and ache.  Then Grandma took up the cudgels.  She was smart and high-spirited, but she was a very peaceable old lady on her own account, and fully resolved “to put up with everything from Dorcas, rather than have strife in the family.”  She was not going to see this helpless little girl imposed on, however.  “The little gal ain’t goin’ to get bent all over, tendin’ that heavy baby, Dorcas,” she proclaimed.  “You can jist make up your mind to it.  She didn’t come here to do sech work.”

So Dorcas had to make up her mind to it.

Ann’s principal duties were “scouring the brasses” in Grandma’s room, taking steps for her, and spinning her stint every day.  Grandma set smaller stints than Mrs. Polly.  As time went on, she helped about the cooking.  She and Grandma cooked their own victuals, and ate from a little separate table in the common kitchen.  It was a very large room, and might have accommodated several families, if they could have agreed.  There was a big oven and a roomy fire-place.  Good Deacon Wales had probably seen no reason at all why his “beloved wife” should not have her right therein with the greatest peace and concord.

But it soon came to pass that Mrs. Dorcas’s pots and kettles were all prepared to hang on the trammels when Grandma’s were, and an army of cakes and pies marshaled to go in the oven when Grandma had proposed to do some baking.  Grandma bore it patiently for a long time; but Ann was with difficulty restrained from freeing her small mind, and her black eyes snapped more dangerously at every new offense.

One morning, Grandma had two loaves of “riz bread,” and some election cakes, rising, and was intending to bake them in about an hour, when they should be sufficiently light.  What should Mrs. Dorcas do, but mix up sour milk bread, and some pies with the greatest speed, and fill up the oven, before Grandma’s cookery was ready!

Grandma sent Ann out into the kitchen to put the loaves-in the oven and lo and behold! the oven was full.  Ann stood staring for a minute, with a loaf of election cake in her hands; that and the bread would be ruined if they were not baked immediately, as they were raised enough.  Mrs. Dorcas had taken Thirsey and stepped out somewhere, and there was no one in the kitchen.  Ann set the election cake back on the table.  Then, with the aid of the tongs, she reached into the brick oven and took out every one of Mrs. Dorcas’s pies and loaves.  Then she arranged them deliberately in a pitiful semicircle on the hearth, and put Grandma’s cookery in the oven.

She went back to the southwest room then, and sat quietly down to her spinning.  Grandma asked if she had put the things in, and she said “Yes, ma’am,” meekly.  There was a bright red spot on each of her dark cheeks.

When Mrs. Dorcas entered the kitchen, carrying Thirsey wrapped up in an old homespun blanket, she nearly dropped as her gaze fell on the fire-place and the hearth.  There sat her bread and pies, in the most lamentable half-baked, sticky, doughy condition imaginable.  She opened the oven, and peered in.  There were Grandma’s loaves, all a lovely brown.  Out they came, with a twitch.  Luckily, they were done.  Her own went in, but they were irretrievable failures.