with braid, and fitted her like a glove, but heavy as lead almost, and jest a-draggin' round her waist—not a shoulder strap, nor a button or string or anything that she could divide the burden with; no, them heavy skirts all a-hangin' like millstuns round the little, spindlin' waist, and that so tight bound down by a hard bone-and-steel cosset that it looked like a prisoner of the deepest dye incarcerated in the closest confinement. I see when she lay down, tired almost to death and a-gaspin', that she didn't remove her cosset; no, there it wuz, a-holdin' her in its deathly grip right there on the bed, and I sez, "Don't you take off your cosset when you lay down?"
"No," sez she, kinder pantin' for breath, "Mamma thinks it hurts any one's form so to lounge round with cossets off that she never allowed me to take them off when I lay down in the daytime, and Aggie le Fleur wears hers all night, so Mamma said, and she said that she meant to have me wear mine all night when I got a little stronger. Mamma sez that it injures one's form terribly to go without 'em even for an hour. It ruins anybody to go without 'em, so Mamma said and so Aggie le Fleur sez."
"Is it possible," sez I; "I never mistrusted before that I wuz ruined, and I've gone without 'em since long enough before you and that young Le Fleur woman you speak of wuz anywhere round or thought on, and," sez I, "if I wuz in your place I'd run the resk of bein' spilte, and take that thing offen me."
She wuz a sweet-dispositioned girl, I could see, and she consented, and she sot up and exerted the hull of her strength, and finally onhinged or onjinted it somewhere and peeled it offen her. And such a sithe of relief
