Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/167

 not miss her own brooding care, but when Ann Mary cried out joyfully at the sight of the food, "Oh, how hungry I am!" everything but pleasure was immediately swept away from the little sister's loyal heart.

They cooked their supper—Hannah still had some of the cornmeal and the flitch of bacon their Hillsboro friends had given them—and went to bed directly on the queer, hard bed, with a straw tick and no feathers, which Dr. Necronsett had prescribed, warmly wrapped up in the pair of heavy Indian blankets he had loaned them. They were so close to the house that they heard the old doctor moving around inside, and they could see the light of his candle, so they were not afraid.

Indeed, the two sisters were so sleepy that even if they had been timorous it could scarcely have kept them from the deep slumber into which they fell at once, and which lasted until the sun shone in on them the next morning.

That was the first day of that wonderful summer, and most of the days which followed were like it. Every morning Hannah rose early, made a little open fire, cooked their breakfast, and was off to her spinning. Just as her first employer had said, there was no lack of work for a spinner who worked as fast and yet as carefully as if it were for herself. In Hannah's thread there were never any thin places which broke as soon as the weaver stretched it on the loom, nor yet any thick lumps where the wool had insisted, in grandmother's phrase, "on going all kim-kam." At first, she went about to people's houses; but, seeing