At any rate, they all ran about as fast as ants in an ant-hill, and the busiest of all was sixteen-year-old Hannah Sherwin.  Since she was my grandmother’s grand mother’s mother, at last the story is really begun.

Hannah had been a baby of eighteen months when the Sherwins came over the mountains from the old home in Connecticut, so she knew nothing about any other way of living than what 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 over of sawn planks, and chairs that were so shiny you could see your face in them or else stuffed and cushioned in brocade as soft—­“as soft as a feather tick!” she told Hannah.

Her listener, having no idea of what brocade might be, and taking the feather-tick simile literally, must have imagined a very queer kind of chair.

Hannah was a short, fair, rosy-cheeked child, who passed for good-looking enough; but Ann Mary was slender and dark and a real beauty, although Hillsboro people did not realize it.  She looked fragile, as if she could not do much hard work and that is always a serious blemish in feminine beauty to the eyes of pioneers.

So far in her life she had not been forced to do any hard work, because Hannah had done it all for her.  Their mother had died when they were both little girls, and their father was so busy 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 were done.  And Hannah delighted to do them, because she adored Ann Mary, and could not bear to have her sister troubled with any of the coarse tasks which made up her own happy, busy day.

Now, all that grandmother ever tells me about the beginning of this story is that when the lovely Ann Mary was nineteen years old she “fell into a decline,” as they called it.  She grew pale and thin, never smiled, could not eat or sleep, and lay listlessly on the bed all day, looking sadly at Hannah as she bustled about.

A great many girls in those days fell into declines and died.  Of course, nobody knows the reason for most of the cases, but it seems as plain as the nose on my face that Ann Mary’s sickness was entirely Hannah’s fault for 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 could look forward to, and in the workaday little world of pioneer Hillsboro nobody would dare to think of marrying a girl who looked like a tea-rose and did not know how to make soft soap.  No wonder she lost her appetite!

It might not have gone any further, however, if Hannah, distracted with anxiety, had not run to all the old women in town about her sick sister.  Every one of them had had a niece, or a daughter—­or at least a granddaughter—­who had died in a decline; so, of course, they knew just what to do for Ann Mary, and they came and did it.