Friday afternoon she was curled up by the fire reading, looking like a big kitten, if you had seen only her gray frock. Uncle Win had glanced at her every now and then. He did not mind having her around—not as much, in fact, as Cary, who tumbled books about and moved chairs noisily and kept one's nerves astir all the time, as a big healthy fellow whose body has grown so fast that he hardly knows what to do with his long arms and legs is apt to do.
Doris was like a little mouse. She never rattled the leaves when she turned them over, she never put books in the cases upside down, she did not finger papers or anything that lay on the table when she stood by it. He had a fancy that all children were meddlesome and curious and given to asking queer questions: these were the things he remembered about Cary in those first years of sorrow when he could hardly bear him out of his sight.
Instead, Doris was restful with her quaint ways. She did not run against chairs nor move a stool so that the legs emitted a "screak" of agony, and she could sit still for an hour at a time if she had a book. Of course, being a girl she ought to sew instead.
It was getting quite dusky. Uncle Winthrop came and stirred the fire and put on a pine log, then drew up his chair.
"Put away your book, Doris. You will try your eyes."
She shut it up and came and stood by him. He passed his arm around her.
"Uncle Win, there was a time when people had to read and sew by the blaze of logs and torches. There were no candles."
"They did it not so many years ago here. I dare say they are still doing it out in country places. They go to bed early."
"What seems queer to me is that people are continually finding out things. They must at one time have been very ignorant. No, they could not have been either," reflectively. "For just think how Adam named the animals. And Miss Arabella said that Job knew all about the stars and called them by their names. But perhaps it was the little things like candles and such. Yet they had lamps ever and ever so long ago."
"People seem to advance and then fall back. They emigrate and cannot take all their appliances with them, and they make simpler things to use until they have leisure and begin to accumulate wealth. You see, they could not bring a great deal from England or Holland in the vessels they had in early sixteen hundred. So they had to begin at the foundation in many things."