to Ann Mary and the boy, who looked to her for courage,
and told them that they were to have the fun of sleeping under the stars.

Boys were the same then as now, and Remember Williams was partly shivering
with dread of bears and Indians and things, and partly glowing with
anticipatory glory of telling the Hillsboro boys all about the adventure.
Hannah soothed the first and inflamed the second emotion until she had
Remember strutting about gathering firewood, as brave as a lion.

Very probably Ann Mary would have been frightened to death, if she had not
been so sleepy from her long day out of doors that she could not keep her
eyes open. And then, of course, everything must be all right, because
there was Hannah!

This forlorn terrified little captain wrapped the invalid in all the extra
clothing, managed to get a fire started, and cooked a supper of hot
cornmeal mush in her big iron "kittle." Ann Mary ate a great deal of this,
sweetened as it was with maple sugar crumbled from the big lump Hannah Had
brought along and immediately afterward she fell sound asleep.

Soon the soft night air of June was too strong a soporific for Remember's
desire to keep awake and hear the catamounts scream, as he had heard they
did in those woods. Hannah was left quite alone to keep watch and to tend
the fire, her heart in her mouth, jumping and starting at every shadow
cast by the flames.

She knew that wild beasts would not come near them if a big fire burned
briskly; and all that night she piled on the wood, scraped away the ashes,
and watched Ann Mary to see that she did not grow chilly. Hannah does not
seem to have been much inclined to talk about her own feelings, and there
is no record of what she suffered that night; but I think we may be sure
that it seemed a long time to her before the sky began to whiten in the
east.

As soon as she could see plainly, she cooked a hearty breakfast of broiled
bacon and fried mush, and wakened her two charges to eat it. They made a
very early start, and there is nothing more to tell about their journey
except that at about seven o'clock that evening the two tired
horses crept into the main street of Heath Falls, and a very much excited
girl asked the first passer-by where the Indian herb-doctor lived.

They found him in a little old house of logs--the only one that looked
natural to them in the prosperous settlement. When Hannah knocked at the
door, he opened it himself. He was a small, very