into a dusky corner with her knitting, happy if the evening passed without
her brother saying, with a crude sarcasm, "Ask your Aunt Mehetabel about
the beaux that used to come a-sparkin' her!" or, "Mehetabel, how was't
when you was in love with Abel Cummings." As a matter of fact, she had
been the same at twenty as at sixty, a quiet, mouse-like little creature,
too timid and shy for anyone to notice, or to raise her eyes for a moment
and wish for a life of her own.

Her sister-in-law, a big hearty housewife, who ruled indoors with as
autocratic a sway as did her husband on the farm, was rather kind in an
absent, offhand way to the shrunken little old woman, and it was through
her that Mehetabel was able to enjoy the one pleasure of her life. Even as
a girl she had been clever with her needle in the way of patching
bedquilts. More than that she could never learn to do. The garments which
she made for herself were the most lamentable affairs, and she was humbly
grateful for any help in the bewildering business of putting them
together. But in patchwork she enjoyed a tepid importance. She could
really do that as well as anyone else. During years of devotion to this
one art she had accumulated a considerable store of quilting patterns.
Sometimes the neighbors would send over and ask "Miss Mehetabel" for such
and such a design. It was with an agreeable flutter at being able to help
someone that she went to the dresser, in her bare little room under the
eaves, and extracted from her crowded portfolio the pattern desired.

She never knew how her great idea came to her. Sometimes she thought she
must have dreamed it, sometimes she even wondered reverently, in the
phraseology of the weekly prayer-meeting, if it had not been "sent" to
her. She never admitted to herself that she could have thought of it
without other help; it was too great, too ambitious, too lofty a project
for her humble mind to have conceived. Even when she finished drawing the
design with her own fingers, she gazed at it incredulously, not daring to
believe that it could indeed be her handiwork. At first it seemed to her
only like a lovely but quite unreal dream. She did not think of putting it
into execution--so elaborate, so complicated, so beautifully difficult a
pattern could be only for the angels in heaven to quilt. But so curiously
does familiarity accustom us even to very wonderful things, that as she
lived with this astonishing creation of her mind,