“Great land of love! if the teacher at school had ’a’ taught me like that, I’d ’a’ been a minister! I felt as though she’d cracked a hole in my head and was just pouring the l’arning in through a funnel. And ’twa’n’t more’n ten minutes before she found out ’twas my eyes the trouble. I’m terrible near-sighted. Well, that was before the days when everybody wore specs. There wa’n’t no way to git specs for me; but you couldn’t stump Aunt Almera. She just grabbed up a sort of magnifying-glass that she used, she said, for her sewing, now her eyes were kind o’ failing her, and she give it to me. ‘I’ll take bigger stitches,’ says she, laughing; ‘big stitches don’t matter so much as reading for an American citizen.’
“Well, sir, she didn’t forgit me; she kept at me to practice to home with my magnifying-glass, and it was years before I could git by the house without Aunt Almera come out on the porch and hollered to me, that bossy way she had, ‘Lemuel, you come in for a minute and let me hear you read.’ Sometimes it kind o’ madded me, she had such a way o’ thinkin’ she could make everybody stand ’round. And sometimes it made me laugh, she was so old, and not much bigger’n my fist. But, by gol, I l’arned to read, and I have taken a sight of comfort out of it. I don’t never set down in the evening and open up the Necronsett ‘Journal’ without I think of Aunt Almera Canfield.”
One day I was sent over to Mrs. Pratt’s to get some butter, and found it just out of the churn. So I sat down to wait till Mrs. Pratt should work it over, munching on a cookie, and listening to her stream of talk—the chickens, the hail-storm of the other day, had my folks begun to make currant jelly yet? and so on—till she had finished and was shaping the butter into beautiful round pats. “This always puts me in mind of Aunt Almera,” she said, interrupting an account of how the men had chased a woodchuck up a tree—who ever heard of such a thing? “Whenever I begin to make the pats, I remember when I was a girl working for her. She kept you right up to the mark, I tell you, and you ought to have seen how she lit into me when she found out some of my butter-pats were just a little over a pound and some a little less. It was when she happened to have too much cream and she was ‘trading in’ the butter at the store. You’d have thought I’d stolen a fifty-cent piece to hear her go on! ‘I sell those for a pound; they’ve got to be a pound,’ says she, the way she always spoke, as though that ended it.
“‘But land sakes, Mis’ Canfield,’ says I, all out o’ patience with her, ‘an ounce or two one way or the other—it’s as likely to be more as less, you know! What difference does it make? Nobody expects to make their pats just a pound! How could you?’
“‘How could you? How could you?’ says she. ‘Why, just the way you make anything else the way it ought to be—by keeping at it till it is right. What other way is there?’
“I didn’t think you could do it. I knew you couldn’t; but you always had to do the way Mis Canfield said, and so I began grumbling under my breath about high-handed, fussy old women. But she never minded what you said about her, so long as you did your work right. So I fussed and fussed, clipping off a little, and adding on a little, and weighing it between times. It was the awfulest bother you ever saw, because it spoiled the shape of your pat to cut at it so much, and you had to start it over again every time.
“Well, you wouldn’t believe it, how soon I got the hang of it! She’d made me think about it so much, I got interested, and it wasn’t any time at all before I could tell the heft of a pat to within a fraction of an ounce just by the feel of it in my hand. And I never forgot it. You never do forget that kind of thing. I brought up my whole family on that story. ‘Now you do that spelling lesson just exactly right,’ I’d say to my Lucy, ‘just the way Aunt Almera made me do the butter pats!’”
I was sitting on the steps of the Town Hall, trying to make a willow whistle, when the janitor came along and opened the door. “The Ladies’ Aid are going to have a supper in the downstairs room,” he explained, getting out a broom. I wandered in to visit with him while he swept and dusted the pleasant little community sitting-room where our village social gatherings were held. He moved an armchair and wiped off the frame of the big portrait of Lincoln. “Your great-grandmother gave that, do you know it?” he observed, and then, resting on the broom for a moment and beginning to laugh, “Did you ever hear how Aunt Almera got folks stirred up to do something about this room? Well, ’twas so like her! The place used to be the awfulest hole you ever saw. Years ago they’d used it to lock up drunks in, or anybody that had to be locked up. Then after the new jail was built the sheriff began to take prisoners down there. But nobody did anything to this room to clean it up or fix it. It belongs to the town, you know, and nobody ever’ll do anything that they think they can put off on the town. The women used to talk a lot about it—what a nice place ’twould be for socials, and how ’twould keep the boys off the streets, and how they could have chicken suppers here, same as other towns, if this room was fixed up. But whose business was it to fix it up? The town’s of course! And of course nobody ever thinks that he and his folks are all there is to the town. No, they just jawed about it, and kept saying ‘wa’n’t the selectmen shiftless because they didn’t see to it!’ But of course the selectmen didn’t have the money to do anything. Nothing in the law about using tax money to fix up rooms for sociables, is there? And those were awful tight times, when money came hard and every cent of tax money had to be put to some good plain use. So the selectmen said they couldn’t do anything. And nobody else would, because it wasn’t anybody’s business in particular, and nobody wanted to be put upon and made to do more than his share. And the room got dirtier and dirtier, with the lousy old mattress the last drunk had slept on right there on the floor in the corner, and broken chairs and old wooden boxes, and dust and dry leaves that had blown in through the windows when the panes of glass were broken—regular dumping-ground for trash.
“Well, one morning bright and early—I’ve heard my mother tell about it a thousand times—the first person that went by the Town Hall seen the door open and an awful rattling going on. He peeked in, and there was little old Aunt Almera, in a big gingham apron, her white hair sticking out from underneath a towel she’d tied her head up in, cleaning away to beat the band. She looked up, saw him standing and gaping at her, and says, just as though that was what she did every day for a living, ‘Good morning,’ she says. ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’