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“I don’t know, mother, what I want for myself. It doesn’t matter, but for thee I would have rest from all these cruel worries thee has borne so long.”

She buried her face in her mother’s lap and put her strong young arms about the frail, toil-bent form.

“There, there, dear. Try to rule thy spirit, Dorothy. Thee’s too much worked up about this. They are not worries to me. I am thankful we have nothing to decide, one way or the other–only to do our best with what is given us. Thee’s not thyself, dear. Go down-stairs and fetch in the clothes, and don’t hurry; stay out till thee gets more composed.”

Dorothy did not succeed in bringing herself into unity with her father’s call, but she came to a fuller realization of his struggle. When he bade them good-by, his face showed what it had cost him, but Rachel was calm and cheerful. The pain of parting is keenest to those who go, but it stays longer with those who are left behind.

“Dorothy, take good care of thy mother!” Friend Barton said, taking his daughter’s face between his hands and gravely kissing her brow between the low-parted ripples of her hair.

“Yes, father,” she said, looking into his eyes. “Thee knows I’m thy eldest son.”

They watched the old chaise swing round the corner of the lane, then the pollard willows shut it from sight.

“Come, mother,” said Dorothy, hurrying her in at the gate. “I’m going to make a great pot of mush, and have it hot for supper, and fried for breakfast, and warmed up with molasses for dinner, and there’ll be some cold with milk for supper, and we shan’t have any cooking to do at all.”

They went round to the kitchen door. Rachel stopped in the wood-shed, and the tears rushed to her eyes.

“Dear father! How he has worked over that wood, early and late, to spare us!”

We will not revive Dorothy’s struggles with the farm-work and with the boys. They were an isolated family at the mill-house; their peculiar faith isolated them still more, and they were twelve miles from meeting and the settlement of Friends at Stony Valley. Dorothy’s pride kept her silent about her needs, lest they might bring reproach upon her father among the neighbors, who would not be likely to feel the urgency of his spiritual summons.

The summer heats came on apace and the nights grew shorter. It seemed to Dorothy that she had hardly stretched out her tired young body and forgotten her cares in the low attic bedroom, before the east was streaked with light and the birds were singing in the apple-trees, whose falling blossoms drifted in at the window.

One day in early June, Friend Barton’s flock of sheep–consisting of nine experienced ewes, six yearlings, and a sprinkling of close-curled lambs whose legs had not yet come into mature relations with their bodies–were gathered in a little railed inclosure, beside the stream which flowed into the “mill head.” It was supplied by the waste from the pond, and when the gate was shut, rambled easily over the gray slate pebbles, with here and there a fall, just forcible enough to serve as a douche bath for a well-grown sheep. The victims were panting in their heavy fleeces, and their hoarse, plaintive tremolo mingled with the ripple of the water and the sound of young voices in a frolic. Dorothy had divided her forces for the washing to the best advantage. The two elder boys stood in the stream to receive the sheep, which she, with the help of little Jimmy, caught and dragged to the bank.

The boys were at work now upon an elderly ewe, while Dorothy stood on the brink of the stream, braced against an ash sapling, dragging at the fleece of a beautiful but reluctant yearling. Her bare feet were incased in a pair of moccasins which laced around the ankle; her petticoats were kilted, and her broad hat bound down with a ribbon; one sleeve was rolled up, the other had been sacrificed in a scuffle in the sheep-pen. The new candidate for immersion stood bleating and trembling, with her fore feet planted against the slippery bank, pushing back with all her strength, while Jimmy propelled from the rear.