. "I was thinking of
family and friends, pleasures and memories and ambitions and hopes."

"I guess it don't pinch you any worse to give up a hope than it would a
good two-year-old heifer," retorted Ansel; "but there, you can't never
tell what folks'll hang on to the hardest! The man that drove them
Boston folks over here last Sunday,--did you notice him? the one that
had the sister with a bright red dress an' hat on?--Land! I could think
just how hell must look whenever my eye lighted on that girl's
git-up!--Well, I done my best to exhort that driver, bein' as how we had
a good chance to talk while we was hitchin' an' unhitchin' the team;
an' Elder Gray always says I ain't earnest enough in preachin' the
faith;--but he didn't learn anything from the meetin'. Kep' his eye on
the Shaker bunnits, an' took notice o' the marchin' an' dancin', but he
didn't care nothin' 'bout doctrine.

"'I draw the line at bein' a cerebrate,' he says. 'I'm willin' to sell
all my goods an' divide with the poor,' he says, 'but I ain't goin' to
be no cerebrate. If I don't have no other luxuries, I will have a wife,'
he says. 'I've hed three, an' if this one don't last me out, I'll get
another, if it's only to start the kitchen fire in the mornin' an' put
the cat in the shed nights!'"

IV

LOUISA'S MIND

[Illustration]

Louisa, otherwise Mrs. Adlai Banks, the elder sister of Susanna's
husband, was a rock-ribbed widow of forty-five summers,--forty-five
winters would seem a better phrase in which to assert her age,--who
resided on a small farm twenty miles from the manufacturing town of
Farnham.

When the Fates were bestowing qualities of mind and heart upon the
Hathaway babies, they gave the more graceful, genial, likable ones to
John,--not realizing, perhaps, what bad use he would make of them,--and
endowed Louisa with great deposits of honesty, sincerity, energy, piety,
and frugality, all so mysteriously compounded that they turned to
granite in her hands. If she had been consulted, it would have been all
the same. She would never have accepted John's charm of personality at
the expense of being saddled with his weaknesses, and he would not have
taken her cast-iron virtues at any price whatsoever.

She was sweeping her porch on that day in May when Susanna and Sue had
wakened in the bare upper chamber at the Shaker Settlement--Sue
clear-eyed, jubilant, expectant, unafraid; Susanna pale from her fitful
sleep, weary with the b