Lake Umbagog.
1907
August 8
  I have just become acquainted with an interesting
and, indeed, remarkable woman, Mrs. Jonathan P. West.
I saw her first on the afternoon of my arrival, when, as the
stage halted in front of the Post Office on Upton Hill, she drove
up in a dilapidated open buggy and stopped for a moment to speak
to our driver. She attracted my attention at once by her bright,
roving eyes, swarthy complexion and clear-cut aquiline features
which gave her the look of an Italian or of a half-breed Indian,
a suggestion enhanced by the large red and black handkerchief she
was wearing bound like a turban about her head in lieu of
a hat or bonnet. On enquiry I learned that she was of
New England stock and a native of New Hampshire, and that
she had lived ever since her girlhood in Upton, where she
had accumulated what, for that town, is a large property
(about $75000, it is said) by her industry, sagacity and
energy and with little help from her husband who is reputed
an easy-going, ineffective sort of man although without
bad habits. Mrs West called for my, by previous appointment, 
at Lakeside, this afternoon, and drove me over Upton Hill
to Back Street, to see this husband. He lives here on one
of the three large farms which they own and she on another
near the Upton Post Office. The third is the Heyward place
at the Narrows which she has just bought.  She carries on 
all three making them all pay and working in the fields
with her hired men and almost as hard as any of them.
Although she has passed her seventieth year, she continues
to drive a mowing machine, drawn by a pair of horses,
over her rocky, stump-bestrewn fields, to pitch the hay,
when made, from the cocks into the hay wagon and
from this to the mow in the barn, laboring thus
ceaselessly for hours in succession. As we drove along
Mrs West