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There were the same old spruce and pine boards that she had scrubbed so many times and trodden thin as she hurried to and fro about her work. It was very strange to see an unfamiliar chair or two, but the furnishings of a farm kitchen were much the same, and there was no great change. Even the cradle was like that cradle in which her own children had been rocked. She gazed and gazed, poor old Mother Bascom, and forgot the present as her early life came back in vivid memories. At last she turned away from the window with a sigh.

The flowers that she had planted herself long ago had bloomed all summer in the garden; there were still some ragged sailors and the snowberries and phlox and her favorite white mallows, of which she picked herself a posy. “I’m glad the old place is so well took care of,” she thought, gratefully. “An’ they’ve new-silled the old barn I do declare, and battened the cracks to keep the dumb creatures warm. ‘T was a sham-built barn anyways, but ‘t was the best I could do when the child’n needed something every handturn o’ the day. It put me to some expense every year, tinkering of it up where the poor lumber warped and split. There, I enjoyed try’n to cope with things and gettin’ the better of my disadvantages! The ground’s too rich for me over there to Tobias’s; I don’t want things too easy, for my part. I feel most as young as ever I did, and I ain’t agoin’ to play helpless, not for nobody.

“I declare for ‘t, I mean to come up here by an’ by a spell an’ stop with the young folks, an’ give ’em a good lift with their work. I ain’t needed all the time to Tobias’ s now, and they can hire help, while these can’t. I’ve been favoring myself till I’m as soft as an old hoss that’s right out of pasture an’ can’t pull two wheels without wheezin’.”

There was a sense of companionship in the very weather. The bees were abroad as if it were summer, and a flock of little birds came fluttering down close to Mrs. Bascom as she sat on the doorstep. She remembered the biscuits in her pocket and ate them with a hunger she had seldom known of late, but she threw the crumbs generously to her feathered neighbors. The soft air, the brilliant or fading colors of the wide landscape, the comfortable feeling of relationship to her surroundings all served to put good old Mercy into a most peaceful state. There was only one thought that would not let her be quite happy. She could not get her sister-in-law Ruth Parlet out of her mind. And strangely enough the old grudge did not present itself with the usual power of aggravation; it was of their early friendship and Ruth’s good fellowship that memories would come.

“I declare for ‘t, I wouldn’t own up to the folks, but I should like to have a good visit with Ruth if so be that we could set aside the past,” she said, resolutely at last. “I never thought I should come to it, but if she offered to make peace I wouldn’t do nothin’ to hinder it. Not to say but what I should have to free my mind on one or two points before we could start fair. I’ve waited forty year to make one remark to Ruthy Parlet. But there! we’re gettin’ to be old folks.” Mercy rebuked herself gravely. “I don’t want to go off with hard feelins’ to nobody.” Whether this was the culmination of a long, slow process of reconciliation, or whether Mrs. Bascom’s placid satisfaction helped to hasten it by many stages, nobody could say. As she sat there she thought of many things; her life spread itself out like a picture; perhaps never before had she been able to detach herself from her immediate occupation in this way. She never had been aware of her own character and exploits to such a degree, and the minutes sped by as she thought with deep interest along the course of her own history. There was nothing she was ashamed of to an uncomfortable degree but the long animosity between herself and the children’s aunt. How harsh she had been sometimes; she had even tried to prejudice everybody who listened to these tales of an offender. “I wa’n’t more ‘n half right, now I come to look myself full in the face,” said Mercy Bascom, “and I never owned it till this day.”