“She’s awful deef!” cried a new voice from the doorway.  “She ain’t that scared.  She’s sarcy enough, sometimes.”

A woman, middle-aged or more, stood on the rough, slanting door-stone.  She had bare feet, in coarse calf-skin slippers, stringy petticoats differing only from the child’s in length, sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, no neck garniture,—­not a bit of anything white about her.  Over all looked forth a face sharp and hard, that might have once been good-looking, in a raw, country fashion, and that had undoubtedly always been, what it now was, emphatically Yankee-smart.  An inch-wide stripe of black hair was combed each way over her forehead, and rolled up on her temples in what, years and years ago, used to be called most appropriately “flat curls,”—­these fastened with long horn side-combs.  Beyond was a strip of desert,—­no hair at all for an inch and a half more toward the crown; the rest dragged back and tied behind with the relentless tightness that gradually and regularly, by the persistence of years, had accomplished this peculiar belt of clearing.  It completed her expression; it was as a very halo of Yankee saintship crowning the woman who in despite of poverty and every discouragement had always hated, to the very roots of her hair, anything like what she called a “sozzle;” who had always been screwed up and sharp set to hard work.  She couldn’t help the tumbledown fence; she had no “men-folks” round; and she couldn’t have paid for a hundred pickets and a day’s carpentering, to have saved her life.  She couldn’t help Prissy’s hair even; for it would kink and curl, and the minute the wind took it “there it was again;” and it was not time yet, thank goodness! to harrow it back and begin in her behalf the remarkable engineering which had laid out for herself that broad highway across all the thrifty and energetic bumps up to Veneration (who knows how much it had had to do with mixing them in one common tingle of mutual and unceasing activity?) and down again from ear to ear.  Inside the poor little house you would find all spick and span, the old floor white and sanded, the few tins and the pewter spoons shining upon the shelf, the brick hearth and jambs aglow with fresh “redding,” table and chairs set back in rectangular tidiness.  Only one thing made a litter, or tried to; a yellow canary that hung in the window and sang “like a house afire,” as Aunt Hoskins said, however that is, and flung his seeds about like the old “Wash at Edmonton,” “on both sides of the way.”  Prissy was turned out of doors in all pleasant weather, so otherwise the keeping-room stayed trim, and her curly hair grew sunburnt.

“She’s ben deef ever sence she hed the scarlet-fever.  Walk in,” said the woman, by no means satisfied to let strangers get only the outside impression of her premises, and turning round to lead the way without waiting for a reply.  “Come in, Prissy!” she bawled, illustrating her summons with what might be called a beckoning in broad capitals, done with the whole arm from finger-tips to shoulder, twice or thrice.