nearly two o'clock before
Guess bin ' alone here with me so constant , he 's got kind of willful . But it do n't bother me any ; ai n't that lucky ? '' She hurried her completed pies into the oven with a swiftness of movement she had never lost , her sweet , thin soprano soaring high in the words of a winding old hymn tune : Lord , how we grovel here below , Fond of these trifling toys ; Our souls can neither rise nor go To taste supernal joys ! ... It was nearly two o'clock before the big brown horse , indignant at the unwonted invasion of his afternoon leisure , stepped slowly out from the Daggett barn . On the seat of the old-fashioned vehicle , to which he had been attached by Mrs. Daggett 's skillful hands , that lady herself sat placidly erect , arrayed in her blue and white striped muslin . Mrs. Daggett conscientiously wore stripes at all seasons of the year : she had read somewhere that stripes impart to the most rotund of figures an appearance of slimness totally at variance with the facts . As for blue and white , her favorite combination of stripes , any fabric in those colors looked cool and clean ; and there was a vague strain of poetry in Mrs. Daggett 's nature which made her lift her eyes to a blue sky filled with floating white clouds with a sense of rapturous satisfaction wholly unrelated to the state of the weather .