needed righting, wounds that cried out to be
healed. There were motherless children, there were helpless sufferers
moaning for the sight of a green field, but the superfluous females of
Amanda Dalton's day had not awakened to any sense of responsibility
with regard to their unknown brothers and sisters.

Amanda was a large-hearted woman. She would have shared her soda
biscuit, her bean soup, her dandelion greens, her hogshead cheese, her
boiled dinner, her custard pie, with any hungry mortal, but no one in
Bonny Eagle needed bite nor sup. Therefore she feather-stitched her
dish-towels, piled her kindling in a "wheel pattern" in the shed,
named her hens and made friends of them, put fourteen tucks in her
unbleached cotton petticoats, and fried a pancake every Saturday for
her cat.

"It's either that or blow your brains out, if you've got a busy mind!"
she said grimly to Susan Benson, her best friend, who was passing a
Saturday afternoon with her. It was chilly and they liked the cheerful
warmth of the Saturday fire that was baking the beans and steaming the
brown bread.

Susan unrolled her patchwork and, giving a flip to the cat with her
thimble finger, settled herself comfortably in the kitchen rocker.

The cat leaped down and stalked into the next room with an air of
offended majesty, as much as to say: "Of all the manners I ever saw,
that woman has the worst! She contrives to pass by three empty chairs
and choose the one I chance to be occupying!"

"You wouldn't be so lonesome if you could see a bit of life from your
house, Mandy," said Mrs. Benson. "William an' I were sayin' last night
you'd ought to move into the village winters, though nothin' could be
handsomer than the view from your sink window this minute. Daisies,
daisies everywhere! How do you manage to keep 'em out o' your place,
Mandy, when they're so thick on Caleb Kimball's?"

"I just root an' root, an' keep on rootin'," Amanda responded
cheerfully, "though I don't take a mite o' pride out of it, for the
better my place looks the worse his does, by comparison."

"It is a sight!" said Mrs. Benson, standing for a moment by the sink
and looking up to Kimball's.

"I went up there one night after dark, when I knew Caleb 'd gone to
Hixam, an' I patched up some o' the holes in his stone wall, thinkin'
his whiteweed seeds wouldn't blow through quite so thick!"--and Amanda
joined Mrs. Benson at the window. "I'd 'a' done a day's work on his
side o' the wa