Her husband came in smiling, a veritable brother Jonathan, hale and
hearty, though tired, for he had arisen from bed at three o'clock
that morning, milked a dozen cows, done chores enough to kill a dozen
dapper city clerks, and then tramped beside his oxen through the deep
snow, taking a load of wood to sell in Dover nearly twenty miles away.

This load he had labored hard for two days to cut on the mountainside,
and it brought him the munificent sum of three dollars, yet he was
happier than any multi-millionaire I ever saw. There were stumps he
had dug out, and rocks he had picked on his farm, enough to fence his
hundred acres almost sky-high; but even then he said he had to shoot
his corn and potatoes out of a gun to get them through the stones into
the ground.

This family was the life of every husking-bee, where each red ear of
corn led to rollicking fun, resounding smacks on rosy cheeks, and of
paring-bees when even numbered apple-seeds were the match-makers for
bachelors and maids. They often took prizes in my spelling-matches,
when the bashful swains were allowed to clasp hands with their
sweethearts, which led to many lifelong hand and heart clasps in this
good old-fashioned town where there were no despairing old maids nor
lone, lorn, grouty unmated men.

They went every Sunday to whittle sticks, swap jack-knives and
horses, and to listen to the white-haired parson who led them by the
resistless rhetoric of a blameless life, as well as by his heartfelt
prayers and exhortations in those "ways which are ways of pleasantness
and those paths which are paths of peace."