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Updated: May 5, 2025
They cooked their supper Hannah still had some of the cornmeal and the flitch of bacon their Hillsboro friends had given them and went to bed directly on the queer, hard bed, with a straw tick and no feathers, which Dr. Necronsett had prescribed, warmly wrapped up in the pair of heavy Indian blankets he had loaned them.
Romances, adventures, tragedies, and farces ... why, we are the characters of those plots. Every child who runs past the house starts a new story, every old man whom we leave sleeping in the burying-ground by the Necronsett River is the ending of another ... or perhaps the beginning of a sequel.
The great social event of the year, not only for Hillsboro, but for all the outlying towns of Woodville, Greenford, and Windfield, was the annual "Entertainment for buying new books," as it was named on the handbills which were welcomed so eagerly by the snow-bound, monotony-ridden inhabitants of the Necronsett Valley.
Hannah put very little faith in the agricultural part of the cure. She thought that very probably it was nothing more than a blind, and that Master Necronsett came out at night and said charms and things over Ann Mary as she slept.
One side of the shed was gone entirely, so that the wind and the sun would come right in on poor, delicate Ann Mary, and there was only an awning of woven bark-withes to let down when it rained. But even that was not the worst. Hannah listened with growing suspicion while Master Necronsett explained the rest of it.
After this, Hannah sent Remember Williams home with the horses, giving him fresh and elaborate directions about the right road to take. Then she marched Ann Mary to the herb-doctor's. "Here, Master Necronsett," she said, "here is Ann Mary to be cured!" When the doctor told them about his system, Hannah did not like the sound of it at all.
She was so irrationally angry with him that she could not trust herself to speak. She stood looking out of the low window at the Necronsett, running swift and black between the white banks.
He learned all the sounds of the late night and early morning, and how they had different voices in the dark; the faint whisper of the maple-branches, the occasional stir and muffled chirp of a bird, the hushed, secret murmur of the little brook which ran between his garden and the Crittenden yard, and the distant, deeper note of the Necronsett River as it rolled down the Ashley valley to The Notch.
Sometimes when the stars hang very bright over Hemlock Mountain and the Necronsett River sings loud in the dusk, we remember the old man's speech, and, though we smile at his simplicity, we think, too, that the best which awaits us can only be very much better but not so very different from what we have known here.
Once, in her anxiety to have everything exactly right for her sister, Hannah asked Master Necronsett about Captain Winthrop's being there so much. "Master Doctor, will not Captain Winthrop absorb, perchance, some of the great virtue of the plant away from Ann Mary? Will he not hurt her cure?"
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