Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

OUR NEIGHBORS 131
mother about all these awesome stories, which I did while
Isabelie was still on the departing path.
The hired man, Sam by name, did not like this queer old
woman and, believing himself to be something of a poet, he
made a number of stanzas with Aunt Isabelie as the subject.
I have forgotten all but these few lines:
The house that looks so lonesome
Why don't you tear it down?
The inmate is so loathesome;
How I detest her frown!
Yes, the house did look lonesome without, and within as well,
where an aged woman sat by a smoldering fire through the
long winter evenings, plying her knitting-needles making
socks for market, so that she could buy tea and coffee and
brown sugar and, once in a while, a little molasses. All her
cooking was done in the primitive style; the meat was boiled
over the fire; numerous pothooks dangled from the old black
crane; an iron teakettle suspended from one of the hooks
sang or gurgled or hissed, making at times its own startling
combination of sound in that silent house. An old cat slept
away the long winter evenings on a rug near Aunt Isabelie as
she thought of the long years fled, or perchance, and more
likely, of some news she was eager to tell.
Our hired girl would sometimes take me to spend the evening
there; I remember how comfortable she always kept her
little house. There were two beds in the one room; these
were made up very high with foot valences all around them.
In one corner of her room she did her kitchen work and another
was her sitting room; the beds were in corners which were
doing duty as bedrooms and the only partitions between all
these apartments were imaginary lines.
One day Aunt Isabelie called in Brother Joe and me to
sympathize with her in a misfortune. She had a fine smoked
ham which she was keeping for spring, when one day she discovered
that it had grown strangely light in weight. Upon
examination she found that mice had gnawed a hole in the
top near the string and had eaten out all the good lean meat,