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But Amanda had a quick foot, a neat hand, a light touch, and a peculiar faculty of “turning off” work so that it simply would not last through the day. Why did she never think of going to the nearest city and linking her powers with those of some one who would put them to larger uses? Simply because no one ever did that sort of thing in Bonny Eagle in those days. Girls crowded out of home by poverty sought employment here and there, but that a woman of forty, with a good home and ten acres of land–to say nothing of coupon bonds that yielded a hundred dollars a year in cash–that such a one should seek a larger field in a strange place, would have been thought flying in the face of Providence, as well as custom.

Outside Bonny Eagle, in the roar and din and clamor of cities, were all sorts of wrongs that needed righting, wounds that cried out to be healed. There were motherless children, there were helpless sufferers moaning for the sight of a green field, but the superfluous females of Amanda Dalton’s day had not awakened to any sense of responsibility with regard to their unknown brothers and sisters.

Amanda was a large-hearted woman. She would have shared her soda biscuit, her bean soup, her dandelion greens, her hogshead cheese, her boiled dinner, her custard pie, with any hungry mortal, but no one in Bonny Eagle needed bite nor sup. Therefore she feather-stitched her dish-towels, piled her kindling in a “wheel pattern” in the shed, named her hens and made friends of them, put fourteen tucks in her unbleached cotton petticoats, and fried a pancake every Saturday for her cat.

“It’s either that or blow your brains out, if you’ve got a busy mind!” she said grimly to Susan Benson, her best friend, who was passing a Saturday afternoon with her. It was chilly and they liked the cheerful warmth of the Saturday fire that was baking the beans and steaming the brown bread.

Susan unrolled her patchwork and, giving a flip to the cat with her thimble finger, settled herself comfortably in the kitchen rocker.

The cat leaped down and stalked into the next room with an air of offended majesty, as much as to say: “Of all the manners I ever saw, that woman has the worst! She contrives to pass by three empty chairs and choose the one I chance to be occupying!”

“You wouldn’t be so lonesome if you could see a bit of life from your house, Mandy,” said Mrs. Benson. “William an’ I were sayin’ last night you’d ought to move into the village winters, though nothin’ could be handsomer than the view from your sink window this minute. Daisies, daisies everywhere! How do you manage to keep ’em out o’ your place, Mandy, when they’re so thick on Caleb Kimball’s?”

“I just root an’ root, an’ keep on rootin’,” Amanda responded cheerfully, “though I don’t take a mite o’ pride out of it, for the better my place looks the worse his does, by comparison.”

“It is a sight!” said Mrs. Benson, standing for a moment by the sink and looking up to Kimball’s.

“I went up there one night after dark, when I knew Caleb ‘d gone to Hixam, an’ I patched up some o’ the holes in his stone wall, thinkin’ his whiteweed seeds wouldn’t blow through quite so thick!”–and Amanda joined Mrs. Benson at the window. “I’d ‘a’ done a day’s work on his side o’ the wall as lief as not, only I knew folks would talk if they saw me.”

“Land, no, they wouldn’t, Mandy. Everybody knows you wouldn’t take him if he was the last man on earth; an’ as for Caleb, I guess he wouldn’t marry any woman above ground, not if she was a seraphim. I used to think he’d spunk up some time or other, when he got over his mother’s death; but it’s too late now, I’m afraid.”