“In the clock weights, father.”
“Stop the clock!” cried the father. “Oh, Annie, ’tis a marvel you are!”
The old clock, with an oak frame, stood in the corner of the “living room,” as the common room was called, whose doors faced the parlor and the kitchen. It had stood there for a generation. It was some eight feet high and two broad in its upper part and two in its lower. It had a brass ornament on the top, and it ticked steadily and solemnly always and so loud as to be heard in the upper rooms at night. On its face were figures of the sun and moon. Annie’s hand had for several years wound the clock.
The great clock was stopped, the heavy weights were removed, and the minutemen carried them to the forge of Baldwin, the blacksmith, where they were speedily melted and poured into the molds.
The company went joyfully away, and as they marched down the hill the captain ordered the men to give three cheers for Annie Overfield. That that lead did much for the history of our country there can be no doubt. How much one can not tell.
One day, shortly after these events, a clock-cleaner came to the house on the hill. The maple leaves were flying and the migrating birds gathering in the rowen meadows. He said:
“I can not regulate the clock now, but I will be around again another year.”
When he came back, the sylph-like Annie was gone—where, none knew. She had been gone a long time.
Why had she gone? It was the old tale. A common English sailor from the provinces came to work on the farm. He received his pay in the fall and disappeared, and the day after he went Annie went too. It was very mysterious. She had been “her mother’s girl.”
She had spent her evenings with the sailor after the mowing days by the grindstone under the great maple-trees. He had sung to her English sailor songs and told her stories of the Spanish main and of his cottage at St. John’s. He was a homely man, but merry-hearted, and Annie had listened to him as to one enchanted. She carried him cold drinks “right from the well” in the field. She watched by the bars for him to come in from the meadows and fields. She grew thin, had “crying spells,” thought she was going “into a decline.” She was not like herself. The love stronger than that for a mother had found Annie amid the clover-fields when the west winds were blowing. The common sailor had become to her more than life. She felt that she could live better without others than without him.