Bel longed, as human creatures who are discontent always do, to get away.  The world was big; there must be better things somewhere.

There was a pathos of weariness, and an inspiration of hope, in her little rhyme about the hen.

Bel was named for her Aunt Belinda.  Miss Belinda Bree came up for a week, sometimes, in the summer, to the farm.  All the rest of the year she worked hard in the city.  She put a good face upon it in her talk among her old neighbors.  She spoke of the grand streets, the parades, Duke’s balls,—­for which she made dresses,—­and jubilees, of which she heard afar off,—­as if she were part and parcel of all Boston enterprise and magnificence.  It was a great thing, truly, to live in the Hub.  Honestly, she had not got over it since she came there, a raw country girl, and began her apprenticeship to its wonders and to her own trade.  She could not turn a water faucet, nor light her gas, nor count the strokes of the electric fire alarm, without feeling the grandeur of having Cochituate turned on to wash her hands,—­of making her one little spark of the grand illumination under which the Three Hills shone every night,—­of dwelling within ear-shot and protection of the quietly imposing system of wires and bells that worked by lightning against a fierce element of daily danger.  She was proud of policemen; she was thrilled at the sound of steam-engines thundering along the pavements; she felt as if she had a hand in it.  When they fired guns upon the Common, she could only listen and look out of windows; the little boys ran and shouted for her in the streets; that is what the little boys are for.  Somebody must do the running and the shouting to relieve the instincts of older and busier people, who must pretend as if they didn’t care.

All this kept Miss Belinda Bree from utterly wearing out at her dull work in the great warerooms, or now and then at days’ seamstressing in families.  It really keeps a great many people from wearing out.

Miss Bree’s work was dull.  The days of her early “mantua making” were over.  Twenty years had made things very different in Boston.  The “nice families” had been more quiet then; the quietest of them now cannot manage things as they did in those days; for the same reason that you cannot buy old-fashioned “wearing” goods; they are not in the market.  “Sell and wear out; wear out and sell;” that is the principle of to-day.  You must do as the world does; there is no other path cut through.  If you travel, you must keep on night and day, or wait twenty-four hours and start in the night again.

Nobody—­or scarcely anybody—­has a dress-maker now, in the old, cosy way, of the old, cosy sort, staying a week, looking over the wardrobes of the whole family, advising, cutting, altering, remaking, getting into ever so much household interest and history in the daily chat, and listening over daily work:  sitting at the same table; linking herself in with things, spring and fall, as the leaves do with their goings and comings; or like the equinoxes, that in March and September shut about us with friendly curtains of rain for days, in which so much can be done in the big up-stairs room with a cheerful fire, that is devoted to the rites and mysteries of scissors and needle.  We were always glad, I remember, when our dress-making week fell in with the equinoctial.