Falls was invited, because Hannah said they had been so good to her.
Everybody came, too, except old Master Necronsett, and that was nothing,
because he never went anywhere except to the woods.

I know just what the bride and Hannah wore, for we have pieces of the
material in our oldest cedar chest; but, of course, as they weren't your
own great-great-great-grandmother and aunt, perhaps you wouldn't care to
have me tell you all about their costumes. It was a grand occasion,
however--that you can take from me; and the family tradition is that Ann
Mary looked like a wonderful combination of an angel and a star.

And then Captain and Mrs. Winthrop rode off in one direction, and Hannah
and her father in another, and there were a great many tears shed, for all
everybody; was so happy.

VI.

Hannah went home with her head full of new ideas, and with four books in
her saddle-bags--which, for those days, was a large library. These were
the Bible, the "Universal Preceptor," a volume of the Shakespeare
comedies, and Plutarch's "Lives." Armed with these weapons, how she did
stir things up in Hillsboro! She got the children together into a school,
and taught them everything she had learned in Heath Falls; and that was
so much--what with the studying which she always kept up by herself--that
from our little scrap of a village three students went down to the college
at William's Town, in Massachusetts, the first year it was started, and
there has been a regular procession of them ever since.

After a time she married Giles Wheeler, and began to teach her own
children--she had nine--and very well instructed they were. She was too
busy, then, to go into the schoolroom to teach; but never, then or later,
even when she was an old, old woman, did she take her vigilant eyes and
her managing hand off the schools of our county.

It was due to her that Hillsboro could boast for so long that its
percentage of illiterates was zero. If, by chance, anyone grew up without
knowing how to read, Aunt Hannah pounced on him and made him learn,
whether he would or not. She loaned about, to anyone who would read them,
the books she brought from Heath Falls; and in time she started a little
library. Remembering the days when Captain Winthrop had read aloud to her
in the granary, she had her children go about to read aloud to sick
people, and to busy seamstresses or spinners who had no time for books.

And the number of girls in declines she