Susan pulled down a large heap of corn to husk while telling her story, and shook out of it the dry corn-cockles, saying, “First the blade, and then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear,” and adding, “Every cornstalk is a Thanksgiving sermon.” The children drew near to hear, and with them one girl, Susanna, whose eyes grew with the story. “Tell all you know,” said Deacon White; “and it is mighty interesting to hear a person tell a little _more_ than he knows. I always like people that can see just a little beyond the horizon—what is the imagination for?” “I shall tell you only the plain truth,” said Susan. “So let me begin with the planting-time, when the bluebirds came with the sky on their wings, and the children dropped the first corn into the ground. I was dreadful poor that year. Mother had just died and left me alone and lonesome, and I began then to be hands and feet for everybody, so as to heal up the great lump in my heart. I had a Rob-Roy shawl that I had worn for years to church, summer and winter, and one June day, as I was coming down the steps of the church, Deacon White here, says he, says he to me, ‘Susan, you ought to have some better things to wear; and if we have a prosperous year, and my ship comes in prosperous-like, I mean to get the folks together in the fall, and to have them make you a present of a real camlet cloak.’ “Could I believe my ears? It was only grand folks that wore camlet cloaks! The wives of people who traded at sea! “I attended church at Quaker Hill for the most part, because, to tell the truth, I had to dress plain, and my simple clothes did not make me look so poor among the gray Quaker folk as they did among the silk gowns and camlet cloaks at Tiverton. And then, at the hands-shaking after the Quaker meetings, I used often to find something in my hands besides emptiness, and I always felt friendly to the Quaker folk who were led by the Spirit, and who believed their words were Spirit when they preached and exhorted. They are good people, and I wish that the world were full of such, which I say though I am Orthodox. “Well, I looked at the Deacon. His first wife had a camlet cloak, brought over from the East Indies or some foreign parts where the camels grow. “But what the Deacon said did touch my heart in a tender place. He was the first person in all the community that had ever seemed to think that I would like to be thought of. My lip trembled, and I pulled down my calash to hide my weakness, because my eyelids began to twitch, and I couldn’t help it. I walked down the steps firmly, and then I took the wood-path home, and sat down on the pine-needles all alone on the way and had a good cry. I didn’t know that I had any such feelings before. It wasn’t the thought of a camlet cloak that made me break up so,—it was that the Deacon had seen that I had had a hard time, and felt for me.