“Oh, no, he’s doing finely.”

“Susie all right?”

“Why, yes,” I said wonderingly.

“Nothing the matter with her other boy?”

“Why, no, no,” I told him.  “Everybody’s all right Here, just take this down.”

He turned away his head on the pillow and murmured something I did not catch.  When I asked him what he said, he smiled feebly as in deprecation of his well-known ridiculous ways.  “I’m just as much obliged to you,” he said, “but if everybody’s all right, I guess I won’t have any medicine.”  He looked at me earnestly.  “I’m—­I’m real tired,” he said.

It came out in one great breath—­apparently his last, for he did not move after that, and his ugly, slack-mouthed face was at once quite still.  Its expression made me think of the time I had seen it as a child, by lantern-light, as he looked down at the new-born lamb on his breast.

IN NEW NEW ENGLAND

I.

This is a true story, for I have heard it ever so many times from my grandmother.  She heard it from her grandmother, who told it about her own mother; and it began and ended right here in our village of Hillsboro, Vermont, in 1762.

Probably you think at once of the particular New England old town you know, and imagine Hillsboro of that date as an elm-shaded, well-kept street, with big, white, green-shuttered houses, full of shining mahogany furniture and quaint old silver.  But my grandmother gives an entirely different picture of old times in this corner of Vermont.  Conditions here, at that time, were more as they had been in Connecticut and Massachusetts a hundred and forty years before.  Indeed, the Pilgrim Fathers endured no more hardships as pioneers in a wild, new country than did the first Vermonters.

Hillsboro had been settled only about fifteen years before this story begins, and the people had had to make for themselves whatever they possessed, since there was no way to reach our dark, narrow valley except by horseback over the ridge of the Green Mountains.  There were no fine houses, because there was no sawmill.  There were little, low log cabins of two rooms each, and the furniture, such as it was, was rough-hewn out of native woods.  Our great-grandfathers were too busy clearing the forest and planting their crops to spend much time designing or polishing table-legs.

And the number of things they did not have!  No stoves, no matches, no books, no lamps, and very few candles; no doctors, no schools, no clocks, and so nearly no money that what they had is not worth mentioning But the fact that there were no schools did not mean that life was one long vacation for the children.

“No, indeedy!” as grandmother always says emphatically.

In the urgent bustle of pioneer life, the children could not be spared from work for long school-hours.  They picked up what they could from the elders of their families, and worked, as grandmother puts it, “as tight as they could leg it” from morning to night.  Everybody else worked that same way, so the children did not know that they were being abused.  Indeed, grandmother seemed to doubt if they were.