ecessity spends her
time forcing you to do all the things you don't like, where the whole
world seems hungry and muddy and wet. It was an extraordinary
experience for her, this slopping through the mud with soaking shoes,
no prospect of a meal, and a heart that insisted on sinking in spite
of her attempts to persuade herself that the situation was amusing. It
did not amuse her. It might have amused somebody else,--the Grand
Duke, for instance, if he could have watched her now (from, say, a
Gothic window, himself dry and fed and taken care of), being punished
so naturally and inevitably by the weapons Providence never allows to
rust, those weapons that save parents and guardians so much personal
exertion if only they will let things take their course, those sharp,
swift consequences that attend the actions of the impetuous. I might,
indeed, if this were a sermon and there were a congregation unable to
get away, expatiate on the habit these weapons have of smiting with
equal fury the just and the unjust; how you only need to be a little
foolish, quite a little foolish, under conditions that seem to force
it upon you, and down they come, sure and relentless, and you are
smitten with a thoroughness that leaves you lame for years; how
motives are nothing, circumstances are nothing; how the motives may
have been aflame with goodness, the circumstances such that any other
course was impossible; how all these things don't matter in the
least,--you are and shall be smitten. But this is not a sermon. I have
no congregation. And why should I preach to a reader who meanwhile has
skipped?

It comforted Priscilla to find that almost the whole village wanted to
come and cook for her, or as the women put it "do" for her. Their
cooking powers were strictly limited, and they proposed to make up for
this by doing for her very completely in other ways; they would scrub,
sweep, clean windows, wash,--anything and everything they would do.
Would they also sew buttons on her uncle's clothes? Priscilla asked
anxiously. And they were ready to sew buttons all over Fritzing if
buttons would make him happy. This eagerness was very gratifying, but
it was embarrassing as well. The extremely aged and the extremely
young were the only ones that refrained from offering their services.
Some of the girls were excluded as too weedy; some of the mothers
because their babies were too new; some of the wives because their
husbands were too exacting; but when