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WHO GOT THE MITTEN?
BY ROSE TERRY COOKE.
"DEER ANT ROXY,--Ive hed consider'ble many calls for mittins along back this Winter: mostly they're wove goods, thet dont last no time. Its come into my head that mabbe you'd jest as lives make a leetle suthin to buy snuff an' handkerchers with, odd times, and reklectin you used to be a master hand to knit this is for to say that ef you'd fall to and knit a lot of them two-threaded mittins we boys set by so, why I could sell 'em for ye--on commission. Ef you're agreeble why drop me a line to 117 Blank St St Josephs, you see its mostly drovers and sech wants 'em.
"Yours to command,
"JOHN JACKSON."
"The lands sakes!" ejaculated Miss Roxy Blair, as she laid down her spectacles after reading this letter. "John was allers the beateree for gumption. I allers said he'd make a spoon or spile a horn, an' I do b'lieve it's the spoon. Well said! I've got full twenty run o' blue yarn I spun last year, an' some red: guess there won't be no white wanted in them parts. I'll set to an' get a lot more red over to Miss Billins's. Wonder ef she'd git wind on't, and go to makin' mittins herself?--she beats all to question folks up. I'll tell her I'm a-goin' to teach Nance to knit; and so I be: 'ta'n't no lie. I will teach her to knit an' help on the mittins. It'll be suthin for her to do nights, 'stead of readin' all the newspaper scraps she can pick up."
Nancy Peck was Miss Roxy's bound girl; the old lady lived alone in a small brown house on a hill-side far above Bassett; a grass-grown track ran by the house, through the woods that clothed the hill-top, over and away into the heart of the Green Mountains.
Little Nancy had been bound out to Miss Roxana only about a year when John Jackson's letter reached Bassett. Miss Roxy was getting old; rheumatism had laid hold of her, and she could not hobble up and down hill to the village any longer: so she resolved to take a young girl into her house to wait on her.
"'Twon't cost a great deal," she said to herself. "There's the gardin a'n't half planted; she can drop potaters as well as a man, and hill 'em up too; and I can set more beans outside the fence; when Isr'el comes up to spade the gardin, he can fix up a place for more beans, and Ingin meal's cheap. Fact is, anyway, I durstn't be up here alone no longer, and hirin' some feller or 'nother to do arrands would cost more'n it come to. There's ma's old gownds can be cut over for her, sech as is too ragged for me."
Having made up her mind, the old lady persuaded a neighbor who sometimes drove by her house to mill to take her in, and leave her at the poor-house, which was on his way, until he came back with his grist. When he returned he found two passengers, for Miss Roxy had fixed on Nancy for an experiment.
"'Twas Hobson's choice," she explained to Mr. Tucker, as they drove along; "there wa'n't no other gal there. She's real small, but Miss Simons says she's spry an' handy, and she ha'n't got nobody belongin' to her, so's't I sha'n't be pestered with folks a-comin' round."
In six months little Nancy had become so useful that she was formally bound out to the old lady, and now she went to school in summer half a day, and had learned to read and write tolerably. She was very lonesome in that solitary house. There were children at the poor-house whom she played with, tended, and loved, but Miss Roxy had not even a cat; and when Nancy, in the longing of her loving little heart, took a crook-necked squash out of the shed, tied a calico rag about its neck, and made a dolly of it to be company for her in the little garret where she slept, Miss Roxy hunted it up--for she kept count of everything she had--boxed Nancy's ears soundly, and cut up poor little yellow Mary Ann, and boiled her in a pot for pies.
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