At first we couldn’t sell the farm.  It was down at the foot of Torringford Hill, two good miles from meetin’, and a mile from the school-house; most of it was woodsy, and there wa’n’t no great market for wood about there.  So for the first year Squire Potter took it on shares, and, as he principally seeded it down to rye, why, we sold the rye and got a little money, but ’twa’n’t a great deal,—­no more than we wanted for clothes the next winter.  Aunt Langdon sent us down a lot of maple-sugar from Lee, and when we wanted molasses we made it out of that.  We didn’t have to buy no great of groceries, for we could spin and knit by fire-light, and, part of the land bein’ piny woods, we had a good lot of knots that were as bright as lamps for all we wanted.  Then we had a dozen chickens, and by pains and care they laid pretty well, and the eggs were as good as gold.  So we lived through the first year after father died, pretty well.

Anybody that couldn’t get along with mother and Major (I always called Mary Jane “Major” when I was real little, and the name kind of stayed by) couldn’t get along with anybody.  I was as happy as a cricket whilst they were by, though, to speak truth, I wasn’t naturally so chirpy as they were; I took after father more, who was a kind of a despondin’ man, down-hearted, never thinkin’ things could turn out right, or that he was goin’ to have any luck.  That was my natur’, and mother see it, and fought ag’inst it like a real Bunker-Hiller; but natur’ is hard to root up, and there was always times when I wanted to sulk away into a corner and think nobody wanted me, and that I was poor and humbly, and had to work for my living.

I remember one time I’d gone up into my room before tea to have one of them dismal fits.  Miss Perrit had been in to see mother, and she’d been tellin’ over what luck Nancy’d had down to Hartford:  how’t she had gone into a shop, and a young man had been struck with her good looks, an’ he’d turned out to be a master-shoemaker, and Nancy was a-goin’ to be married, and so on, a rigmarole as long as the moral law,—­windin’ up with askin’ mother why she didn’t send us girls off to try our luck, for Major was as old as Nance Perrit.  I’d waited to hear mother say, in her old bright way, that she couldn’t afford it, and she couldn’t spare us, if she had the means, and then I flung up into our room, that was a lean-to in the garret, with a winder in the gable end, and there I set down by the winder with my chin on the sill, and begun to wonder why we couldn’t have as good luck as the Perrits.  After I’d got real miserable, I heerd a soft step comin’ up stairs, and Major come in and looked at me and then out of the winder.

“What’s the matter of you, Anny?” said she.

“Nothing,” says I, as sulky as you please.

“Nothing always means something,” says Major, as pleasant as pie; and then she scooched down on the floor and pulled my two hands away, and looked me in the face as bright and honest as ever you see a dandelion look out of the grass.  “What is it, Anny?  Spit it out, as John Potter says; you’ll feel better to free your mind.”