But they did not measure Marcia Haddon for her grave clothes. She began again to take up the affairs of life. She found the sympathy of all these people of a very gentle sort. The secretiveness and the apathy of the Cumberlands, taking life as it came, were extended to the stranger as well. But all her life it had been Marcia Haddon’s trait to observe rather than to talk; and for a long time she only observed—and pondered what she saw.
These strange people—how poor they were, How very poor! Their furniture was mostly made by hand—these chairs, their legs stubbed by an age of wear on the puncheon floors, went back a generation or more. She rested in a corded bed, made of walnut in rude mountain workmanship. The table upon which she saw daily meals served was hewn out by a local carpenter. The spinning wheel whose whirring she heard in another room was, as Granny Williams assured her, made by her own father in an earlier time. “An’ she’s a good wheel,” added the old woman. “I kin run her all day an’ she’ll never onct throw her band.” The little flax wheel with its more strident hum also was an heirloom carefully preserved.
And all these people were so busy, so under the constant necessity of individual, personal labor. The skeining and the hanking of yarns, the winding of bobbins for the looms, the repair of the loom sleighs by the ancient who made a specialty in such matters—all these things spoke of a day entirely foreign to all the experience of Marcia Haddon, who, born into easy circumstances, in another country, never had known real labor.
There was no cook-stove in Granny Williams’ house—the old pot-hooks at the fireside, the crane and its pendent hooks, the heavy cast-iron oven, the brass kettles, an infrequent copper vessel of this sort or that—all these went back to another day. The “furrin woman” for the first time in her life saw what was the responsibility of a home, saw first the beauty of personal industry.
Time was coming on now for the hoeing of the corn planted on these steep hillsides. From her window Marcia Haddon could see women working along with the men, children as well. And then Granny Williams would tell her of her own young wifehood, when with her husband she had started in to clear their farm, and had helped in digging out the stumps and in logging up the felled trees for the burning. She spoke with pride of granddaughters of her own able to do as good a day at the hoe as “ary man.”