The bushel basket of cranberry beans was within easy reach, and each
of the pickers had filled her lap from it again and again. The shed
chamber was not an unpleasant place in which to sit at work, with its
traces of seed corn hanging from the brown cross-beams, its spare
churns, and dusty loom, and rickety wool-wheels, and a few bits of old
furniture. In one far corner was a wide board of dismal use and
suggestion, and close beside it an old cradle. There was a battered
chest of drawers where the keeper of the poor-house kept his
garden-seeds, with the withered remains of three seed cucumbers
ornamenting the top. Nothing beautiful could be discovered, nothing
interesting, but there was something usable and homely about the
place. It was the favorite and untroubled bower of the bean-pickers,
to which they might retreat unmolested from the public apartments of
this rustic institution.
Betsey Lane blew away the chaff from her handful of beans. The spring
breeze blew the chaff back again, and sifted it over her face and
shoulders. She rubbed it out of her eyes impatiently, and happened to
notice old Peggy holding her own handful high, as if it were an
oblation, and turning her queer, up-tilted head this way and that, to
look at the beans sharply, as if she were first cousin to a hen.
"There, Miss Bond, 'tis kind of botherin' work for you, ain't it?"
Betsey inquired compassionately.
"I feel to enjoy it, anything that I can do my own way so," responded
Peggy.
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