nd them, but this was
accomplished at a cost of incessant labor and watchfulness, which the
mistress really enjoyed since it filled her days with "things to do,"
but which was not so well liked by her bond-maid.

Ma'am Puss curled herself at Alfy's feet and purred herself to sleep so
soundly that a tame mouse, the girl's own especial pet, came out from
hiding and scampered merrily about the kitchen floor. The chorus of
clock-ticks sounded drowsily through the silent house, Madam was taking
her daily rest on her lounge in the sitting-room, and after a time the
seamstress's good intentions passed into a maze of dreams. In them she
seemed to be eternally climbing steep stairs into a chamber of horrors
tenanted by one starving boy; or she was watching Madam choke to death
over a lump of hot scorched porridge; or she was being tossed on the
horns of Squire Pettijohn's black bull,--the terror of all young, and
some old, Marsdenites,--and from this last dream she awoke to find the
kitchen quite dark, and Whitey mooing outside the window.

It was Montgomery's place to "tend cow," the lonely remnant of a once
large herd, but it was Alfaretta's duty to milk it.

"Yes, Whitey! It's all right, an' for once you've come home by yourself.
A good job, too. Let me see. How fur have I sewed? To there--to there!"
sleepily murmured the maid, and realizing that she had on that afternoon
of best intentions accomplished the magnificent distance of two inches!
"Two inches, if it's a stitch. Two inches a day for--How many days will
it take to hem--to hem--Huh! I can't bother! But if I'm to go to school
next quarter as Madam says I may, I'll have to do faster 'n that. Might
get it ready for my outfit, like Monty says," remarked the sewer to
herself, laughing carelessly.

Folding the garment neatly, she put it back in the work-basket her
mistress had given her, and taking her pail, went out to milk old
Whitey. But first she attended to what was properly Montgomery's part of
the evening's chores, stalling the cow and throwing into her manger the
scanty supply of night fodder that could be afforded. Then she sat down
to milk, and accomplished that operation so slowly that Whitey turned
her head as far as the stanchions would permit to see what this slowness
meant.

With the coming of the dusk Alfaretta's perplexities had returned and
brought others with them. It was not only a question of the boy's going
supperless--nor her courage, nor of bur