with a mixture of beef-fat and dripping; and so on, and so on,
eternally.

When the girls were respectively seventeen and thirteen, Waitstill
had begged a small plot of ground for them to use as they liked, and
beginning at that time they had gradually made a little garden, with a
couple of fruit trees and a thicket of red, white, and black currants
raspberry and blackberry bushes. For several summers now they had sold
enough of their own fruit to buy a pair of shoes or gloves, a scarf or
a hat, but even this tiny income was beginning to be menaced. The Deacon
positively suffered as he looked at that odd corner of earth, not any
bigger than his barn floor, and saw what his girls had done with no
tools but a spade and a hoe and no help but their own hands. He had
no leisure (so he growled) to cultivate and fertilize ground for small
fruits, and no money to pay a man to do it, yet here was food grown
under his very eye, and it did not belong to him! The girls worked in
their garden chiefly at sunrise in spring and early summer, or after
supper in the evening; all the same Waitstill had been told by her
father the day before that she was not only using ground, but time, that
belonged to him, and that he should expect her to provide "pie-filling"
out of her garden patch during haying, to help satisfy the ravenous
appetites of that couple of "great, gorming, greedy lubbers" that he was
hiring this year. He had stopped the peeling of potatoes before boiling
because he disapproved of the thickness of the parings he found in the
pig's pail, and he stood over Patty at her work in the kitchen until
Waitstill was in daily fear of a tempest of some sort.

Coming in from the shed one morning she met her father just issuing from
the kitchen where Patty was standing like a young Fury in front of the
sink. "Father's been spying at the eggshells I settled the coffee with,
and said I'd no business to leave so much good in the shell when I broke
an egg. I will not bear it; he makes me feel fairly murderous! You'd
better not leave me alone with him when I'm like this. Oh! I know that
I'm wicked, but isn't he wicked too, and who was wicked first?"

Patty's heart had been set on earning and saving enough pennies for a
white muslin dress and every day rendered the prospect more uncertain;
this was a sufficient grievance in itself to keep her temper at the
boiling point had there not been various other contributory causes.
Waitstill's patien