Of The Nook people who came on foot, the Standishes, and Brewsters, and Pabodies, and Prences, and Colliers, and Doctor Comfort Starr, the new physician, with his family, and the Partridges, and Wadsworths, and others, had mustered strong and in every variety of condition, age, and sex; for our ancestors, having far fewer opportunities of amusement than we have, made a great deal more of each one as it came along, and not only sucked the juice from their orange, but ate every bit of the pulp. The apple-bee was but a prelude to the evening’s entertainment, and for weeks before, every young girl in the colony had planned her dress and simple ornaments, and dreamed of some face or voice that should belong to her own especial Robin Adair, or of the games and the songs and haply the contradances that might be permitted when the church-members had withdrawn; and Lucretia Brewster, with her daughter Mary and Love’s wife Sarah, and such fantastic aid as Gillian had chosen to bestow, had been for a week busy in preparing the house and a big shed just finished, for the reception of the expected guests and their steeds. Gillian! Well, Gillian! And when one has said her name the subject widens until it becomes impossible to handle. Niece of Lucretia Brewster, whose sister had married a Spaniard, this Gillian, left a deserted orphan in some foreign port, had drifted back to England, and thence to New England, where a year or so before the apple-bee she had arrived by hand of Captain William Pierce, consigned along with a present of kersey and Hollands linen to Jonathan Brewster by a cousin who claimed that, as Lucretia was the girl’s nearest relative, her maintenance should fall upon Lucretia’s husband. At first the charge was joyfully accepted, for Gillian was just the age of Mary, Jonathan’s only daughter, and would be a sister to her, as they said. But as the weeks and months went on both Mary and her mother grew silent upon the subject of the new sister, while Jonathan, and his sons William and Jonathan and Benjamin, never ceased to congratulate the women and each other upon the joy and delight of her presence; the father especially often calling upon his wife to recognize how in this case virtue had brought its own reward, and their benevolence to the orphan received a blessing of singular richness almost in the first moments of its exercise. To these pious thanksgivings Lucretia Brewster, who was a very discreet woman, never offered any contradiction; but when next her husband found some little matter essential to his comfort neglected, or some detail of the rigid family rule calmly set aside, the gentle explanation was, “I left it to Gillian to do;” or, “It was Gillian who chose to do it in spite of all I said.”