Louisa was evidently quite awkward, and in many ways not house broke; also absent-minded and careless, as is the traditional author. It seems that her manners at table were commented upon once too often by other members of her family. She decided not to stand it. So one morning she managed to be the first at breakfast, and when the remainder of the family turned up in the dining room they were greeted with a strange sight. Louisa had pinned the New York _Tribune_ around her head and was wearing it like a great helmet. The pages reached the table and completely covered her plate. Only her hands were visible. At intervals they would come out, take something, and retire behind the paper again. For weeks she kept this up and no amount of pleading would stop her, until there was a general abject apology from the whole family. None of the second generation appreciated the Concord atmosphere. Louisa tells of her astonishment, when grown, to learn that no society was so fine or intellectual as that of her childhood. The saddest results of this strangely intellectual atmosphere was the number of spinsters it produced. The Misses Blood were always a curious sight to me. Their house, way up in the woods, was chair to chair and bureau to bureau, completely around the rooms, with priceless old Colonial furniture, but their economies were a revelation. Every Sunday they would stop in front of the Old Manse at the foot of the avenue and, retiring into a niche in the trees, put on their shoes and stockings, which they had carried during the three-mile walk. They always stayed for second service, and one of my amusements, when the sermon was dull, was to watch them begin their lunch, which generally consisted of Bent’s water crackers. In and out, in and out went the hard, round objects, in their attempts to bite with their one or two remaining back teeth. The sight almost hypnotized me. Their death, which occurred after I was grown up, was one of the unspoken tragedies of life. One day a farmer passed and noticed there was no smoke coming from their chimney. He went in and found one of the sisters dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs, having fallen down and broken her leg. The other sister, who had become paralyzed and deaf, was sitting in a chair upstairs, also dead. The one had not been able to move after her fall, and the other could not hear her cries. Both had died from starvation.