rrowly for the hot mush; and after
breakfast she caught a minute, when Phineas had gone to work, and
Mrs. Polly was in the pantry, and Nabby down cellar. She had barely
time to fill a bowl with mush, and scud.

How lightly she stepped over that back chamber floor, and how
gingerly she opened the grain-chest lid. The thief looked piteously
out at her from his bed of Indian corn. He was a handsome man,
somewhere between forty and fifty. Indeed he came of a very good
family in a town not so very far away. Horse-thiefs numbered some
very respectable personages in their clan in those days sometimes.

They carried on a whispered conversation while he ate. It was
arranged that Ann was to assist him off that night.

What a day poor Ann had, listening and watching in constant terror
every moment, for fear something would betray her. Beside, her
conscience troubled her sadly; she was far from being sure that she
was doing right in hiding a thief from justice. But the poor man's
tears, and the mention of his daughter, had turned the scale with
her; she could not give him up.

Her greatest fear was lest Mrs. Polly should take a notion to search
for mice in the grain-chests. She so hoped Nabby would not broach the
subject again. But there was a peculiarity about Nabby--she had an
exceedingly bitter hatred of rats and mice. Still there was no danger
of her investigating the grain-chests on her own account, for she was
very much afraid. She would not have lifted one of those lids, with
the chance of a rat or mouse being under it, for the world. If ever a
mouse was seen in the kitchen Nabby took immediate refuge on the
settle or the table and left some one else to do the fighting.

So Nabby, being so constituted, could not be easy on the subject this
time. All day long she heard rats and mice in the grain-chests; she
stopped and listened with her broom, and she stopped and listened
with her mop.

Ann went to look, indeed that was the way she smuggled the thief's
dinner to him, but her report of nothing the matter with the grain
did not satisfy Nabby. She had more confidence in Mrs. Polly. But
Mrs. Polly did not offer to investigate herself until after supper.
They had been very busy that day, washing, and now there was churning
to do. Ann sat at the churn, Mrs. Polly was cutting up apples for
pies; and Nabby was washing dishes, when the rats and mice smote her
deaf ears again.

"I knew I heerd 'em then," she said; "I don't bel