Not many days after the new arrivals had moved in, Hat appeared one afternoon in the dooryard. She was dressed for visiting. She had on a clean pink and white checked frock and the inevitable little white apron. On her head was a starched pink sunbonnet. She was a tremendous creature, both tall and stout, and her skin was coarse. But she looked handsome in a dark, bold, gipsy-like way. Judith, who was neither small nor delicate, looked like a frail blossom beside her.
"Well, if it hain't Hat Wolf!" exclaimed Judith, who was bringing a bucket of water from the cistern. She set the bucket down and hastened to meet her visitor.
"My, but I'm glad you've come to live here, Judy," said Hat, with genuine enthusiasm. "Las' year I got so's I wouldn't come over here no matter haow lonesome I was, 'cause old Aunt Jinny Patton wouldn't do nothing but set an' sigh an' say she knew the Lord was a-goin' to take her soon. Old people is that tiresome. Naow you an' me, when we hain't got much to do, kin visit each other. An' I'll lend you my books an' you kin lend me yourn; an' we'll sew rags together an' have good times. You know it gits awful lonesome in these hollers, an' anybody needs neighbors. Tain't like livin' on the pike."
Judith proudly showed Hat her new chicken coops, the four dozen hens that her father had given her, the place that they had selected for a garden spot and the shepherd pup which a neighbor had given them, a fluffy ball of black and white silk, trimmed, as nature knows how to trim, with soft tan. Then she led her into the house and showed her, piece by piece, all her wedding finery, her new sheets and towels and her bright bedquilts. Hat examined all these things with deep interest and exclaimed over them with unfeigned admiration. In the intervals of looking at the things to which Judith called her attention, her bold black eyes travelled about the room and took in every detail of its floor, walls, and furnishings. Nothing escaped her. She was alive with that small curiosity so frequent in farmers' wives, which causes them to take note of the smallest minutiæ of their neighbors' interiors. When she went away she carried in her mind an exact photograph of Judith's two rooms and of her dooryard. She even knew that Judith's clothesline was a wire and not a rope one. Such capacity for detail does solitude engender in the female mind.