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“I suppose you’re too young to remember John Ashby’s grandmother? A good woman she was, and she had a dreadful time with her family. They never could keep the peace, and there was always as many as two of them who didn’t speak with each other. It seems to come down from generation to generation like a–curse!” And Miss Debby spoke the last word as if she had meant it partly for her thread, which had again knotted and caught, and she snatched the offered scissors without a word, but said peaceably, after a minute or two, that the thread wasn’t what it used to be. The next needleful proved more successful, and the listener asked if the Ashbys were getting on comfortably at present.

“They always behave as if they thought they needed nothing,” was the response. “Not that I mean that they are any ways contented, but they never will give in that other folks holds a candle to ’em. There’s one kind of pride that I do hate,–when folks is satisfied with their selves and don’t see no need of improvement. I believe in self-respect, but I believe in respecting other folks’s rights as much as your own; but it takes an Ashby to ride right over you. I tell ’em it’s the spirit of the tyrants of old, and it’s the kind of pride that goes before a fall. John Ashby’s grandmother was a clever little woman as ever stepped. She came from over Hardwick way, and I think she kep’ ’em kind of decent-behaved as long as she was round; but she got wore out a doin’ of it, an’ went down to her grave in a quick consumption. My mother set up with her the night she died. It was in May, towards the latter part, and an awful rainy night. It was the storm that always comes in apple-blossom time. I remember well that mother come crying home in the morning and told us Mis’ Ashby was dead. She brought Marilly with her, that was about my own age, and was taken away within six months afterwards. She pined herself to death for her mother, and when she caught the scarlet fever she went as quick as cherry-bloom when it’s just ready to fall and a wind strikes it. She wa’n’t like the rest of ’em. She took after her mother’s folks altogether.

“You know our farm was right next to theirs,–the one Asa Hopper owns now, but he’s let it all run out,–and so, as we lived some ways from the stores, we had to be neighborly, for we depended on each other for a good many things. Families in lonesome places get out of one supply and another, and have to borrow until they get a chance to send to the village; or sometimes in a busy season some of the folks would have to leave work and be gone half a day. Land, you don’t know nothing about old times, and the life that used to go on about here. You can’t step into a house anywheres now that there ain’t the county map and they don’t fetch out the photograph book; and in every district you’ll find all the folks has got the same chromo picture hung up, and all sorts of luxuries and makeshifts o’ splendor that would have made the folks I was fetched up by stare their eyes out o’ their heads. It was all we could do to keep along then; and if anybody was called rich, it was only because he had a great sight of land,–and then it was drudge, drudge the harder to pay the taxes. There was hardly any ready money; and I recollect well that old Tommy Simms was reputed wealthy, and it was told over fifty times a year that he’d got a solid four thousand dollars in the bank. He strutted round like a turkey-cock, and thought he ought to have his first say about everything that was going.