"Come, mother," said Dorothy, hurrying her in at the gate. "I'm going
to make a great pot of mush, and have it hot for supper, and fried for
breakfast, and warmed up with molasses for dinner, and there'll be some
cold with milk for supper, and we shan't have any cooking to do at all!"

They went around by the kitchen door. Rachel stopped in the woodshed, and
the tears rushed to her eyes.

"Dear father! How he has worked over that wood, early and late, to spare
us!"

We will not revive Dorothy's struggles with the farm-work, and with the
boys. They were an isolated family at the mill-house; their peculiar faith
isolated them still more, and they were twelve miles from meeting and the
settlement of Friends at Stony Valley. Dorothy's pride kept her silent
about her needs, lest they might bring reproach upon her father among the
neighbors, who would not be likely to feel the urgency of his spiritual
summons.

The summer heats came on apace and the nights grew shorter. It seemed
to Dorothy that she had hardly stretched out her tired young body and
forgotten her cares, in the low, attic bedroom, before the east was
streaked with light and the birds were singing in the apple-trees, whose
falling blossoms drifted in at the window.

One day in early June, Friend Barton's flock of sheep (consisting of nine
experienced ewes, six yearlings, and a sprinkling of close-curled lambs
whose legs had not yet come into mature relations with their bodies) was
gathered in a wattled inclosure, beside the stream that flowed into the