Once I was taken to see an old Irishwoman who had come from Ireland as a young girl, just after the great famine in ’48, and had gone to work for Great-grandmother, who was then sixty-three years old. She told me this story, in her thick, thick early-nineteenth-century brogue, which I will not try to reproduce here: “There was a pretty girl, young and happy-looking, that lived up the road with her father, a poor weak rag of a man with a backbone like a piece of string. He’d married for his second wife a hard, hard woman. And when they found out the girl was in trouble, and her sweetheart that was the cause of it off up in the North Country for the winter to work as a lumberjack, didn’t the stepmother turn the poor girl out--yes, out like a dog. And old Mrs. Canfield--that was some kin to you, I forget what--where I was working, she went right out and brought her in, and kept her there safe and sound all winter, treating her as nice as anybody, letting her sew to pay for her keep, and helping her make the baby clothes. She’d go with her to church every Sunday, the girl right on her arm, and nobody daring to say a word, for fear of old Mrs. Canfield’s tongue, ‘For,’ she used to say, ‘let ’em say a word if they dare, and I’ll tell a few things I know about some folks in this town who had to be married in a hurry, and whose babies came into the world ahead of time.’ You see, she was so old she knew everything that had happened from the beginning almost. She’d say, ‘There’s lots worse things done every day in this town than anything Margaret’s done,’ she’d say, and nobody to answer her back a word. “But everybody was thinking it very certain that the man would never come back, and if he did, he’d never own the child, nor have anything to do with Margaret, poor girl! You see, in those days there weren’t any mails that were carried ’way back off in the woods, and she neither had any word of him nor he of her. Well, old Mrs. Canfield knew what people were saying all right, and I could see that she was troubled in her mind, though she never lowered her high head by an inch. Margaret’s time drew near, and no sign from John Dawson that was away. But Margaret never lost her faith in him a minute. ‘When John is back,’ she’d say, just as sure of him as though they’d been married by the priest; but I could see old Mrs. Canfield look queer when she’d hear Margaret talking that way. “And then one morning, in April ’twas, and we’d all the doors and windows open for the first time, Margaret had gone down the walk to look at the lilac bush to see if there were any buds on it, and around the corner came John Dawson!