A great many girls in those days fell into declines and died. Of course, nobody knows the reason for most of the cases, but it seems as plain as the nose on my face that Ann Mary's sickness was entirely Hannah's fault for not letting her sister do her share of the household work. There she was--pretty and ignorant and idle--with nothing to interest her, and nothing to look forward to, for in those days marriage was the only thing a girl could look forward to, and in the workaday little world of pioneer Hillsboro nobody would dare to think of marrying a girl who looked like a tea-rose and did not know how to make soft soap. No wonder she lost her appetite! It might not have gone any further, however, if Hannah, distracted with anxiety, had not run to all the old women in town about her sick sister. Every one of them had had a niece, or a daughter--or at least a granddaughter--who had died in a decline; so, of course, they knew just what to do for Ann Mary, and they came and did it. Then poor Ann Mary was sick, indeed, I promise you! They shut her up in the inner room of the little log house, although it was the end of May, and the weather was fit for the angels. They darkened the one window, and kept the door closed, and put the sick girl to bed between two mountains of feathers. They gave her "sut" (soot) tea and "herb-drink" and steeped butternut bark, and goodness knows what else; and they tiptoed in and out, and stared at her mournfully, and shook their heads and pursed up their lips, until it is a wonder to me that Ann Mary did not die at once. II. Very likely she would have died, if one day in June there had not come through Hillsboro a trader on his way from "over the mountain" up to Canada, looking for furs. That morning, when Hannah got up, she found the fire in their big fireplace completely extinguished. She snatched up the warming-pan--not a polished brass one with a smooth, turned handle, like those you see in Colonial museums, but a common iron pan, fastened to a hickory sapling; and she went as fast as she could, without running--for girls never ran "before folks" in those days--over to the nearest neighbor, to "borrow a handful of fire." The neighbors were just getting up, and their fire was too low to spare any, so Hannah had to wait until some hardwood sticks got well to burning. While she waited, the trader, who was staying overnight in that house, went on with a long story about an Indian herb-doctor, of whose cures he had heard marvelous tales, three days' journey back. It seemed that the Indian's specialty was curing girls who had gone into a decline, and that he had never failed in a single case he had undertaken.