m the New
Jersey seacoast. In this village she was born, here she had married
and buried her husband, and here she expected somebody to bury her; but
she was in no hurry for this, for she had scarcely reached middle age.
She was a tall woman with no apparent fat in her composition, and full
of activity, both muscular and mental.

She rose at six o'clock in the morning, cooked breakfast, set the
table, washed the dishes when the meal was over, milked, churned,
swept, washed, ironed, worked in her little garden, attended to the
flowers in the front yard and in the afternoon knitted and quilted and
sewed, and after tea she either went to see her neighbors or had them
come to see her. When it was really dark she lighted the lamp in her
parlor and read for an hour, and if it happened to be one of Miss Mary
Wilkins's books that she read she expressed doubts as to the realism of
the characters therein described.

These doubts she expressed to Dorcas Networthy, who was a small, plump
woman, with a solemn face, who had lived with the widow for many years
and who had become her devoted disciple. Whatever the widow did, that
also did Dorcas--not so well, for her heart told her she could never
expect to do that, but with a yearning anxiety to do everything as well
as she could.

She rose at five minutes past six, and in a subsidiary way she helped
to get the breakfast, to eat it, to wash up the dishes, to work in the
garden, to quilt, to sew, to visit and receive, and no one could have
tried harder than she did to keep awake when the widow read aloud in
the evening.

All these things happened every day in the summer-time, but in the
winter the widow and Dorcas cleared the snow from their little front
path instead of attending to the flowers, and in the evening they
lighted a fire as well as a lamp in the parlor.

Sometimes, however, something different happened, but this was not
often, only a few times in the year. One of the different things
occurred when Mrs. Ducket and Dorcas were sitting on their little front
porch one summer afternoon, one on the little bench on one side of the
door, and the other on the little bench on the other side of the door,
each waiting until she should hear the clock strike five, to prepare
tea. But it was not yet a quarter to five when a one-horse wagon
containing four men came slowly down the street. Dorcas first saw the
wagon, and she instantly stopped knitting.

"Mercy on me!" she exc