embering the instructions, "Keep going until
you get what you go for," I started at double quick to the next
neighbor, and to the next, and the next, for three-quarters of an hour.
I must have zig-zagged several miles, only to return with the sad news
that there was not a loaf of bread in the town. Meanwhile my mother had
taken in the situation, and when I got home exhausted and disgusted, the
travelers were eating their dinner, a skillet full of biscuits having
been baked at short notice. Soon they were on their horses, and the work
at the wash tub was resumed. Though the occasion was a trying one, not a
word of murmur escaped the lips of that heroic woman, for she endured as
seeing the Invisible. Was she not a hero?

During those years of special hardships, my mother had the companionship
and aid of a younger sister, a bright, red-headed girl, as fleet of foot
as the mountain gazelle, with a voice, at least to me, as sweet as the
melody of angels. Through the misty past of more than sixty years, there
comes the memory of several incidents illustrative of both her moral and
physical heroism. On one occasion, not unlike that just referred to, she
was called to set aside her spinning-wheel just when the weaver was
clamoring for the yarn which was to go into the beautiful home-made
flannel, from which her new Sunday dress was to be made, and which she
had promised to furnish that day. More than an hour of precious time had
been consumed when she resumed her spinning, striking up in her
inimitable treble:

"And let this feeble body fail."

Young as I was, I had sympathized with her in her loss of time, feeling
that at least on that occasion it was an imposition that entire
strangers should call at that unreasonable hour for a dinner, because
they could get it free, but her heart seemed to be in the song, and as
she whirled the wheel still more vigorously, and stepped mere rapidly,
as if to make up lost time, she came to

"In hope of that immortal crown,
I now the Cross sustain:
And gladly wander up and down,
And smile at toil and pain."

It seemed to my childish imagination that she was triumphing over her
difficulties and defying toil and pain, with words specially adapted to
her "up and down," the to and fro movement in spinning. It was an
exhibition of moral heroism, not often surpassed by martyr or confessor.
But she was a physical hero as well. I saw her tested once at a
cam