She had promised the minister’s wife to be back at a certain hour to see about employment, so she dared not stay longer, though it was with a sinking heart that she left her sister to that grim old savage, with his brusque lack of sympathy.  However, the minister’s wife reassured her with stories of all the other girls from far and near whom he had cured by that same foolish, silly method; so Hannah turned all her energies upon the spinning which a neighbor-woman had set her to do.

Hired workers have been the same from the days of the Psalmist down to our own, and Hannah, putting her whole heart into her work, accomplished, so her surprised employer told her, twice as much spinning as any serving-girl she had ever hired.

“And excellent good thread, too!” she said, examining it.

If Hannah kept up to that, she added, she could have all the work she had time for.  She gave the little girl two pennies—­two real pennies, the first money Hannah had ever earned.  With a head spinning with triumph, she calculated that at that rate she could earn fourpence a day!

She spent a farthing for some fish a little boy brought up from the river, and a halfpenny for some fresh-baked bread, and a part of her precious four-shilling piece for an iron fry-pan, or “spider.”  Laden with these, she hurried back to see how Ann Mary had endured the old doctor’s roughness.  She found her sister very tired, but, proudly anxious to show a little spot, perhaps six feet; square, which she had spaded up with intervals of rest.

“The herb-doctor says that I have done well, and that I will finish the spading in a week, or perhaps even less,” she said:  “and I like Master Necronsett!  He is a good old man, and I know that he will cure me.  He makes me feel very rested when he comes near.”

Hannah felt a little pang to think that her sister should not miss her own brooding care, but when Ann Mary cried out joyfully at the sight of the food, “Oh, how hungry I am!” everything but pleasure was immediately swept away from the little sister’s loyal heart.

They cooked their supper—­Hannah still had some of the cornmeal and the flitch of bacon their Hillsboro friends had given them—­and went to bed directly on the queer, hard bed, with a straw tick and no feathers, which Dr. Necronsett had prescribed, warmly wrapped up in the pair of heavy Indian blankets he had loaned them.  They were so close to the house that they heard the old doctor moving around inside, and they could see the light of his candle, so they were not afraid.

Indeed, the two sisters were so sleepy that even if they had been timorous it could scarcely have kept them from the deep slumber into which they fell at once, and which lasted until the sun shone in on them the next morning.

IV.