But Myron bore her grandmother's bad temper with patience and without bitterness. Her father often said to her, "The yeast is bitter, but it is the yeast that makes bread sweet."
Jed Holder died one day in autumn, when the aromatic green cones had been picked from the hops and lay browning upon paper-covered boards in the sun. The last breath Jed Holder drew savored of their fragrance, and the aroma of the hops dispelled the faint odor of mortality in the death chamber.
The winter succeeding his death was a long and bitter one. Fuel was high; and however sparingly bought, still the plainest provisions cost money. Albeit Myron and her grandmother lived frugally, yet they exhausted Jed's poor hoardings very soon. Spring found them penniless.
But in summer, life is more easily sustained, and Myron found various occupations which sufficed to keep her grandmother in tolerable comfort. Hoeing and weeding, cleaning house and berrying, doing extra washings, cooking for threshers and harvesters, all had their part in Myron's busy life. Her grandmother was never satisfied either with her ability or her willingness to work; but for all that she worked, and worked well too.
There was soon proof positive of this given her grandmother, for after Myron had helped in the half yearly saturnalia of work Mrs. Deans called "house cleaning," the latter arranged to have Myron come to the farm daily to help the bound girl.
For that summer Mrs. Deans had boarders--boarders who read, and walked, and brought in great bunches of golden rod, and masses of wild aster, and long trails of virgin bower clematis.
There were Mrs. and Miss Rexton, Miss Carpenter and Dr. Henry Willis, a young medico. They had all driven to the lake one day from the Mineral Spring Hotel, where they were stopping. The lake curved in a shining semi-circle round Jamestown, and swept off in ever-widening curves far away, until sky and water blended in a band of blinding silver radiance. The party of four had been caught in a thunderstorm, and sought refuge on Mrs. Deans' veranda.
Then and there they had decided that they must come there for the rest of the summer, and with one accord set about persuading Mrs. Deans to give her consent. Of a truth their persuasion would have had little effect upon that worthy woman, had not the remuneration suggested seemed to her quite extravagantly sufficient; therefore she was pleased at length to accede to their request, and a few days later found the quartette comfortably settled at Mrs. Deans'.