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By the 1st of June Mrs. Thayer had the sun-bonnets done. There were four of them, for the four youngest girls–Eliza, Mary Ann, Harriet, and Mirandy. She had five daughters besides these, but two were married and gone away from home, and the other three were old enough to make their own sun-bonnets.

There were four Thayer boys; one of them came next to Mirandy, the youngest girl, the others ranked upward in age from Harriet, who was eleven, to Sarah Jane, who was sixteen. There were thirteen sons and daughters in all in Josiah Thayer’s family, and eleven were at home. It was hard work to get enough from the stony New England farm to feed them; and let Mrs. Thayer card and spin and dye and weave as she would, the clothing often ran short. And so it happened that little Mirandy Thayer, aged six, had no shoes to her feet.

One Sunday in June she cried because she had to go to meeting barefooted.

“Ain’t you ashamed of yourself, a great big girl like you, crying?” said her mother, sternly. “You go right over there, and sit down on the settle till father gets hitched up, and Daniel, you go and sit down ‘side of her, and teach her the first question in the catechism. She’d ought to find out there’s something else to be thought about on the Sabbath day besides shoes.”

So Mirandy, sniffing between the solemn words, repeated them after Daniel, who was twelve years old, and knew his catechism quite thoroughly. And when the great farm wagon, with the team of oxen, stood before the door, she climbed in with the rest without a murmur.

But sitting in the meeting-house through the two hours’ discourse, she drew up her little bare feet under her blue petticoat, and going down the aisle afterwards, she crouched, making it sweep the floor, until her mother dragged her up forcibly by one arm.

“Ain’t you ashamed of yourself?” she whispered. “A great big girl like you!”

Mirandy was in reality very small for her age, and everybody called her “little;” but she got very few privileges on account of her youth and littleness. In those days, and especially in a family like Josiah Thayer’s, where there were so many children that each had to scratch for itself at an early age or go without, six years was considered comparatively mature, and the child who had lived that long was not exempt from many duties.

So Mrs. Thayer did not think herself in the least severe when she said to Mirandy after meeting: “If you want some shoes so bad, you’ll have to work an’ earn ’em.”

Mirandy looked up inquiringly at her mother.

“You can pick berries an’ sell ’em,” replied her mother. “You’re plenty big enough to.”

Mirandy said nothing, and soon her mother set her to rocking Jonathan in his red wooden cradle; but as she sat, with her small bare foot on the rocker, ambition expanded wider and wider in her childish soul, and she resolved that she would earn some shoes.

The berries were not ripe before the middle of July. She had some five weeks to wait before she could fairly begin work. But not a day passed that she did not visit the pastures to see if the berries were ripe. She brought home so many partially ripe ones for samples that her brothers and sisters remonstrated. They, too, were vitally interested in the berry crop in behalf of shoes and many other things. “She won’t leave any berries on the bushes to get ripe if she picks so many green ones,” they complained, and her mother issued a stern decree that Mirandy should not go to the berry pasture until the berries were fairly ripe.

But at last, one hot morning in July, the squad of berry-pickers started. There were four Thayer girls and two Thayer boys, besides Jonathan, the baby, whom Eliza dragged in his little wooden wagon.