For that reason Ma Thropp did the cooking, baked the "light bread,"
and made the clothes and washed them and mended them till they
vanished. She cut the boys' hair; she schooled the girls to help her
in the kitchen and at the sewing-machine and with the preserve-jars.
Her day's work ended when she could no longer see her darning-needle.
It began as soon as she could see daylight to light the fire by. In
winter the day began in her dark, cold kitchen long before the sun
started his fire on the eastern hills.
She upheld a standard of morals as high as Mount Everest and as bleak.
She made home a region of everlasting chores, rebukes, sayings wiser
than tender, complaints and bitter criticisms of husband, children,
merchants, neighbors, weather, prices, fabrics--of everything on
earth but of nothing in heaven.
Strange to say, the children did not appreciate the advantages
of their life. The boys had begun to earn their own money early by
the splitting of wood and the shoveling of snow, by the vending of
soap, and the conduct of delivery-wagons. They spent their evenings
at pool-tables or on corners. The elder girls had accepted positions
in the various emporia of the village as soon as they could. They
counted the long hours of the shop life as an escape from worse.
Their free evenings were not devoted to self-improvement. They
did not turn out to be really very good girls. They were up to all
sorts of village mischief and shabby frivolity.
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