A Little Maid of Province Town

								

him.
"'Mean well,' indeed!" Joseph Starkweather had replied to his neighbor's
remark. "When they have closed the port of Boston, so that no ship but the
king's war-ships dare go in and out? Even our fishing-boats are closely
watched. Already the Boston people are beginning to need many things.
Americans are not going to submit to feeding British soldiers while their
own men go hungry."
But now Joseph Starkweather was the only man who interested himself in the
lonely child. Day after day of that first week of her father's absence
Anne had stayed close to the little house, looking hopefully out across
the harbor for a sight of his boat; and day after day Joseph Starkweather
had come lounging down the beach to speak with the child, to ask her what
she had for breakfast, and if she slept safe and unafraid.
"The meal is gone," she told him one morning, "and I do not sleep now--I
wait and listen for my father;" and then it was that he told her she must
seek another home.
"You are too young to stay alone," he said; "pick up a bundle of your
clothes and go to Mrs. Stoddard on the hill. She hasn't a chick or child
of her own. Like as not you'll be a blessing to her." And Anne, used to
obedience and sorrow, obeyed.
There was nothing of much value in the small house, but on the day after
Anne's entrance as a member of the Stoddard family, Captain Stoddard
loaded the poor sticks of furniture on a handcart, and pulled it through
the sandy tracks to his cottage door.
"It's the child of an English spy you're giving shelter to," he had said,
when Martha Stoddard had told him that Anne was to live with them, "and
she'll bring no luck to the house." But his wife had made no response; the
dark-eyed, elfish-looking child had already found a place in the woman's
heart.
"I don't eat so very much," Anne announced as Mrs. Stoddard gave her a
bowl of corn mush and milk when she came down-stairs.
"You'll eat what you want in this house, child," answered her new friend,
and Anne ate hungrily.
"Now come to the door, Anne, and I'll brush out this tangle of hair of
yours," said Mrs. Stoddard; "and after this you must keep it brushed and
braided neatly. And bring down your other frock. I'll be doing some
washing this afternoon, and I venture to say your frock is in need of
it."
The first few days in the Stoddard family seemed almost unreal to Anne.
She no longer watched for her father's boat, she no longer wandered about
the beach, playing in the sand and hunting for shells. Her dresses were
not now the soiled and ragged covering which had served as frocks, but
stout cotton gowns, made from a skirt of Mrs. Stoddard's, and covered with
a serviceable apron. A sunbonnet of striped cotton covered the dark head,
and Anne was as neat and well-dressed as the other children of the
settlement. To be sure her slender feet were bare and tanned, and hardened
by exposure; but there was not a child in the neighborhood who wore shoes