“Wish we could make the village come alive though, as it was,” Cornelius said. “I notice the strangers always think of it as a quiet place, whereas, from what I’ve been reading, it was just the contrary—lots of bustle and noise, hammers pounding and saws screeching, mill whistles blowing, men shouting at teams of oxen, the blacksmith’s hammer clanging.”

Jem cleared his throat. “I count on my wonderful aides to complete and touch up the picture. Christina, are you about ready to deliver yourself of ‘The Women of Willard?”

Christina laughed. “It has been a rather hard delivery, Jem, since you put it that way—labor pains awful; result, a poor mite. But you shall have it—as soon as I’ve drunk my tea.”

“No hurry. But by May twentieth I must have them all in. You don’t happen to know when the Websters come back, do you? Their place is still all closed up. Big drift of snow up against the back door in the shade there.”

“Houses must get lonely in the winter,” Cathy said.

“The mice come in,” Jem answered, “and squirrels too now and again. Bad for the chimneys, that.”

“Maybe they just creak and settle in and go to sleep—the houses, I mean,” Cathy went on, enjoying her fantasy.

“And dream,” Christina said. “The Websters’ house must be full still of those two mad sisters who lived there so long, the Misses Townsend. Remember when Ella came to vote, carrying a sack of hedgehog noses to get the bounty? The Town Hall practically had to be fumigated.”

“She was quite a woman,” Jem said, unwilling to be critical, “going out on snowshoes at more than eighty, I hear, after hedgehogs.”

“How much was the bounty?” Cathy asked.

“Twenty-five cents a nose.”

“Only twenty-five cents?” Cathy tried to imagine how it could be—how many noses anyway—and how ghastly a mess they must have been in.

“They imagined they were down to their last pennies,” Christina said. “You were asked to look into matters when you were selectman—remember, Jem?—and reassure them that they could still afford to eat?”

Christina was happy to remember it all. One rested in the past.

“Poor dears,” Jem sighed.

Cornelius chuckled. “Jem, you are a charitable man. I must say I could not manage to call either Ella or Pauline ‘dear’; Ella could hold up Town Meeting for hours on a point of order, so I have been told.”

“Well, she was up on parliamentary procedure. More than once I had to eat crow, I must confess. She was good Yankee stuff, Cornelius. I admired her. That woman wouldn’t be downed.”

“Mmm”—Cornelius pondered this—“the struggle for survival. Amazing what people can endure if they have to. So many around here have died hard deaths, lonely …” His eyes were bright with tears, Cathy noticed. Amazing how Gramp felt everything so these days.