After that day things happened fast.  Captain Winthrop rode off over the mountains to Hillsboro, to ask John Sherwin if he might marry his daughter; and when he came back, there was John Sherwin himself riding along beside him, like an old friend.  And when he saw his two dear daughters—­Ann Mary, who had gone away like a lily, now blooming like a rose, and Hannah, stout little Hannah, with her honest blue eyes shining—­when he saw his two daughters, I say—­well, I’m sure I have no idea what happened, for at this point grandmother always takes off her glasses, and sniffs hard, and wipes her eyes before she can go on.

So there was a wedding at the minister’s house, and everybody in Heath Falls was invited, because Hannah said they had been so good to her.  Everybody came, too, except old Master Necronsett, and that was nothing, because he never went anywhere except to the woods.

I know just what the bride and Hannah wore, for we have pieces of the material in our oldest cedar chest; but, of course, as they weren’t your own great-great-great-grandmother and aunt, perhaps you wouldn’t care to have me tell you all about their costumes.  It was a grand occasion, however—­that you can take from me; and the family tradition is that Ann Mary looked like a wonderful combination of an angel and a star.

And then Captain and Mrs. Winthrop rode off in one direction, and Hannah and her father in another, and there were a great many tears shed, for all everybody; was so happy.

VI.

Hannah went home with her head full of new ideas, and with four books in her saddle-bags—­which, for those days, was a large library.  These were the Bible, the “Universal Preceptor,” a volume of the Shakespeare comedies, and Plutarch’s “Lives.”  Armed with these weapons, how she did stir things up in Hillsboro!  She got the children together into a school, and taught them everything she had learned in Heath Falls; and that was so much—­what with the studying which she always kept up by herself—­that from our little scrap of a village three students went down to the college at William’s Town, in Massachusetts, the first year it was started, and there has been a regular procession of them ever since.

After a time she married Giles Wheeler, and began to teach her own children—­she had nine—­and very well instructed they were.  She was too busy, then, to go into the schoolroom to teach; but never, then or later, even when she was an old, old woman, did she take her vigilant eyes and her managing hand off the schools of our county.

It was due to her that Hillsboro could boast for so long that its percentage of illiterates was zero.  If, by chance, anyone grew up without knowing how to read, Aunt Hannah pounced on him and made him learn, whether he would or not.  She loaned about, to anyone who would read them, the books she brought from Heath Falls; and in time she started a little library.  Remembering the days when Captain Winthrop had read aloud to her in the granary, she had her children go about to read aloud to sick people, and to busy seamstresses or spinners who had no time for books.