She used to go every day,
and soon dispensed with her friend's escort, finding no difficulty
in getting about. Indeed, she came to be known on the streets
she passed through, and on the cars she travelled by, and people guided her.
Several times as she was taking the wrong car men stopped her,
and said to her, "Madam, yours is the red car." She said, sure enough it was,
but she never could divine how they knew. She addressed the conductors as,
"My dear sir", and made them help her not only off, but quite to the sidewalk,
when she thanked them, and said "Good-by", as if she had been at home.
She said she did this on principle, for it was such a good thing
to teach them to help a feeble woman. Next time they would expect to do it,
and after a while it would become a habit. She said no one knew what terror
women had of being run over and trampled on.
She was, as I have said, an awful coward. She used to stand still
on the edge of the street and look up and down both ways ever so long,
then go out in the street and stand still, look both ways and then run back;
or as like as not start on and turn and run back after she was more
than half way across, and so get into real danger. One day, as she was
passing along, a driver had in his cart an old bag-of-bones of a horse,
which he was beating to make him pull up the hill, and Cousin Fanny,
with an old maid's meddlesomeness, pushed out into the street
and caught hold of him and made him stop, which of course collected a crowd,
and just as she was coming back a little cart came rattling along,
and though she was in no earthly danger, she ran so to get out of the way
of the horse that she tripped and fell down in the street and hurt herself.
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