Aunt Louisa has brought her work; she is knitting a long woollen stocking, and the yarn is white. She puts on her glasses, unwinds the stocking, pulls her long steel needles out of the ball of yarn and throws it on the floor; then she begins to knit. The knitting seems to help her to talk; for as she moves the needles back and forth, she never for a moment stops talking or lacks a single word. Something is said that reminds her of her husband, and she tells us of his death: “It was nearly thirty years ago. He went out to the barn to hitch up the colt. The colt was one that Truman had just got that summer. He traded a pair of oxen for it, to a man over in Johnston, but I disremember his name. It was a tall rangy colt, almost as black as coal, but with a white stripe on its nose and white hind feet. He was going out to draw in a load of hay from the bottom meadow. It was a little late in the season, but the spring had been dry, and it had rained almost all the summer, and he hadn’t had a chance to get in his hay any sooner. He was doing his work that year alone, for his hired man had left because his father died, and it was so late in the season that he thought he would get on alone for the rest of the year.” I do not yet know how her husband was really killed, although she told us about it so many times, stopping often to sigh and take a pinch of snuff, and wipe her nose and eyes with a large red and black handkerchief. She said she had never felt like marrying since, and that she had no consolation but her religion. After she had finished the story of her husband’s death, she began to tell us about the neighbors. She seemed especially interested in some man who lived alone in the village and who had done something terrible; I cannot now tell what it was, and in fact I hardly understood then what she meant. But she said she had been talking with Deacon Cole and with Squire Allen, and they thought it was a burning shame that the men folks didn’t do something about it—that Squire Allen had told her there was no law that could touch him, but she thought if the men had any spirit they would go there some night and rotten-egg him and ride him on a rail and drum him out of town. I cannot remember that my mother said anything about the matter, but she seemed to agree, and Aunt Louisa kept on talking until it was almost nine o’clock; then she said she thought it was about time for her to go home. My mother said a few words about her staying overnight, but Aunt Louisa said she ought to go “so as to be there early in the morning.” I know I thought at the time that my mother did not urge her very much, and that if she had, Aunt Louisa would most likely have stayed. Then my father told my older brother and me to get a lantern and go home with her. Of course there was nothing else to do. All along the road she kept talking of the terrible things the man had done, and how she thought the men and boys of the village ought to do something about it.