Hillsboro People

her. She heard it from her grandmother, who told it about her own mother; and

shining mahogany furniture and quaint old silver. But my grandmother gives an entirely different picture of old times in this corner of Vermont. Conditions here, at that time, were more as they

rrow valley except by horseback over the ridge of the Green Mountains. There were no fine houses, because there was no sawmill. There were little, low log cabins of two rooms each, and the furn

les; no doctors, no schools, no clocks, and so nearly no money that what they had is not worth mentionin

grandmother always

from the elders of their families, and worked, as grandmother puts it, "as tight as they could leg it" from morning to night. Everybody

e busiest of all was sixteen-year-old Hannah Sherwin. Since she was my

hat she saw in rough little Hillsboro. But her elder sister, Ann Mary, who was a tall girl of nineteen, remembered-or thought she remembered-big houses that were made all ove

t be, and taking the feather-tick simile literall

and dark and a real beauty, although Hillsboro people did not realize it. She looked fragile, as if she c

y outdoors, every minute he was awake, that, for all his affection for them, he did not know or care which of his daughters cooked and washed, and swept and spun, so long as these things

was nineteen years old she "fell into a decline," as they called it. She grew pale and thin, never smiled,

r not letting her sister do her share of the household work. There she was-pretty and ignorant and idle-with nothing to interest her, and nothing to look forward to, for in those days marriage was the only thing a girl c

omen in town about her sick sister. Every one of them had had a niece, or a daughter-or at least a granddaugh

kened the one window, and kept the door closed, and put the sick girl to bed between two mountains of feathers. They gave her "sut" (soot) tea and "herb-drink" and steeped butternut bark, and