It was in May, towards the latter part, and an awful rainy night.  It was the storm that always comes in apple-blossom time.  I remember well that mother come crying home in the morning and told us Mis’ Ashby was dead.  She brought Marilly with her, that was about my own age, and was taken away within six months afterwards.  She pined herself to death for her mother, and when she caught the scarlet fever she went as quick as cherry-bloom when it’s just ready to fall and a wind strikes it.  She wa’n’t like the rest of ’em.  She took after her mother’s folks altogether.

“You know our farm was right next to theirs,—­the one Asa Hopper owns now, but he’s let it all run out,—­and so, as we lived some ways from the stores, we had to be neighborly, for we depended on each other for a good many things.  Families in lonesome places get out of one supply and another, and have to borrow until they get a chance to send to the village; or sometimes in a busy season some of the folks would have to leave work and be gone half a day.  Land, you don’t know nothing about old times, and the life that used to go on about here.  You can’t step into a house anywheres now that there ain’t the county map and they don’t fetch out the photograph book; and in every district you’ll find all the folks has got the same chromo picture hung up, and all sorts of luxuries and makeshifts o’ splendor that would have made the folks I was fetched up by stare their eyes out o’ their heads.  It was all we could do to keep along then; and if anybody was called rich, it was only because he had a great sight of land,—­and then it was drudge, drudge the harder to pay the taxes.  There was hardly any ready money; and I recollect well that old Tommy Simms was reputed wealthy, and it was told over fifty times a year that he’d got a solid four thousand dollars in the bank.  He strutted round like a turkey-cock, and thought he ought to have his first say about everything that was going.

“I was talking about the Ashbys, wasn’t I?  I do’ know’s I ever told you about the fight they had after their father died about the old house.  Joseph was married to a girl he met in camp-meeting time, who had a little property—­two or three hundred dollars—­from an old great uncle that she’d been keeping house for; and I don’t know what other plans she may have had for spending of her means, but she laid most of it out in a husband; for Joseph never cared any great about her that I could see, though he always treated her well enough.  She was a poor ignorant sort of thing, seven years older than he was; but she had a pleasant kind of a face, and seemed like an overgrown girl of six or eight years old.  I remember just after they was married Joseph was taken down with a quinsy sore throat,—­being always subject to them,—­and mother was over in the forenoon, and she was one that was always giving right hand and left, and she told Susan Ellen—­that was his wife—­to step over in the afternoon