“Why, when I was a lass in Devon I had stitched six samplers before I was your age; and one of them had the entire Lord’s prayer upon it embroidered in letters of red so small that your grandame had to don her spectacles in order to spell it out.
“Ah, well, the girls of to-day are catching the spirit of the times—revolt against the old order and small patience with the new. I must be off, Patience, and across the orchard to Mistress Edwards’ with a bowl of curds. She has a mind that they cure her gout. Do you attend your work while I am gone. The sampler is almost finished. I can read the text at the top in spite of its crooked letters, dear child:
“‘A Soft Answer Turneth Away Wrath.’
“Here are all the letters of the alphabet, too, and now it remains only for you to embroider your name in the cross-stitch. Measure your stitches with great care, for you will likely begin it so near the border that you will have small space left for Arnold.
“I shall be back by tea time.” Mistress Arnold stooped to touch with one thin, white hand, stripped of all its jewels, the bowed, brown head of the little girl who sat by the window sewing.
“If you finish the sampler by five o’clock, you may go out in the garden and play. Oh—”
Mistress Arnold turned in the doorway, and pulled from the green silk reticule which hung at her side, a long iron key.
“I will leave the key to the barn in your charge, Patience, and on no account give it to any one until I return. Your father tells me that his store of powder and shot is increasing daily, and we are likely to need these before long.”
Mistress Arnold sighed as she stepped over the threshold and took her way—a tall, straight figure in gray crinoline—between the pink clouds that the apple blooms made, and then out of sight.
Small Patience Arnold, a little brown-eyed lass who had seen eight summers in the quaint, white-walled town of Lexington, watched her mother. Then she leaned back in the stiff, wooden chair that was so much too high for her, drawing a weary little sigh. It was very dull, indeed, and stupid to stay in the bare kitchen. All outdoors, the first bees, the robins, and the perfume of the apple trees called her. Oh, if she might only drop her sewing to the floor, and run out to the garden, darting in and out among the trees like a bluebird in her straight frock of indigo-dyed homespun. If she might only sing in her sweet, clear voice, above the hum of bees and birds, the songs that her mother knew—the songs of merry old England where every one was happy, and everything was gay!