The author says of Susan that she “was a sociable soul, if occasionally a bit difficult”--and we welcome her to our gathering of patriotic heroes and heroines. The lower half-door of the Thurrell house side porch was closed because Susan Tong’s ball of yarn, which was always slipping from her vast and rotund knees, had a way of hopping down the steps if the door were left open. Because the garden-path sloped, the ball, if once started, would roll far beyond even the longest reach of the odd implement with twin handles at one end, flat nippers at the other, and a middle length of extensible iron latticework, which had earned Susan, properly the Widow Thurrell, the name by which she was commonly known. But the upper half of the broad, green-painted door was set wide to the streaming sunshine of a mild October afternoon of 1776. Just within the door showed the chintz back, gay with red-patterned palm-leaves, of the huge armchair in which sat Susan Tongs herself, her smooth bands of red hair just showing beneath her cap, her small, light eyes lifted from her work to the golden autumnal landscape, her triple chin descending upon a snowy amplitude of kerchief, and a pair of long steel needles clicking in her two fat hands. Susan possessed two distinctions: she was the fattest person in the village, and she was the only fat person in it who had not an easy-going disposition. Too unwieldy for many years past to move about upon her little feet and weak ankles without the assistance of her crutch-handled staff, her utmost exertion was to cross the road to the meeting-house on Sundays; week-days she spent in her chair, directing the household tasks of her pretty niece, Tamsine, who did not have a very easy life of it. Susan Thurrell, everybody said, had been notably brisk and light of foot in her youth, and the burden of flesh which had come upon her in later life was particularly unwelcome, and far from being accompanied by a corresponding increase in mental grace. She was certainly very exacting. Just what her weight was no one knew; her own guess was “nigh about two hundred and fifty,” but there were many who vowed it was three hundred if it was a pound. A mottled hen which had somehow got into the garden patch caught Susan’s eye, and a shadow of anger overcast her wide face. The creature was clucking its way, followed by a lone chicken, directly toward her favorite bed of sweet herbs. She shouted a husky “Shoo,” but without effect; then she caught up her “lazy man’s tongs,” which lay near. Quickly compressing the handles, she shot the tip out to its farthest extent and picked up with it a crust of bread fallen from the dinner-table and overlooked, for Tamsey, the orderly caretaker, had been called away in haste that day to a sick neighbor. This crust she flung at the invader. The hen squawked and ran, but presently returned to peck cheerfully at the missile.