The other woman laughed.  “Why, you don’t have to talk ’bout foreign parts or else keep still, do ye?”

“Oh, it’s just so ‘bout everythin’.  We heard she’d been in Washington last winter, so Eben he brisked up and tried her on politics.  Well, she’d never heard of direct primaries, they’re raisin’ such a holler ’bout in York State; she didn’t know what th’ ’nsurgent senators are up to near as much as we did, and to judge by the way she looked, she’d only just barely heard of th’ tariff.”  The word was pronounced with true New England reverence.  “Then we tried bringin’ up children, and lumberin’ an’ roads, an’ cookin’, an’ crops, an’ stock, an’ wages, an’ schools, an’ gardenin’, but we couldn’t touch bottom nowhere.  Never a word to be had out’n her.  So we give up and now we just sit like stotin’ bottles, an’ eat—­an’ do our visitin’ with each other odd minutes afterward.”

“Why, she don’t look to be half-witted,” said the other.

“She ain’t!” cried Mrs. Pritchard with emphasis.  “She’s got as good a headpiece, natchilly, as anybody.  I remember her when she was a young one.  It’s the fool way they’re brung up!  Everythin’ that’s any fun or intrust, they hire somebody else to do it for ’em.  Here she is a great strappin’ woman of twenty-two or three, with nothing in the world to do but to traipse off ‘cross the fields from mornin’ to night—­an’ nobody to need her there nor here, nor anywhere.  No wonder she looks peaked.  Sometimes when I see her set and stare off, so sort o’ dull and hopeless, I’m so sorry for her I could cry!  Good land!  I’d as lief hire somebody to chew my vittles for me and give me the dry cud to live off of, as do the way those kind of folks do.”

The distant call of a steam-whistle, silvered by the great distance into a flute-like note, interrupted her.  “That’s the milk-train, whistling for the Millbrook cross in’,” she said.  “We must be thinkin’ of goin’ home before long.  Where be those young ones?” She raised her voice in a call as unexpectedly strong and vibrant as her laugh. “Susie!  Eddie!  Did they answer?  I’m gittin’ that hard o’ hearin’ ’tis hard for me to make out.”

“Yes, they hollered back,” said the other.  “An’ I see ’em comin’ through the pasture yonder.  I guess they got their pails full by the way they carry ’em.”

“That’s good,” said Mrs. Pritchard with satisfaction.  “They can get twenty-five cents a quart hulled, off’n summer folks.  They’re savin’ up to help Joel go to Middletown College in the fall.”

“They think a lot o’ Joel, don’t they?” commented the other.

“Oh, the Pritchards has always been a family that knew how to set store by their own folks,” said the old woman proudly, “and Joel he’ll pay ’em back as soon as he gets ahead a little.”

The children had evidently now come up, for Virginia heard congratulations over the berries and exclamations over their sun-flushed cheeks.  “Why, Susie, you look like a pickled beet in your face.  Set down, child, an’ cool off.  Grandma called you an’ Eddie down to tell you an old-timey story.”