t see no need of improvement. I believe in self-respect, but I
believe in respecting other folks's rights as much as your own; but it
takes an Ashby to ride right over you. I tell 'em it's the spirit of the
tyrants of old, and it's the kind of pride that goes before a fall. John
Ashby's grandmother was a clever little woman as ever stepped. She came
from over Hardwick way, and I think she kep' 'em kind of decent-behaved
as long as she was round; but she got wore out a doin' of it, an' went
down to her grave in a quick consumption. My mother set up with her the
night she died. It was in May, towards the latter part, and an awful
rainy night. It was the storm that always comes in apple-blossom time. I
remember well that mother come crying home in the morning and told us
Mis' Ashby was dead. She brought Marilly with her, that was about my own
age, and was taken away within six months afterwards. She pined herself
to death for her mother, and when she caught the scarlet fever she went
as quick as cherry-bloom when it's just ready to fall and a wind strikes
it. She wa'n't like the rest of 'em. She took after her mother's folks
altogether.

"You know our farm was right next to theirs,--the one Asa Hopper owns
now, but he's let it all run out,--and so, as we lived some ways from
the stores, we had to be neighborly, for we depended on each other for a
good many things. Families in lonesome places get out of one supply and
another, and have to borrow until they get a chance to send to the
village; or sometimes in a busy season some of the folks would have to
leave work and be gone half a day. Land, you don't know nothing about
old times, and the life that used to go on about here. You can't step
into a house anywheres now that there ain't the county map and they
don't fetch out the photograph book; and in every district you'll find
all the folks has got the same chromo picture hung up, and all sorts of
luxuries and makeshifts o' splendor that would have made the folks I
was fetched up by stare their eyes out o' their heads. It was all we
could do to keep along then; and if anybody was called rich, it was only
because he had a great sight of land,--and then it was drudge, drudge
the harder to pay the taxes. There was hardly any ready money; and I
recollect well that old Tommy Simms was reputed wealthy, and it was told
over fifty times a year that he'd got a solid four thousand dollars in
the bank. He strutted round like a turkey-c