On that fine summer afternoon, neither too hot nor too cold but just right, when Caroline sewed her silken seam and dreamed of foreign lands, Jacqueline sat in the shabby hammock in the Conways’ scuffed-up side-yard, and darned stockings.

“I know now,” murmured Jacqueline, “why the worst thing you can say of anything is ‘darn it!’”

There were not a great many stockings, for the little Conways, and Jacqueline, too, went barelegged as much as possible, but every stocking had at least one hole, and often the holes came in places that had been darned before. Then you must be most particularly careful not to do the dull work hurriedly and leave rough places that would blister tender heels and little toes.

“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything,” said Grandma Conway, as she pulled out the threads that Jacqueline in her haste had drawn all puckery. “It’s as easy to do it right as wrong.”

Jacqueline pouted a little as she took back the ugly brown stocking, with her work all undone, but none the less she wove her needle carefully in and out of the frayed threads, as Grandma expected her to do. For Jacqueline, you see, liked Grandma, as she had never liked the teachers or the governesses that she had always managed to “get round.” You couldn’t “get round” Grandma, any more than you could “get round” a bas-relief. And if she made you do your work just so, she treated the boys in the same fashion. There was no partiality at the Conway farm.

So Jacqueline darned stockings on that sunny afternoon, and Grandma, in the worn rocker that Jacqueline had dragged out for her, patched garments already so often patched that you had to hunt to find the original fabric. Great wafts of warm, odorous air came from the acres of onions. The bees were murmurous about their squat, white hives. A woodpecker tapped in the tree above Jacqueline’s head. Then with a great clatter an ancient Ford came bounding along the dirt road and vanished ultimately in a cloud of silvery dust.

“My land,” chuckled Grandma, and her old eyes twinkled behind her steel-bowed spectacles. “Wouldn’t our great-grandfathers have had a conniption fit, if they’d seen a thing like that go rattlety-banging through the Meadows? They’d have jailed somebody for witchcraft, sure enough. ‘Carriages without horses’, same as old Mother Shipton prophesied.”

“Weren’t they cruel and stupid in those old times?” said Jacqueline, with her mind still full of the slaughterous doings and inhuman punishments of “The Prince and the Pauper.” “Think of anybody being silly enough to think some poor old woman was a witch!”

“Well, perhaps we wouldn’t have done much better, if we’d been living then,” said Grandma tolerantly. “You’ve got to judge folks according to their circumstances. Now take those old, ancient folks, living here on the edge of what was then a howling wilderness, and not knowing what might pop out on ’em any minute—a catamount, maybe, or like as not a painted Indian, with a scalping knife. You can’t blame ’em if their nerves got kind of raw, and they began to see things that weren’t there and believe things that weren’t so, and then raise the cry of ‘Witch!’ and go persecuting some poor neighbor.”

“Were there really ever any Indians here in Longmeadow?” asked Jacqueline, round-eyed. That there should have been Indians in the wild California canyons and in the somber deserts she could easily believe, but this New England village, with its orderly meadows and its well-trained elms, seemed the last place where gruesome tragedy could ever have been staged.

“Well, I guess there was a few, off and on,” said Grandma placidly. “Didn’t your Pa, and he a Longmeadow boy, ever tell you ’bout old Aunt Hetty Tait, that was your ever so many times great-grandmother?”

With conviction Jacqueline shook her head. How should she ever have heard of Caroline’s ancestresses?

“Well, now!” said Grandma pityingly, and wiped her spectacles.

“Tell me, please—please!” cried Jacqueline, bouncing up and down in the aged hammock.

“Land sakes, child, it’s lucky that hammock is strung up good and strong, or you’d come down ker-flummocks! Just you go on with your darning, whilst I tell you what there is to tell. ’Taint much. Hetty Tait wasn’t aunt to anybody then, nor was she old. She was a young, blooming girl from down river, born in Allingham, that Nathan Tait fetched here a bride, when first this settlement was made. Their farm was up to the north end of town, and the woods ran right down into their pasture land. One day Hetty was making soft soap at the big fireplace in the kitchen, with her two babies asleep in the cradle right at hand.”

“Grandma! Don’t say anything happened to the babies!” cried Jacqueline, with a swift thought of Annie’s golden head.

Sphinx-like, Grandma went on:

“It was a balmy day in spring, and the door stood wide open. Nathan Tait had gone into town. Hetty was alone on the place. All at once, though she hadn’t heard a sound, she sensed she wasn’t alone. She whirled round quick as scat, and lo and behold you! there was a great big six-foot savage, with a scalp tied to his belt and a knife in his hand, just stepping cat-footed into her kitchen, and his eyes on her babies.”

“Go on, Grandma! Go on, or I’ll scream!”

“That’s just what Hetty didn’t waste time a-doing, Jackie. Quicker ’n you can say Jack Robinson, she scooped up the scalding hot soap in the great huge ladle she had in her hand, and let drive fair and square at the Indian’s face. He didn’t linger after that. He took out at the door, and Hetty bestowed another ladleful upon his naked back, to speed his footsteps. Then she double barred the door and took down her husband’s fowling piece and kept watch till her husband’s return, not knowing, of course, whether he would return, or whether he’d be ambushed on the road from town, as many a man was in those old days. You can’t blame those folks, Jackie, if they were sort of hard. Life wasn’t what you might call soft with them.”

“I’ll play that game to-morrow,” Jacqueline announced with snapping eyes. “I’ll be Hetty, and Freddie and Annie can be the babies, and Neil shall be the Injun—only of course I’ll throw cold water on him, not hot soap. It won’t hurt him really, Grandma.”

“I’ll trust Neil to take care of himself,” chuckled Grandma.

The peace of the hot afternoon, murmurous with bees, descended again upon the side-yard. Jacqueline’s eyes were thoughtful.

“And did that all happen really right here in Longmeadow?”

“Just as sure as you’re a-sitting in that hammock, Jackie.”

“Tell me some more about those old times—ah, please do!”

“Not now, Jackie. Sun’s getting low and I must mix up a batch of Johnny-cake for supper.”

With a sigh Grandma began to fold away the little overalls that she had not yet finished patching.

“Let me make the Johnny-cake,” Jacqueline offered suddenly. “I did it day before yesterday, and you telling me what to do. Let me try it alone! Please!”

Grandma considered for a second.

“The receipt is all written out in the brown book back of the clock,” she said. “Mind you flour the pan after you’ve greased it, and don’t be too lavish with the sugar.”

“I will—I won’t,” Jacqueline made two promises almost in one breath.

In her worn sneakers (Caroline’s sneakers!) she flashed away into the big, tidy kitchen. Corn-meal in the big tin, eggs and butter from the cool cellar. Milk in the blue and white pitcher. Sugar in the brown crock. She was going to cook! At school, in cooking class, in a neat ruffled apron, with aluminum and white-enamel bowls, and spoons of approved pattern, she had made apricot-whip and fudge. But now in the Conway kitchen, with a yellow mixing bowl and an iron spoon, she really made something that her family would like to eat, and she sang joyously as she measured and stirred.

She had two big pans of Johnny-cake in the oven that she had craftily heated, and she wasn’t looking at them more than twice every five minutes, when the family began to gather. First came Nellie, leading Freddie, and asking if supper wasn’t most ready, and Jacqueline, quite as if she ran the house, so important she now felt, told Nellie to wash her hands and Freddie’s, too, before she thought of supper. Then came Grandma, to take up Annie and freshen her against mealtime, and then the family Ford came gallantly into the yard, and here were Aunt Martha and Neil, back from Baring Junction, with three sacks of grain.

“Oh, Aunt Martha!” Jacqueline bounded to meet her. “Supper’s ready, and I made the Johnny-cake all alone, and fixed the oven by myself.”

And do you know, Caroline with her party in prospect, felt no happier than Jacqueline felt, when tired, dusty Aunt Martha (who wasn’t her aunt!) smiled at her and said:

“Well, of all things! You got the supper yourself? You spelled Grandma? I guess my bones were all right, Jackie, when they said you were the sort that would be a real little helper in the house.”