The Project Gutenberg eBook, Westerfelt, by Will N. Harben

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Title: Westerfelt

Author: Will N. Harben

Release Date: November 28, 2005 [eBook #17178]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WESTERFELT***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

WESTERFELT

A Novel

by

WILL N. HARBEN

New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1901
Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.

TO

MY WIFE

Westerfelt

Chapter I

They had had a quilting at the house of the two sisters that day. Six
or seven women of the neighborhood, of middle age or older, had been in
to sew on the glaring, varicolored square. All day long they had
thrust their needles up and down and gossiped in their slow,
insinuating way, pausing only at noon to move their chairs to the
dinner-table, where they sat with the same set curves to their backs.

The sun had gone down behind the mountain and the workers had departed,
some traversing the fields and others disappearing by invisible paths
in the near-by wood. The two sisters had taken the finished quilt from
its wooden frame, and were carefully ironing out the wrinkles
preparatory to adding it to the useless stack of its kind in the corner
of the room.

"I believe, as I'm alive, that it's the purtiest one yet," remarked
Mrs. Slogan. "Leastwise, I hain't seed narry one to beat it. Folks
talks mightily about Mis' Lithicum's last one, but I never did have any
use fer yaller buff, spliced in with indigo an' deep red. I wisht they
was goin' to have the Fair this year; ef I didn't send this un I'm a
liar."

Mrs. Slogan was a childless married woman of past sixty. Her sister,
Mrs. Dawson, had the softer face of the two, which, perhaps, was due to
her having suffered much and to the companionship of a daughter whom
she loved. She was shorter than her sister by several inches, and had
a small, wrinkled face, thin, gray hair, and a decided stoop. Some
people said she had acquired the stoop in bending so constantly over
her husband's bed during his last protracted illness. Others affirmed
that her sister