Hillsboro People

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

He helped her raise her weighty body with the deftness of long practice and they both went dully into the house.

The knowledge of the sky and of the signs of weather which was almost an instinct with the descendant of generations of farmers, was put to an anxious use during the days which followed.

Not since the days when, as a young girl, she had roamed the mountains, as much a part of the forest and fields as any wild inhabitant, had she so scanned the face of the valley which was her world.

She had stopped hoping for any release from her sentence. She only prayed now for one more day of grace, and into each day she crowded a fullness of life which was like a renewal of her vigorous youth.

Of late years, existence had flowed so uniform a passage through the channels of habit that it had become but half sentient. The two old people had lived in almost as harmoniously vacant and vital a silence as the old trees in the forest back of the house. In the surroundings which generations of human use had worn to an exquisite fitness for their needs, and to which a long lifetime had adjusted their every action, they convicted their life with the unthinking sureness of a process of Nature. But now the old woman, feeling exile close upon her, drew from every moment of the familiar life an essential savor.

She knew there was no hope for her; the repeated visits of the doctor and his decided judgments left her no illusions as to the possibility of escape. "The very first cold snap you must certainly go," he said, with the inflexibility of the young. "Mr. Prentiss is likely to have one of his bad turns and you simply cannot give him the are he must have. Besides, when he is sick, you will have to look after the fires, and the slightest exposure would mean pneumonia. I've just written your son so." He drew on his overcoat. He was so recently from the hospital that it was still of a fashionable cut and texture. "I can't see anyway why you object to going. Your son can't afford to keep you both here, and hire somebody to look after you into the bargain. Think of the advantages you have there, theaters and museums and the like."

Mrs. Prentiss spoke sharply. "I've never been in a theater in my life and I hope I'll go to my grave without being; and as for museums and things, look at me! I'm so big I can hardly get into the cars, and my city grandchildren are ashamed to go out with me and have all the folks looking at the fat old woman from the country."

The doctor laughed involuntarily at this picture as he turned away.

"Do you think you are so big it takes the whole Necronsett valley to hold you?" he called lightly over his shoulder.

Mrs. Prentiss looked after him with burning eyes What did he know about the continuity of human life He had told her himself that he had never lived more than four years in one place. What did he know of ordering your life, not only for yourself, but for your parents and grandparents? She felt often as she looked upon the unchanging line of the mountains guarding the valley, as in her great-grandfather's time, that she saw with the eyes of her ancestors as well as her own. The room in which she stood had been her grandmother's bedroom, and her father had been born there, as she had been herself, and as her children had been. In her childhood she had looked up to the top of the tall chest of drawers as to a mountain peak, and her children had, after her. Every inequality in the floor was as familiar to her feet as to those of her great-grandmother. The big chest, where she had always kept her children's clothes, had guarded hers and her mother's, and as often as she had knelt by it, she had so vivid a recollection of seeing her mother and her grandmother in the same attitude, that she seemed to lose for a moment the small and confining sense of individual personality, and to become merged in a noble procession of mothers of the race.