There lives an old lady in a great western city (I don’t give its name) who ought to wear a crown instead of a bonnet. The town trembles before her masterful benevolence. Her magnificent house dominates the “best community,” and her six middle-aged married children, established near-by in houses of equal magnificence, do not dare call their souls their own.
A neighbor of mine was in her city last year, and was taken to see her. The old lady seemed to know an amazing amount, not only about our far-away eastern State, but about our actual county. She finally showed such an absorbing interest in particular households that my friend said:
“But how can you know? How _can_ you have heard about so-and-so?”
“Child,” said the old chieftainess, her fine eyes twinkling and filling, “My name is no guide to you now, except that it’s Irish, but I was born and brought up in your county. I was an Esmond from Ridgefield, and had my schooling at the convent, not six miles from your door.”
After Ridgefield, with its deserted convent, you come presently to where the rolling country is suddenly flung amazingly apart in the chasm-like valley of the Winding River. Weir’s Mills, the village at the head of navigation, is a pleasant peaceful little place, a very old settlement, with a noted old church.
A neighbor of ours, a man now of eighty, has told me that in his childhood at Weir’s Mills, the school had neither paper nor blackboard nor slates for the children to write on. The teacher smoothed the ashes of the hearthstone out flat with a shingle, and the children did their figuring on that. Farmers going into town chalked the figures of their sales on their beaver hats, and the assessor chalked the taxes up on the doors.
The school-teachers were taken to board in turn, two weeks at a time, by different families; and a friend, now an elderly woman, has told me that when teaching, as a young girl, she had as a rule to share her bed with three or four children of the family. In several places the hens slept in the room too. The schools of course were ungraded. After her teaching hours she helped in the housework, but she liked it, and made warm friends. She found the life vigorous and hardy—“It was life that was every bit of it alive,” she has told me.