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SARAH JONES? DISCOVERY. | «68
CHAPTE R VIL,
Ifuzza for the forests and hills!
. jluzza, for the berrics so blue!
Our baskets we'll cheerily fill,
While the thickets are sparkling with dew.
Years before the scene of our story returns to Catskill, Arthur
Jones and the pretty Martha Fellows had married and settled down
in life. Yhe'kind-hearted old man died soon after the union, and
left the pair inheritors of his little shop and.of a respectable landed
property. Arthur made an indulgent, good husband, and Martha
soon became too much confined by the cares of a rising family, for
any practice of the teasing coquetry which had characterized her
girlhood. She seconded her‘husband in all his money-making pro-
jects; was an economical and thrifty housekeeper;. never allowed
her children to go barefvoted, except in the very warmest weather;
and, to use her own words, made a point of holding her head as
high as any woman in the settlement. .
If an uninterrupted course of prosperity could entitle a person to
this privilege, Mrs. Jones certainly made no false claim to it.
Every year added something to her husband’s possessions. - Several
hundred acres of cleared land were purchased beside that which he
inherited from his father-in-law; the humble shop gradually increas-
ed to a respectable varicty-store, and a handsome frame-house oc-
cupied the site of the old log-cabin.
Bosides.all this, Mr. Jones was a justice of the peace and a digni-
tary in the village; and his wife, though a great deal stouter than
when a girl, and the mother of six children, had lost none of her
very handsome woman indeed.
Thus was the family situated at the period when our story returns
to them. One: warm afternoon, in the depth of summer, Mrs.
Jones was sitting in the porch of her dwelling occupied in mending
& garment of home-made linen, which, from its size, evidently be-
longed to some one of her younger children.’ A cheese-press, witha
rich heavy mass of curd compressed between the screws, occupied
one side of the porch; and against it stood a small double flix-
wheel, unbanded, and with a day’s work yet unrecled from the
Spools. A hatchel and a pair of hand-cards, with a bunch of. spools
tied together by a-tow string, lay in a corner, and high above, on
rude wooden pezs, hung several enormous bunches of tow and linen
yarn, the products of many weeks’ hard labor. .
Her children had gone into the woods after whortleberrics, and
_ healthy good looks, and at the age of thirty-eight continued to be a
“
the mother now and then laid down her work and stepped out to the .
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