Mother talked it all over with Deacon Peters, and he counselled her to sell off all the farm but the home-lot, which was sot out for an orchard with young apple-trees, and had a garden-spot to one end of it, close by the house.  Mother calculated to raise potatoes and beans and onions enough to last us the year round, and to take in sewin’ so’s to get what few groceries we was goin’ to want.  We kept Old Red, the best cow; there was pasture enough for her in the orchard, for the trees wa’n’t growed to be bearin’ as yet, and we ’lotted a good deal on milk to our house; besides, it saved butcher’s meat.

Mother was a real pious woman, and she was a high-couraged woman too.  Old Miss Perrit, an old widder-woman that lived down by the bridge, come up to see her the week after father died.  I remember all about it, though I wa’n’t but ten years old; for when I see Miss Perrit comin’ up the road, with her slimpsy old veil hanging off from her bumbazine bonnet, and her doleful look, (what Nancy Perrit used to call “mother’s company-face,”) I kinder thought she was comin’ to our house; and she was allers so musical to me, I went in to the back-door, and took up a towel I was hemmin’, and set down in the corner, all ready to let her in.  It don’t seem as if I could ‘a’ been real distressed about father’s dyin’ when I could do so; but children is just like spring weather, rainin’ one hour and shinin’ the next, and it’s the Lord’s great mercy they be; if they begun to be feelin’ so early, there wouldn’t be nothin’ left to grow up.  So pretty quick Miss Perrit knocked, and I let her in.  We hadn’t got no spare room in that house; there was the kitchen in front, and mother’s bed-room, and the buttery, and the little back-space opened out on’t behind.  Mother was in the bed-room; so, while I called her, Miss Perrit set down in the splint rockin’-chair that creaked awfully, and went to rockin’ back and forth, and sighin’, till mother come in.  “Good-day, Miss Langdon!” says she, with a kind of a snuffle, “how dew you dew?  I thought I’d come and see how you kep’ up under this here affliction.  I rec’lect very well how I felt when husband died.  It’s a dreadful thing to be left a widder in a hard world;—­don’t you find it out by this?”

I guess mother felt quite as bad as ever Miss Perrit did, for everybody knew old Perrit treated his wife like a dumb brute while he was alive, and died drunk; but she didn’t say nothin’.  I see her give a kind of a swaller, and then she spoke up bright and strong.

“I don’t think it is a hard world, Miss Perrit.  I find folks kind and helpful, beyond what I’d any right to look for.  I try not to think about my husband, any more than I can help, because I couldn’t work, if I did, and I’ve got to work.  It’s most helpful to think the Lord made special promises to widows, and when I remember Him I a’n’t afeard.”

Miss Perrit stopped rockin’ a minute, and then she begun to creak the chair and blow her nose again, and she said,—­