Explore "The Conscripts' Hollow" by Mary Noailles Murfree on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Barney Pratt expected this day to be a holiday. Very early in the morning his father and mother had jolted off in the wagon to attend the wedding of a cousin, who lived ten miles distant on a neighboring mountain, and they had left him no harder task than to keep the children far enough from the fire, and his paralytic grandmother close enough to it.
This old woman was of benevolent intentions, although she had a stick with which she usually made her wants known by pointing, and in her convulsive clutch the stick often whirled around and around like the sails of a windmill, so that if Barney chanced to come within the circle it described, he got as hard knocks from her feeble arm as he could have had in a tussle with big Nick Gregory.