n' got a good passel of boneset an'
thoroughwort an' hardback, an' carried it over to Dale, an' sold it
for a shilling.

"Elmira has done some spinnin', too; I can't spin much, but she's
done well enough. Your wife wants some linen pillow-shifts. Elmira
can do the weavin', I guess, an' we can make 'em up together. I've
got a job to make some fine shirts for you, too. Your wife come over
to see about it this week. I dun'no' but she was gettin' kind of
afraid you wouldn't git your interest money no other way; but she
needn't have been exercised about it, if she was. We got this
interest together without your shirts, an' I guess we can the next.
It's been harder work than many folks in this town know anything
about, but we've done it." Ann tossed her head with indescribable
pride and bitterness. There was scorn of fate itself in the toss of
that little head, with its black lace cap and false front, and her
speech also was an harangue, reproachful and defiant, against fate,
not against her earthly creditor; that she would have disdained.

Squire Eben, however, fully appreciating that, and taking the
pictures of pitiful feminine and childish toil which she brought
before his fancy as a shame to his great stalwart manhood, spending
its strength in hunting and fishing and card-playing, looked at the
woman binding shoes with painful jerks of little knotted hands--for
she ceased not her work one minute for her words--and took the bitter
reproach and triumphant scorn in her tone and gesture for himself
alone.

He felt ashamed of himself, in his great hunting-boots splashed with
swamp mud, his buckskins marred with woodland thorn and thicket, but
not a mark of honest toil about him. Had he been in fine broadcloth
he would not have felt so humiliated; for the useless labor of play
cuts a sorrier figure in the face of genuine work for the great ends
of life than idleness itself. He would not have been half so
disgraced by nothing at all in hand as by that bag of game; and as
for the money in that old stocking under the feather-bed, it seemed
to him like the fruits of his own dishonesty.

The impulse was strong upon him, then and there, to declare that he
would take none of that hoard.

"Now look here, Mrs. Edwards," said he, fairly coloring like a girl
as he spoke, and smiling uneasily, "I don't want that money."

Ann looked at him with the look of one who is stung, and yet
incredulous. Elmira gave a little gasp of delight.