Mistress Condit's busy fingers flew, hour after hour, and her brisk step could be heard from dawn to dark at her spinning wheel. Her whole heart and soul were wrapped in the enterprise to which, uncomplainingly, she had given her only son.
Squire Condit was totally unlike his neighbor, Squire Briggs, whose parsimonious clutch refused to abandon any of his possessions without an enormous profit to himself. Indeed, it was common report that he, like the Tories in the village of Caldwell over the mountain, sold stock and grain, as well as wool, at immense profit to the British in New York. For during the winter of 1776–77 the residents of New York, as also the thousands of British troops there and on Staten Island, were in great straits for necessary supplies. Many articles of food could not be had at all, while others were so dear that even the most wealthy grew desperate. It was the Tory farmers who preyed upon these people and afterward became the first of the war profiteers. Thanksgiving Day passed quietly. Mehitable and Charity sat down silently to the corn-meal porridge and sparse slices of bacon with their parents and the men-of-all-work, Amos and Judd, trying not to think of bygone holidays when, with the brother now so far away, they had assembled around the cheerful board that had seemed to groan with all the good things Mistress Condit knew so well how to cook. They were delighted, however, by a large pumpkin pie which she produced with sparkling eyes.
"I could not bear to have the day pass without one bit of feast," she explained half apologetically to her
