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

144
ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
was many weeks before he was able to be out. During that
time the Mount Pleasant Church came over and had prayer
meeting at his home. Added to the infirmities this fall
occasioned, he was afflicted all his latter years with asthma.
Their old home was some distance from the barns, so Uncle
Jimmie prepared for their declining years by erecting a new
frame house near his other buildings, so he could the more
easily attend to his chores. Thus it came about that they
left the old home for the new, placing a tenant in the former
to carry on the work of the farm.
As the years passed on Johnnie became more and more
helpless, eventually losing his mind, and they found it necessary
to place him in the Long View Hospital at Carthage, some four
miles distant. Before this sad day good Uncle Jimmie had
been called to his rest and Aunt Betsy was all alone; but true
to her life's principles she clung to her afflicted child, and every
week she made a tour, I presume on horseback, over the long
stretch of road to the state hospital at Long View. Poor,
dear heart, how sad it all was to finish her days in this way!
After a most laborious life on this large farm with her housekeeping
duties, her large dairy, her much scouring and scrubbing,
she found herself alone in the midst of the accumulations
of her long and industrious hfe, her good husband gone, her
one poor child to whom she had been so devoted in a condition
even her warm mother love could not help, and the fruits of
her manifold labors were but poor comfort, unshared by her
own. Her dear home was rich in the household treasures of
her day; the rag rugs and striped rag carpet, the work of her
middle life, were kept carefully swept and dusted; upstairs in
the clothes presses were stacks of beautiful quilts and blankets,
piled one upon another. What wonderful quilts they were,
quilted so closely sometimes that they were almost darned!
The old names for the patterns chase through my memory,
though I wonder if any skillful, aged fingers set their careful
stitches in patchwork any more — diamonds and herringbone,
wreaths and feathers and fans, wrought out in fine stitches that
are a wonder yet; parallel lines there were, too, and on some
quilts they were no more than an eighth of an inch apart.