Shadows and Sunbeams and Other Stories Author:Fanny Fern Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AUNT HEPSY. It was a comical little old shop, "Aunt Hepsy's," with Its Lil nputian counter, shelves and stove, and its pigmy assortment of old-fashioned ... more »ginghams, twilled cambrics, red flannels, factory cotton and homespun calicoes; its miniature window, with its stock of horn-combs and candy, tin horses and peppermint drops, skeins of yarn and Godfrey's Cordial, gaudy picture books, and six-penny handkerchiefs, from whose center Lafayette and George Washington smiled approbatively upon the big A's and little A's printed round the border. "Aunt Ilepsy;" so every brimless-hatted urchin in the neighborhood called her, though it would have puzzled them worse than the multiplication table, had you asked them why they did so. Year in and year out, her ruddy English face glowed behind the little shop window. Sometimes she would be knitting a pair of baby's socks, sometimes inventing most astonishing looking bags out of rainbow fragments of silk or ribbon. f Sometimes netting watch-guards, or raveling the yarn from some old black stocking, to ornament the " place where the wool ought to grow," on the head of some Topsy doll she was making. Sometimes comforting herself with a sly pinch of snuflj A uNt ii Eps r. 37 or, when sunbeams and customers were scarce, nodding drowsily over the daily papers. Aunt Hepsy had been a beauty, and her pretty face had won her a thriftless husband, of whom champagne and cigars had long since kindly relieved her. And though Time had since forced her to apply to the perruquier, he had gallantly made atonement by leaving her in the undisputed possession of a pair ot' very brilliant black eyes. Add to this a certain air of coquetry, in the fanciful twist of her gay-colored turban, and the disposal of the folds of her lace kerchief over her a...« less