O, may my patience hold out to persevere
without intermission."[14]

Her patience did hold out, and also her courage, as the news came from
home telling her how everything had to be sold to satisfy the
creditors, the furniture, her mother's silver spoons, their clothing
and books, the flour, tea, coffee, and sugar in the pantries. She
rejoiced to hear that Uncle Joshua Read from Palatine Bridge, New
York, had come to the rescue, had bought their most treasured and
needed possessions and turned them over to her mother.

On a cold blustery March day in 1839, when she was nineteen, Susan
moved with her family two miles down the Battenkill to the little
settlement of Hardscrabble, later called Center Falls, where her
father owned a satinet factory and grist mill, built in more
prosperous times. These were now heavily mortgaged but he hoped to
save them. They moved into a large house which had been a tavern in
the days when lumber had been cut around Hardscrabble. It was
disappointing after their fine brick house in Battenville, but they
made it comfortable, and their love for and loyalty to each other made
them a happy family anywhere. As it had been a halfway house on the
road to Troy and travelers continued to stop there asking for a meal
or a night's lodging, they took them in, and young Daniel served them
food and nonintoxicating drinks at the old tavern bar.

Susan, when her school term was over, put her energies into housework,
recording in her diary, "Did a large washing today.... Spent today at
the spinning wheel.... Baked 21 loaves of bread.... Wove three yards
of carpet yesterday."[15]

The attic of the tavern had been finished off for a ballroom with
bottles laid under the floor to give a nice tone to the music of the
fiddles, and now the young people of the village wanted to hold their
dancing school there. Susan's father, true to his Quaker training,
felt obliged to refuse, but when they came the second time to tell him
that the only other place available was a disreputable tavern where
liquor was sold, he relented a little, and talked the matter over with
his wife and daughters. Lucy Anthony, recalling her love of dancing,
urged him to let the young people come. Finally he consented on the
condition that Guelma, Hannah, and Susan would not dance. They agreed.
Every two weeks all through the winter, the fiddles played in the
attic room and the boys and girls of the neighborhood danced the
Virginia reel and