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told. Pa handed the jug around among the grown-ups, and we divided up into two teams and pitched into that corn, each team bound and determined to beat the other one in husking its pile.
    After that they set up trestle tables and benches, and Zebulon. North and George had a wrestling match, while Ma and me and Mrs. Brown and Hetty brought out the supper. Oh, it was just as jolly as could be eating out there in the Indian summer afternoon, with the sun warm on our backs and the haze sort of purple against the hills in the distance beyond our fields.
    After supper we went into the parlor and danced. Mr. Bronson played the drum, and Mr. Stock the fiddle. We danced reels and contredanses, and it was so tight and crowded in that parlor that there hardly was room to move. But we danced anyway until past midnight, everybody but Robert, who had trouble enough walking, much less dancing. I wanted to dance with him, but I couldn’t, and sometimes I’d stay out of a dance to stand beside him so as to keep him company until he’d tell me, “Don’t worry about me, Annie, I don’t mind. You go and dance.” So I did. I danced with everybody, including George and Pa. Pa was just the best dancer, for he made a point of learning the new dances when they came along. It made me proud to dance with Pa, because he, was so good, and still handsome, too, when he was dressed up. And the whole while we danced he joked with me, saying I was his favorite girl, and the prettiest one in the room, and my brown hair was the color of chestnuts, and a whole lot of other things that kept me blushing and laughing. How could I be mad at Pa when he was like that?
    We stayed up mighty late dancing, and, of course, the next morning George didn’t wake up as usual, and neither did anyone else. The first thing I knew I heard Ma banging around downstairs getting the fire roused up, and fixing breakfast. I leapt out of bed, my heart beating quick, pulled on my clothes as quick as I could, and jumped down the loft ladder.
    Ma looked at me. “Heavens, I thought you were gone,” she said. “You’ll catch it from Mr. Hoggart now, sure.”
    I glanced at the clock. It was five-thirty. What was the use of the thing if it let you lie in bed when you were supposed to be at work? Ma had laid out some johnnycake and pork on the table for George and Pa. I grabbed up a hunk of the cake and a piece of pork for dinner, jammed them into the pocket of my dress, flung on my cloak, and ran on out, the blowing rain pushing me along from behind.
    Oh, how I wished I could stay home that day. It made me long for the days before I worked in the mill. I wanted to stay home and help Ma, because I knew it was baking day and that was something I loved. Baking was one of the things every girl had to learn—no man would think of marrying a girl who couldn’t bake. Ma’d been teaching me how to bake bread in the big brick oven alongside the kitchen fireplace. The hardest part of that was the timing.
    George would make a fire in the oven built into the chimney, using wood that burned hot, like hickory or oak or ash. If we kept that going for about two hours it would get just about hot enough. I could tell if it was right by holding my hand about four inches above the brick bottom. If I had to pull it out before I got to ten, counting not too fast, then it was hot enough for bread. We’d shovel all the ashes out, put the bread dough on a long shovel and reach it into the oven. We baked bread first when the oven was hottest. We could cook for about four hours, going next to pies and last, when the oven had cooled down, we baked puddings. Ma could get the timing pretty close on sunny days by watching the sun approach the noonmark—she called it a dinner mark—on the kitchen windowsill. But on cloudy days it was all guesswork. After a few years of watching her, I got so I could guess pretty well when it was done just right—not