gave no very strong evidence of doing much, while the cherry tree
over the well was touched with blight; but for all that she felt
that providence would in some way enable her to scrape up fruit
enough to get over the winter. What was deficient in one part of the
country was made up by the plenty of another. She had recently,
however, felt a great drawback in the bad times consequent upon the
policy of the present administration. At last she had been told it
was the folks in power at Washington who had made times so hard,
that the wealthy manufacturer for whom she "binded" the shoes her
boys stitched, could only give two cents a pair, where formerly he
gave two and a half. But the cunning fellow, who was the sharpest
kind of a straight Whig, said if they got their side in at the next
election, he would come back to old prices, with cash instead of
store pay. Mrs. Trotbridge hoped it might be so, for the half cent
was a serious loss to a family so humble. But she was at a loss to
account how it was that if times were so hard, the manufacturer, who
could not afford to pay old prices, wanted a greater number of shoes
bound, and would hurry her life out to have them done in less time
than it were possible to do them.

The good woman, considering herself honored by such military and
political greatness, spread her table with fried bacon and new laid
eggs, and the cold pork and beans left over from yesterday, a few
shavings of dried beef, currant jelly of the most tempting kind,
doughnuts, hot and fresh out of the bacon fat, and bread made of
wheat raised on the two acre patch across the road, and to which she
added a cup of tea so delicate in flavor that it would have made a
Dutch grandmother return thanks to the East India Company. In truth
there was a snowy whiteness in the table linen, and a nicety and
freshness of flavor in the viands one only finds at a country house