Vashti's Fate — page 63: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

58 GOSSIP—EVERLEIGH ANTECEDENTS. was so bashful and timid-like, you couldn’t only now and then get a sight at em. She had such a pretty way of car- ryin her head, too. ‘“Poor thing! they say she had a hard time of it, and she died wonderfulsudden. You see her husband used to have ~ just such queer spells as they all do, and he’d go foaming round like all possessed—and Mrs. Everleigh, when he got that way, and came on her with that temper o’ his, she just fell right down in a heap on the floor, all of a dead faint. - ‘““She died finally, about a year after they was married. He'd beena havin’ one o’ his high times; I don’t know how it was, but Aunt Mercy always said she believed he struck her. She heard her scream, and ran as quick as ever she could, and there she was, a lyin’ on the floor, with the blood just a pourin’ out of a great hole in her head, where shed hit it, as she fell, against a little marble image that stood on one side of the door. Her husband stood a starin’ at her out o his great wild eyes, and a shakin’ like an ague. When they lifted her onto the bed, they said he just crowded himself behind the door, and curled all up in a heap, chat- terin’ and gibberin’ to himself like an idiot. Bimeby he “crept out o’ the room, stoopin’ like an old man. Nobody followed him, or said aword to him, Well, that was in the mornin’; and afore night there was the beautifulest pair of twin boys born, and the pretty lady mother was dead. ‘‘Mr. Everleigh never seen his wife again, after he crept gibberin’ out of the room that mornin’. They found him lyin’ afore the door of the Hermitage, just alive, and that was all. He'd had a stroke of palsy, and one side o’ him was as dead asa stone. It really looked like a judgment, now didnt it? ‘‘He got a good deal better after awhile, so he could - mumble a few words, that nobody but Philip Bryce could co ee yes - ols