busy clearing the forest and
planting their crops to spend much time designing or polishing table-legs.

And the number of things they did not have! No stoves, no matches, no
books, no lamps, and very few candles; no doctors, no schools, no clocks,
and so nearly no money that what they had is not worth mentioning But the
fact that there were no schools did not mean that life was one long
vacation for the children.

"No, indeedy!" as grandmother always says emphatically.

In the urgent bustle of pioneer life, the children could not be spared
from work for long school-hours. They picked up what they could from the
elders of their families, and worked, as grandmother puts it, "as tight as
they could leg it" from morning to night. Everybody else worked that same
way, so the children did not know that they were being abused. Indeed,
grandmother seemed to doubt if they were.

At any rate, they all ran about as fast as ants in an ant-hill, and the
busiest of all was sixteen-year-old Hannah Sherwin. Since she was my
grandmother's grand mother's mother, at last the story is really begun.

Hannah had been a baby of eighteen months when the Sherwins came over the
mountains from the old home in Connecticut, so she knew nothing about any
other way of living than what she saw in rough little Hillsboro. But her
elder sister, Ann Mary, who was a tall girl of nineteen, remembered--or
thought she remembered--big houses that were made all over of sawn planks,
and chairs that were so shiny you could see your face in them or else
stuffed and cushioned in brocade as soft--"as soft as a feather tick!"
she told Hannah.

Her listener, having no idea of what brocade might be, and taking the
feather-tick simile literally, must have imagined a very queer kind of
chair.

Hannah was a short, fair, rosy-cheeked child, who passed for good-looking
enough; but Ann Mary was slender and dark and a real beauty, although
Hillsboro people did not realize it. She looked fragile, as if she could
not do much hard work and that is always a serious blemish in feminine
beauty to the eyes of pioneers.

So far in her life she had not been forced to do any hard work, because
Hannah had done it all for her. Their mother had died when they were both
little girls, and their father was so busy outdoors, every minute he was
awake, that, for all his affection for them, he did not know or care which
of his daughters cooked and washed, and swept and spun, so long as