wn fifteen miles off, to
Litchfield, and his mill was only three miles from Nepash village.
Hard work and hard fare lay before them both, but they were not
daunted by the prospect....

By and by a cradle entered the door, and a baby was laid in it....

One baby is well enough in a log cabin, with one room for all the
purposes of life; but when next year brought two more, a pair of stout
boys, then John began to saw lumber for his own use. A bedroom was
built on the east side of the house, and a rough stairway into the
loft--more room perhaps than was needed; but John was called in Nepash
"a dre'dful forecastin' man," and he took warning from the twins. And
timely warning it proved, for as the years slipped by, one after
another, they left their arrows in his quiver till ten children
bloomed about the hearth. The old cabin had disappeared entirely. A
good-sized frame house of one story, with a high-pitched roof, stood
in its stead, and a slab fence kept roving animals out of the yard and
saved the apple trees from the teeth of stray cows and horses.

Poor enough they were still. The loom in the garret always had its web
ready, the great wheel by the other window sung its busy song year in
and year out. Dolly was her mother's right hand now; and the twins,
Ralph and Reuben, could fire the musket and chop wood. Sylvy, the
fourth child, was the odd one. All the rest were sturdy, rosy,
laughing girls and boys; but Sylvy had been a pining baby, and grew up
into a slender, elegant creature, with clear gray eyes, limpid as
water, but bright as stars, and fringed with long golden lashes the
colour of her beautiful hair--locks that were coiled in fold on fold
at the back of her fine head, like wreaths of undyed silk, so pale was
their yellow lustre. She bloomed among the crowd of red-cheeked,
dark-haired lads and lasses, stately and incongruous as a June lily in
a bed of tulips. But Sylvy did not stay at home. The parson's lady at
Litchfield came to Nepash one Sunday, with her husband, and seeing
Sylvy in the square corner pew with the rest, was mightily struck by
her lovely face, and offered to take her home with her the next week,
for the better advantages of schooling. Hannah could not have spared
Dolly; but Sylvia was a dreamy, unpractical child, and though all the
dearer for being the solitary lamb of the flock by virtue of her
essential difference from the rest, still, for that very reason, it
became easier to let her go