got dresses she won’t never put on her back again—­silks an’ satins an’ woollens—­because she’s outgrown ’em, an’ they’re all hangin’ up in closets gettin’ mothy, an’ the doctor won’t let her give ’em away.  But this dress she give Elmira wa’n’t give away, for I sent her back next day to do some extra work to pay for it.  I ain’t beholden to nobody.  Elmira swept and dusted the settin’-room and the spare chamber, and washed the breakfast an’ dinner dishes, and I guess she paid for that old dress ample.  It had been laid up with camphor in a cedar chest, but it had some moth holes in it.  It wa’n’t worth such a great sight, after all.

“Jerome he’s worked smart, if I have had to drive him to it sometimes.  He’s wed and dug potatoes everywhere he could git a chance; he’s helped ‘bout hayin’, an’ he’s split wood.  He’s sold some herbs and roots, too, over to Dale.  Jake Noyes he put him up to that.  He come in here one night an’ talked to him real sensible.  ’There’s money ‘nough layin’ round loose right under your face an’ eyes,’ says he; ’all the trouble is you’re apt to walk right past, with your nose up in the air.  The scent for work an’ wages ain’t up in the air,’ says he; ‘it’s on the ground.’  Jerome he listened real sharp, an’ the next day he went off an’ got a good passel of boneset an’ thoroughwort an’ hardback, an’ carried it over to Dale, an’ sold it for a shilling.

“Elmira has done some spinnin’, too; I can’t spin much, but she’s done well enough.  Your wife wants some linen pillow-shifts.  Elmira can do the weavin’, I guess, an’ we can make ’em up together.  I’ve got a job to make some fine shirts for you, too.  Your wife come over to see about it this week.  I dun’no’ but she was gettin’ kind of afraid you wouldn’t git your interest money no other way; but she needn’t have been exercised about it, if she was.  We got this interest together without your shirts, an’ I guess we can the next.  It’s been harder work than many folks in this town know anything about, but we’ve done it.”  Ann tossed her head with indescribable pride and bitterness.  There was scorn of fate itself in the toss of that little head, with its black lace cap and false front, and her speech also was an harangue, reproachful and defiant, against fate, not against her earthly creditor; that she would have disdained.

Squire Eben, however, fully appreciating that, and taking the pictures of pitiful feminine and childish toil which she brought before his fancy as a shame to his great stalwart manhood, spending its strength in hunting and fishing and card-playing, looked at the woman binding shoes with painful jerks of little knotted hands—­for she ceased not her work one minute for her words—­and took the bitter reproach and triumphant scorn in her tone and gesture for himself alone.

He felt ashamed of himself, in his great hunting-boots splashed with swamp mud, his buckskins marred with woodland thorn and thicket, but not a mark of honest toil about him.  Had he been in fine broadcloth he would not have felt so humiliated; for the useless labor of play cuts a sorrier figure in the face of genuine work for the great ends of life than idleness itself.  He would not have been half so disgraced by nothing at all in hand as by that bag of game; and as for the money in that old stocking under the feather-bed, it seemed to him like the fruits of his own dishonesty.