PLOUGHING MARY’S FIELD
“Child, the heretic and the hangman go to church on this morning!”
Her speech is unlike anybody else’s. Every sentence is vivid, but they lose their quaint flavor in telling. She is delighted (she is a fine cook), but excited, too, at getting a “company meal,” and loses her appetite.
“The cook cannot eat, not if she were at the gates of heaven, at these times,” she puts it.
She was telling one day of an unfortunate young farm neighbor—
“He knelt on a nail, and took lock-jaw. They hoisted him to Portland, but it warn’t of no use. He died in four days. He was a beautiful young man. Warn’t it terrible?”
Somehow I never fail to see the poor youth caught up in a sheet and swung through the air the whole journey.
Mary was born and brought up in the Catholic community at Ridgefield; but she has spent little time there. Fifty-five years ago, when she was sixteen, she learned fine sewing and clear-starching at the Great House of our neighborhood, and then nothing would do but she must seek her fortune in Boston, where she already had two sisters in service. She made the voyage in a sailing vessel, a small brig laden with hay. She found out the name of a first-rate dressmaker, in Temple Place; next she bought a piece of fine gray cashmere, and cut and made herself a jacket and dress. Then she presented herself.
“How do I know you are a seamstress at all?” the dressmaker asked.