ilt."

So the summer went on. The corn tasselled, the wheat ears filled well,
the potatoes hung out rich clusters of their delicate and graceful
blossoms, beans straggled half over the garden, the hens did their
duty bravely, and the cow produced a heifer calf.

Father and the boys were fighting now, and mother's merry words were
more rare, though her bright face still wore its smiling courage. They
heard rarely from the army. Now and then a post rider stopped at the
Nepash tavern and brought a few letters or a little news; but this was
at long intervals, and women who watched and waited at home without
constant mail service and telegraphic flashes, aware that news of
disaster, of wounds, of illness, could only reach them too late to
serve or save, and that to reach the ill or the dying involved a
larger and more disastrous journey than the survey of half the world
demands now--these women endured pangs beyond our comprehension, and
endured them with a courage and patience that might have furnished
forth an army of heroes, that did go far to make heroes of that
improvised, ill-conditioned, eager multitude who conquered the trained
bands of their oppressors and set their sons "free and equal," to use
their own dubious phraseology, before the face of humanity at large.

By and by winter came on with all its terrors. By night wolves howled
about the lonely house, and sprung back over the palings when Eben
went to the door with his musket. Joe hauled wood from the forest on a
hand-sled, and Dolly and Diana took it in through the kitchen window
when the drifts were so high that the woodshed door could not be
opened. Besides, all the hens were gathered in there, as well for
greater warmth as for convenience in feeding, and the barn was only to
be reached with snowshoes and entered by the window above the manger.

Hard times these were. The loom in the garret could not be used, for
even fingers would freeze in that atmosphere; so the thread was wound
off, twisted on the great wheel, and knit into stockings, the boys
learning to fashion their own, while Hannah knit her anxiety and her
hidden heartaches into socks for her soldier boys and their father.

By another spring the aching and anxiousness were a little dulled, for
habit blunts even the keen edge of mortal pain. They had news that
summer that Ralph had been severely wounded, but had recovered; that
John had gone through a sharp attack of camp-fever; that Reuben was