his candle, so they were not afraid.

Indeed, the two sisters were so sleepy that even if they had been timorous
it could scarcely have kept them from the deep slumber into which they
fell at once, and which lasted until the sun shone in on them the next
morning.

IV.

That was the first day of that wonderful summer, and most of the days
which followed were like it. Every morning Hannah rose early, made a
little open fire, cooked their breakfast, and was off to her spinning.
Just as her first employer had said, there was no lack of work for a
spinner who worked as fast and yet as carefully as if it were for herself.
In Hannah's thread there were never any thin places which broke as soon as
the weaver stretched it on the loom, nor yet any thick lumps where the
wool had insisted, in grandmother's phrase, "on going all kim-kam."

At first, she went about to people's houses; but, seeing her so neat and
careful, the minister's wife loaned her one of her own wheels, and the
minister had an old granary cleared out for her workroom. Here, day after
day, the wheel whirred unceasingly, like a great bee, and Hannah stepped
back and forth, back and forth, on her tireless young feet, only glancing
out through the big door at the bright glories of the summer weather, and
never once regretting her imprisonment.

Indeed, she said, all her life afterward, that she was so happy, that
summer, it seemed heaven itself could hold no greater joy for her. Of
course, first always in her thoughts was Ann Mary, pulling weeds and
tending her witch garden, and growing plump and rosy, and so strong that
she laughed and ran about and sang as never in her life before.

Hannah put very little faith in the agricultural part of the cure. She
thought that very probably it was nothing more than a blind, and that
Master Necronsett came out at night and said charms and things over Ann
Mary as she slept. However that might be, she could have kissed his funny,
splay feet every time she looked at her sister's bright eyes and red lips;
and when she thought of the joy it would be to her father, she could have
kissed his ugly, wrinkled old face.

But, besides her joy over her sister's health, the summer was for Hannah
herself a continual feast of delight Captain Winthrop, the minister's
young cousin, was staying in Heath Falls to recover from an arrow-wound
got in a skirmish with the Indians in Canada. He was very idle, and very
much bored by the du