Mrs. Simpson, who was decidedly Abner's better half, took in washing
and went out to do days' cleaning, and the town helped in the feeding
and clothing of the children. George, a lanky boy of fourteen, did
chores on neighboring farms, and the others, Samuel, Clara Belle,
Susan, Elijah, and Elisha, went to school, when sufficiently clothed
and not otherwise more pleasantly engaged.

There were no secrets in the villages that lay along the banks of
Pleasant River. There were many hard-working people among the
inhabitants, but life wore away so quietly and slowly that there was a
good deal of spare time for conversation,--under the trees at noon in
the hayfield; hanging over the bridge at nightfall; seated about the
stove in the village store of an evening. These meeting-places
furnished ample ground for the discussion of current events as viewed
by the masculine eye, while choir rehearsals, sewing societies, reading
circles, church picnics, and the like, gave opportunity for the
expression of feminine opinion. All this was taken very much for
granted, as a rule, but now and then some supersensitive person made
violent objections to it, as a theory of life.

Delia Weeks, for example, was a maiden lady who did dressmaking in a
small way; she fell ill, and although attended by all the physicians in
the neighborhood, was sinking slowly into a decline when her cousin
Cyrus asked her to come and keep house for him in Lewiston. She went,
and in a year grew into a robust, hearty, cheerful woman. Returning to
Riverboro on a brief visit, she was asked if she meant to end her days
away from home.

"I do most certainly, if I can get any other place to stay," she
responded candidly. "I was bein' worn to a shadder here, tryin' to keep
my little secrets to myself, an' never succeedin'. First they had it I
wanted to marry the minister, and when he took a wife in Standish I was
known to be disappointed. Then for five or six years they suspicioned I
was tryin' for a place to teach school, and when I gave up hope, an'
took to dressmakin', they pitied me and sympathized with me for that.
When father died I was bound I'd never let anybody know how I was left,
for that spites 'em worse than anything else; but there's ways o'
findin' out, an' they found out, hard as I fought 'em! Then there was
my brother James that went to Arizona when he was sixteen. I gave good
news of him for thirty years runnin', but aunt Achsy Tarbox had a
ferretin' c