Page:Mistress Madcap Surrenders (1926).pdf/144

 taken up a paper. She be reading something to those two ladies standing in the road!"

Mistress Farrand looked up, as the brother and sister drew abreast her oxcart, and nodded in a neighborly fashion.

"This be a letter from my son at Morris Town," she said briskly, seeing Mehitable's curious gaze upon it. "It is getting so dark, I scarce can see to read it; but having read it to every farmer's wife all the way from my home, I almost can recite it." And while the two ladies and Dan Farrand kept a respectful silence, the old lady acquainted the others with its contents.

It was a pitiful letter from Lieutenant Farrand, written from the camp at Morris Town, telling of the destitution among the soldiers of his own company who, at home, were the sons of neighbors. The young man ended by imploring Mistress Farrand to "tell their mothers."

"So I made my daughters Hannah and Betsy fetch me my cloak and then set stockings upon their needles and Dan and I started out with our steers, rousing the countryside like Paul Revere. Only we be rousing the mothers and sisters, instead of the Minute Men," ended Mistress Farrand with a jolly laugh, yet with a tear in her eye as she spoke a moment later of how the men, looking back, could trace their tracks to the army camp by their bloody footprints and how, at roll call, they had to take