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The next day she told Fanny, and said to her, with her old face stern with anxiety, that the child was lookin' real pindlin', and Ellen had to take bitters for a month afterwards because she gave the cookies to Abby Atkins.
When Ellen's father, Andrew Brewster, came home from the shop, she would speak to him aside as he was washing his hands at the kitchen sink, and tell him that it seemed to her that Ellen looked kind of "pindlin'." Then Andrew, before he sat down at the dinner-table, would take Ellen's face in his two moist hands, look at her with anxiety thinly veiled by facetiousness, rub his rough, dark cheek against her soft, white one until he had reddened it, then laugh, and tell her she looked like a bo'sn.
He had his share o' misery, po' man, him dyin' o' lung-fever an' all.... "Six head o' young ones we'd had, me an' him. An' they'd all dropped off. Come spring, an' one'd be gone. I kep' a-comfortin' that man best I could they was better off, angels not bein' pindlin' an' hungry an' barefoot, an' thanks be, they ain't no mills in heaven. But their pa he couldn't see it thataway nohow.
During the month, one of the hands, Joshua Jozadak Jubal Jones, by the way, fell ill with typhoid fever, and was removed to the hospital. From the first his chances of recovery seemed doubtful, and "Minervy" his wife, as strapping, robust a specimen of her race as poor Joshua was tiny and, as she expressed it, "pore and pindlin'," was in a most emotional frame of mind.
Once she called his attention to a celebrated painter in the crowd. Uncle William's eye rested impartially upon him for a moment and returned to its sky-line. "He looks to me kind o' pindlin'. One o' the best, is he?" "He's not strong, you mean?" "Well, not strong, and not much to him as if the Lord was kind o' skimped for material. Is that one o' his picters?" Her eyes followed his hand. "Alan's!
Nothin' would do but she must learn how to make the gingerbread he liked, an' iron his shirts; an' when Lyddy Ann found he seemed to praise things up jest as much as he had when she done 'em, she give 'em up, an' done the hard things herself, an' let 'Mandy see to Josh. She looked pretty pindlin' then, mark my words; but I never see two such eyes in anybody's head.
Nothin' but flies, I guess likely! ... Mis' Pennell's got a new girl to help round the house, one o' them pindlin' light-complected Smith girls, from the Swamp, look's if they was nussed on bonny-clabber. She's so hombly I sh'd think 't would make her back ache to carry her head round. She ain't very smart, neither. Her mother sent word she'd pick up 'n' do better when she got her growth.
I've seen some of the prettiest babies grow up peaked and pindlin' an' plain as a potato; whilst, on the other hand, reel homely children sometimes come up an' fill out rosy-cheeked an' bright-eyed as you please. There was my half-sister Rachel, now, eight years younger'n me.
"Our father me an' Am'zon's was Cap'n Joshua Silt of the schooner Bravo. Hi-mighty trim and taut craft she was, from all accounts. I I warn't born when he died," added Cap'n Abe, hesitatingly. "You were a posthumous child!" said Louise. "Er I guess so. Kinder 'pindlin', too. Yes! yes! Cap'n Am'zon's ahead o' me in ev'ry way. When father died 'twas pretty average hard on mother," Cap'n Abe pursued.
"I'm a-thinkin', sister," said Miss Ruey, taking off her spectacles and rubbing her nose thoughtfully, "whether or no cow's milk ain't goin' to be too hearty for it, it's such a pindlin' little thing. Now, Mis' Badger she brought up a seven-months' child, and she told me she gave it nothin' but these 'ere little seed cookies, wet in water, and it throve nicely, and the seed is good for wind."
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