THERE be no use talking o' holidays this year!" said Mehitable rather bitterly, the swift—a wooden apparatus for winding yarn, fastened to the edge of the table with a thumbscrew—turning rapidly as she spoke. For this was the time of the Revolution and the American soldiers must be clad.
"I suppose not," agreed Charity, looking up from her seam with a sigh as she reached over to change the cloth in the beak of her sewing bird.
It was dusk in the big kitchen, with only the firelight leaping and flaring in its great cavern of a fireplace, where Charity, who was thirteen years old, could stand erect and where the immense back-log had been dragged into its place by one of the farm horses on a certain autumn day. Now the shadows of the two girls, sitting upon their three-legged stools at each end of the old mahogany table, danced on the mud-plastered walls behind them.
"But I really do not see why we cannot think o' them," continued Charity after awhile. "One might get much pleasure that way, Hitty."
