Thayer card and spin and dye and weave as she would,
the clothing often ran short. And so it happened that little Mirandy
Thayer, aged six, had no shoes to her feet.
One Sunday in June she cried because she had to go to meeting
barefooted.
"Ain't you ashamed of yourself, a great big girl like you, crying?" said
her mother, sternly. "You go right over there, and sit down on the
settle till father gets hitched up, and Daniel, you go and sit down
'side of her, and teach her the first question in the catechism. She'd
ought to find out there's something else to be thought about on the
Sabbath day besides shoes."
So Mirandy, sniffing between the solemn words, repeated them after
Daniel, who was twelve years old, and knew his catechism quite
thoroughly. And when the great farm wagon, with the team of oxen, stood
before the door, she climbed in with the rest without a murmur.
But sitting in the meeting-house through the two hours' discourse, she
drew up her little bare feet under her blue petticoat, and going down
the aisle afterwards, she crouched, making it sweep the floor, until her
mother dragged her up forcibly by one arm.
"Ain't you ashamed of yourself?" she whispered. "A great big girl like
you!"
Mirandy was in reality very small for her age, and everybody called her
"little;" but she got very few privileges on account of her youth and
littleness. In those days, and especially in a family like Josiah
Thayer's, where there were so many children that each had to scratch for
itself at an early age or go without, six years was considered
comparatively mature, and the child who had lived that long was not
exempt from many duties.
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