only because she hadn't found him out, you know,--and so forth, and so forth. Sometimes, too, her narrations assumed a solemn cast, and brought to mind the hush of funerals, and told of