That was the first day of that wonderful summer, and most of the days which followed were like it.  Every morning Hannah rose early, made a little open fire, cooked their breakfast, and was off to her spinning.  Just as her first employer had said, there was no lack of work for a spinner who worked as fast and yet as carefully as if it were for herself.  In Hannah’s thread there were never any thin places which broke as soon as the weaver stretched it on the loom, nor yet any thick lumps where the wool had insisted, in grandmother’s phrase, “on going all kim-kam.”

At first, she went about to people’s houses; but, seeing her so neat and careful, the minister’s wife loaned her one of her own wheels, and the minister had an old granary cleared out for her workroom.  Here, day after day, the wheel whirred unceasingly, like a great bee, and Hannah stepped back and forth, back and forth, on her tireless young feet, only glancing out through the big door at the bright glories of the summer weather, and never once regretting her imprisonment.

Indeed, she said, all her life afterward, that she was so happy, that summer, it seemed heaven itself could hold no greater joy for her.  Of course, first always in her thoughts was Ann Mary, pulling weeds and tending her witch garden, and growing plump and rosy, and so strong that she laughed and ran about and sang as never in her life before.

Hannah put very little faith in the agricultural part of the cure.  She thought that very probably it was nothing more than a blind, and that Master Necronsett came out at night and said charms and things over Ann Mary as she slept.  However that might be, she could have kissed his funny, splay feet every time she looked at her sister’s bright eyes and red lips; and when she thought of the joy it would be to her father, she could have kissed his ugly, wrinkled old face.

But, besides her joy over her sister’s health, the summer was for Hannah herself a continual feast of delight Captain Winthrop, the minister’s young cousin, was staying in Heath Falls to recover from an arrow-wound got in a skirmish with the Indians in Canada.  He was very idle, and very much bored by the dullness of the little town, which seemed such a metropolis to the two girls from Hillsboro.  One day, attracted by Hannah’s shining face of content, he lounged over to the step of her granary, and began to talk to her through the open doorway.

It happened to come out that the little spinner, while she knew her letters from having worked them into a sampler, and could make shift to write her name, could not read or write, and had never had the slightest instruction in any sort of book-learning.  Thereupon the young officer good-naturedly proposed to be her teacher, if Hannah would like.

Would she like!  She turned to him a look of such utter ecstasy that he was quite touched, and went off at:  once to get an old “A-B, ab” book.