I tied my horse to the fence and walked up the worn footpath to the
door. Apparently no one was at home. Under this impression I knocked
vehemently, by way of making sure; and a weak, cracked voice at length
answered, "Come in!" There, by the window, perhaps the same where she
sat so long before, crouched in an old chair covered with calico, her
bent fingers striving with mechanical motion to knit a coarse stocking,
sat old Mrs. Buel. Age had worn to the extreme of attenuation a face
that must always have been hard-featured, and a few locks of snow-white
hair, straying from under the bandanna handkerchief of bright red and
orange that was tied over her cap and under her chin, added to the
old-world expression of her whole figure. She was very deaf; scarcely
could I make her comprehend that I wanted to see her grand-daughter; at
last she understood, and asked me to sit down till Hetty should come
from school; and before long, a tall, thin figure opened the gate and
came slowly up the path.

I had a good opportunity to observe the constant, dutiful, self-denying
Yankee girl,--girl no longer, now that twenty years of unrewarded
patience had lined her face with unmistakable graving. But I could not
agree with Eben's statement that she was not pretty; she must have been
so in her youth; even now there was beauty in her deep-set and heavily
fringed dark eyes, soft, tender, and serious, and in the noble and
pensive Greek outline of the brow and nose; her upper lip and chin were
too long to agree well with her little classic head, but they gave a
certain just and pure expression to the whole face, and to the large
thin-lipped mouth, flexible yet firm in its lines. It is true, her hair
was neither abundant, nor wanting in gleaming threads of gray; her skin
was freckled, sallow, and devoid of varying tint or freshness; her
figure angular and spare; her hands red with hard work; and her air at
once sad and shy;--still, Hetty Buel was a very lovely woman in my eyes,