cotton, wool, and flax, making kerchiefs of linen,
straw Shaker bonnets, and dozens of other useful marketable things, not
forgetting their famous Shaker apple sauce.

Was there ever such a busy summer, Susanna wondered; yet with all the
early rising, constant labor, and simple fare, she was stronger and
hardier than she had been for years. The Shaker palate was never tickled
with delicacies, yet the food was well cooked and sufficiently varied.
At first there had been the winter vegetables: squash, yellow turnips,
beets, and parsnips, with once a week a special Shaker dinner of salt
codfish, potatoes, onions, and milk gravy. Each Sister served her turn
as cook, but all alike had a wonderful hand with flour, and the
whole-wheat bread, cookies, ginger cake, and milk puddings were marvels
of lightness. Martha, in particular, could wean the novitiate Shaker
from a too riotous devotion to meat-eating better than most people, for
every dish she sent to the table was delicate, savory, and attractive.

Dear, patient, devoted Martha! How Susanna learned to love her as they
worked together in the big sunny, shining kitchen, where the
cooking-stove as well as every tin plate and pan and spoon might have
served as a mirror! Martha had joined the Society in her mother's arms,
being given up to the Lord and placed in "the children's order" before
she was one year old.

"If you should unite with us, Susanna," she said one night after the
early supper, when they were peeling apples together, "you'd be thankful
you begun early with your little Sue, for she's got a natural attraction
to the world, and for it. Not but that she's a tender, loving, obedient
little soul; but when she's among the other young ones, there's a
flyaway look about her that makes her seem more like a fairy than a
child."

"She's having rather a hard time learning Shaker ways, but she'll do
better in time," sighed her mother. "She came to me of her own accord
yesterday and asked: 'Bettent I have my curls cut off, Mardie?'"

"I never put that idea into her head," Martha interrupted. "She's a
visitor and can wear her hair as she's been brought up to wear it."

"I know, but I fear Sue was moved by other than religious reasons. 'I
get up so early, Mardie,' she said,--'and it takes so long to unsnarl
and untangle me, and I get so hot when I'm helping in the hayfield,--and
then I have to be curled for dinner, and curled again for supper, and so
it seems like wasti