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196 allowed, and who undoubtedly had a careful eye to the small Hannah, aged four, also old enough to knit a stocking and sew a seam, and read her chapter in the Bible with the best. Dorothy and Sarah could take even more active part, yet even the mature ages of eight and ten did not hinder surreptitious tumbles into heaped up feather beds, and a scurry through many a once forbidden corner of the Ipswich home. For them there was small hardship in the log house that received them, and unending delight in watching the progress of the new. And one or another must often have ridden before the father, who loved them with more demonstration than the Puritan habit allowed, and who in his frequent rides to the new mill built on the Cochichewick in 1644, found a petitioner always urging to be taken, too. The building of the mill probably preceded that of the house, as Bradstreet thought always of public interests before his own, though in this case the two were nearly identical, a saw and grist-mill being one of the first necessities of any new settlement, and of equal profit to owner and users.

Anne Bradstreet was now a little over thirty, five children absorbing much of her thought and time, three more being added during the first six years at Andover. When five had passed out into the world and homes of their own, she wrote, in 1656, half regretfully, yet triumphantly, too, a poem which is really a family biography, though the reference to her fifth child as a son, Mr. Ellis regards as a slip of the pen:

I had eight birds hatcht in one nest, Four Cocks there were, and Hens the rest;