Laboriously the good woman stepped from door-stone to threshold, and voluminously filling the wooden rocker which Mrs. Weston offered her, she fanned herself with her handkerchief, ejaculating between gasps for breath, “Lor’ me! How hot it is! Ef I ever get my breath again, I’ll try ter talk a spell.” But it would have been something greater than shortness of breath that could have completely silenced Mrs. Hodgkins. A few energetic movements of the palm-leaf fan which Randy offered her, a few moments of jerky rocking in the old wooden rocker, and she was ready to begin.
“Well there, Mis’ Weston, I b’lieve I can talk now,” said she. “Joel was goin’ over to the barn raisin’, an’ I told him I didn’t care nothin’ ’bout seein’ it; but ef he’d a mind to drive me as fur as your house, I’d call in an’ look at yer a spell, ’n’ I can’t spare the time to talk ’n’ not do somethin’ at the same time,” and she drew from a capacious bag an old woollen stocking, saying, “I thought I’d bring my knittin’ along and p’haps git this stockin’ footed down while I was talkin’.”
“Why, that’s a woollen stocking,” said little Prue.
“Lor’ yes, child, it’s one of Joel’s winter stockin’s. I was up attic yesterday huntin’ over my rag bag, ’n’ I came across a lot of his old winter stockin’s that I’d ’bout decided to throw away, ’n’ I says to myself, ‘Sophrony Hodgkins, that’s downright wasteful,’ ’n’ I’ve just set myself a task to foot ’em down ’fore winter.” Her needles clicked furiously, and she knit around several times before she spoke again. With her brows contracted she worked until she felt sure that her knitting was “straightened out,” then she paused for a chat.
“Did you know,” she commenced, “that Phœbe Small was a beggin’ an’ a teasin’ her pa to send her to boardin’ school? Well, she is, ’n’ none of the girls could find out what put it in her head ter want ter go ’til Jemima Babson teased it out of her. Seems at the picnic Miss Dayton, in some story she was tellin’ the children, let out that she went away from home ter school, ’n’ Phœbe got the idee that ter go away ter school would jest be the makin’ of her. Jemima don’t care what she says, an’ she up an’ told Phœbe that it ‘would take more ’n boardin’ school to make her as sweet as Miss Dayton,’ all of which was true, but not ter Phœbe’s likin’.”
“Is she going to boarding school?” asked Randy.
“Land, no! Her ma told her to wait ’til she’d learned all there was ter learn at our deestric’ school ’fore she talked ’bout goin’ anywhere else; and that ’bout finished it.”
Here Mrs. Hodgkins, who had said all this without stopping, paused to take breath. “I shouldn’t like my girls to be away at boardin’ school,” said Mrs. Weston, “and I think Mrs. Small would feel ’bout as I do.”
“An’ there’s Mrs. Buffum,” continued Mrs. Hodgkins, “with all her children, ’n’ she says they’ve got to be where she can see ter them, an’ git their larnin’ ter home, and now I’ll tell yer the joke. It seems Miss Dayton laughed when she heard about it, for she wasn’t at boardin’ school at all; she was at school, and was boardin’ at a big hotel with her aunt, ’n’ the hotel was near the school. But there, ye know Phœbe Small never gits anything more ’n half right.
“But I’ll tell ye somethin’ worth tellin’. Old Sandy McLeod’s comin’ to meetin’!”