When money is to be raised for some neighborhood purpose partners for the evening are chosen in what I should think might be a trying, though a most practical fashion. On one Saturday evening the ladies, on the next the gentlemen, are put up for auction as partners, the price paid being in peanuts. A popular partner will sometimes bring as much as a hundred and twenty-five peanuts; and why little Alfred Stoddard, who never did anything in his life but get a musical degree at some tiny college (there are even those who say that he bought the degree), who reads catalogues and nurses his dignity while his wife works the farm, should regularly fetch this fancy price, I never could see.
“Oh, well!” says Sam Marston, “Alfred has them handsome, mournful dark eyes. The ladies can’t resist ’em.”
The three Watson farms lie to the east of the hill, right under its rocky ledges, and are sheltered by it; indeed the whole of the beautiful rounded valley which they occupy is rimmed entirely by low abrupt hills. It must be an old lake bottom, for the last remnant of the lake, a pond a hundred yards or so long, still sparkles bright blue in the midst of it.
Forty years ago Tristam Watson, with his wife and four children, three boys, and Marcia, the youngest, went north two hundred miles, to the Aroostook, when that region still lay under heavy forest. He built his cabin among the first-growth pines, and cleared and planted among the trees, burning and uprooting the stumps gradually, as he could. It was pioneer life, with no roads and almost no neighbors. Bear and moose were common, and deer more than common, and there were wolves in a hard winter; but he was a hardy, vigorous man with hardy children, and he did well.
He had no idea of cutting himself and his family off from their home ties. Nothing of the sort. The railroad ran only a short part of the way, and they could not afford that part, but every year they hitched up and drove home, the whole distance. It took them about five days. They had a little home-made tent, and they built their fire and set up their gipsy housekeeping each night beside the road. If it rained, “why then it rained,” Marcia says. The year was marked by this flight; it was their great adventure, and apparently a perfect frolic, at least for the children. They stayed two or three weeks, saw all the “folks,” and went back to their strenuous forest life.
Tristam died at about sixty, and the family came home, and took up the three beautiful farms left to the sons by their grandparents. The two elder sons married, the third stayed with his mother and sister.
Not long after they came back, Marcia fell ill. There was a badly aggravated strain, and she had measles and bronchitis, and after that, as we say in the country, she “commenced ailing.” She changed in a year from a blooming girl to the little thin, white-faced woman she is now (though her black eyes never stopped twinkling).
A long illness on an isolated farm is a bad thing for more than bodily health. The Rural Free Delivery and Rural Telephone, and the lengthening trolley lines, are bringing the most wholesome stir imaginable after the old colorless days; but in old times the outlying farms too often held pitiful brooding figures of women, sunk in depression. Marcia’s terror was lest she should fall under this shadow. She had seen only too many such cases, and the fear was beginning to realize itself, she often has told me; but from its very danger her mind, fundamentally sane and vigorous, plucked out its salvation. First absorbed in her own ailments, she began to question her doctor about the cure of other diseases. Soon she asked him for books on medicine. She read and studied, and then one day she asked him to take her to see a suffering neighbor. To humor her, he did, and almost at once, ill as she still was, she began to help nursing patients on the neighboring farms. Once her mind took hold of work, it cleared itself as the sky clears of clouds when the wind blows. It was like a slender but vigorous-fibred little tree reaching out and finding life-giving soil for itself. I do not believe she has an ounce of extra strength, even now, and she is by no means always free from pain, but she can do her work, and for five years she has been the most sought-after nurse in half the county.
She has an imp’s fun (and had, even when she was most ill) and can make a groaning patient laugh, as she lays on hot compresses. As we drove home that day in October, she told me how she had been outwitting her brother. (He is a handsome blond-bearded fellow, with what is rare on the farms, a carriage as erect as a soldier’s. He is far slower-natured than Marcia.)
“He’s been real tardy, this year, in getting the hams smoked, and he put off building a smoke-house. He was all for hauling his lumber. Nothing would do but that lumber must be hauled first, whether the pigs were smoked, or whether they flew; and there were Mother and I in want of our bacon.”