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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76984 ***
+
+
+[Illustration: “I’M DOCTOR GARDE’S LITTLE GIRL.”--_Page 11._]
+
+
+
+
+  ROCKY FORK
+
+  BY
+  MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
+
+  ILLUSTRATED BY FRANK T. MERRILL
+
+  _NEW EDITION_
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  BOSTON
+  LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
+
+
+
+
+  _Copyright, 1911_,
+  BY LOTHROP, LEE AND SHEPARD CO.
+  _All rights reserved_
+
+  _Electrotyped and Printed by
+  THE COLONIAL PRESS
+  C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U.S.A._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                                       PAGE
+
+       I. DOCTOR GARDE’S LITTLE GIRL                               9
+
+      II. MR. PITZER                                              19
+
+     III. THE GEOGRAPHY-SCHOOL TEACHER                            25
+
+      IV. COMPANY                                                 36
+
+       V. THE GEOGRAPHY SCHOOL                                    56
+
+      VI. THE NARROWS AND MARY ANN FURNACE                        73
+
+     VII. MISS MELISSA FURTHER DISAPPROVES OF THE ROCKY FORK      84
+
+    VIII. WHICH TREATS OF THUMB-PAPERS                           101
+
+      IX. THEY CHURN                                             108
+
+       X. MOTHER OUTDOORS DISTURBED                              115
+
+      XI. BLUEBELL MAKES A POEM                                  127
+
+     XII. “JORDAN STORMY BANKS”                                  139
+
+    XIII. ABRAM HAS A THEORY                                     152
+
+     XIV. BLUEBELL HAS NO THEORY                                 163
+
+      XV. THE FORD                                               169
+
+     XVI. A TRIO AND CHORUS                                      173
+
+    XVII. DOCTOR GARDE LISTENS TO REASON                         186
+
+   XVIII. BLUEBELL AND TILDY                                     199
+
+     XIX. THE CHILD IN THE BLACKBERRY PATCH                      207
+
+      XX. THE LAST TIME                                          215
+
+     XXI. THE FIRST RAILROAD TRAIN                               230
+
+    XXII. MISS BIGGAR                                            245
+
+   XXIII. A DUCK AMONG SWANS                                     252
+
+    XXIV. MISS MELISSA DROPS A FEW HINTS                         263
+
+     XXV. EVENTS                                                 271
+
+    XXVI. MISS BIGGAR’S POSSESSIONS                              288
+
+   XXVII. DINNER IN DOLL-LAND                                    297
+
+  XXVIII. SOMEBODY ARRIVES                                       305
+
+    XXIX. DOCTOR GARDE’S LITTLE GIRL                             312
+
+     XXX. TWO LETTERS                                            319
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  “I’M DOCTOR GARDE’S LITTLE GIRL” (_page 11_)        _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                         FACING PAGE
+
+  “HERE’S A WAX DOLL FOR YOU”                                     46
+
+  THE PRINCIPAL FIGURES IN A PROCESSION TO THE SCHOOL-HOUSE      110
+
+  LIZA STEPPED BACK, DRAWING HER ROLL OFF THE SPINDLE INTO A
+    LONG WOOLLY THREAD                                           134
+
+  “I SEIZED HIS BRIDLE AND TRIED TO LEAD HIM OUT”                184
+
+  THE PERFORMER PLAYED SOME LITTLE MARCH                         254
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ROCKY FORK]
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DOCTOR GARDE’S LITTLE GIRL
+
+
+Many years ago the morning sun looked down among the tall hills of
+central Ohio, and saw one little girl patting along a path. The path
+wound down through a hollow, and up, up over wood-clothed heights which
+she thought nearly touched the sky.
+
+At first glance this little girl appeared to be a large slat sun-bonnet
+taking a walk on a pair of long pantalettes. But at second glance
+one brown, thin arm escaped from a short sleeve might have been seen
+carrying a calico bag by its drawing-string; and under the pantalettes
+a pair of stout-shod little feet skipped along.
+
+It was not more than seven o’clock. The tall meadow grass was
+glittering, and every bird known to the State was singing with his
+morning voice. When she reached the small run which twisted along the
+hollow, and put her foot on the first of the stepping-stones which
+crossed it, the little girl could not help stopping to gaze in the
+water. The minnows played around the stone with a quiver of their tiny
+bodies which fascinated the gazer. She stooped cautiously and tried to
+catch one in her hand, but sunshine on the pebbles was not more elusive.
+
+“Good-morning, little girl,” said a winning voice; and the little
+girl jumped up, reeled, set one foot in the water, and brandished her
+reticule in the effort to regain her balance. The sugared butter-bread
+and sweet cookies tumbled against currant-pie and cherries, and all
+settled to an upside-down condition as she finally got on the bank and
+saw a gentleman preparing to trip across the stones.
+
+It was an uncommon thing to meet any one, and especially a stranger, on
+that long two-mile path to school. But it was a wonderful thing to meet
+such a grand stranger. She dropped a bobbing curtsy, and the gentleman,
+having crossed, stopped and smiled. He had glittering black eyes, and
+curly hair and whiskers, glittering teeth and boots, fine clothes, and
+altogether the look of a “town gentleman.”
+
+“Whose little girl are you?” inquired this town gentleman affably,
+rubbing the wet soles of his boots on the grass.
+
+Under the long slat sun-bonnet a round face blushed all about its blue
+eyes and quite back to its auburn hair, and a timid voice piped from
+the calico funnel: “I’m Doctor Garde’s little girl.”
+
+“Ah! where does Doctor Garde live?”
+
+“Right back there in that big house.”
+
+“And who lives in this house I just passed?”
+
+“Mrs. Banks. Her little girls go to school with me.”
+
+“Yes. And where do you go to school?”
+
+“In the school-house ’way at the other side of the hills.”
+
+“Oho! many children go there?”
+
+“All of ’em in our districk. There’s Willeys, and Pancosts, and
+Harrises, and Halls, and Bankses, and Martins, and me, and my little
+sister’s going when she gets big enough.”
+
+“Yes. Well, thank you. I may call there in the course of the day. Does
+that path lead back to your school-house?”
+
+“Yes, sir. But you must turn to the right at the big sand-banks, and
+cross the foot-log over Rocky Fork by Hall’s mill.”
+
+The gentleman nodded, and passed on smiling as Doctor Garde’s little
+girl dropped him another curtsy. She skipped across the stones and
+hastened up rising ground to the Banks’. Theirs was a weather-beaten
+domicile, part log and part frame, with a covered stoop at one door on
+which Tildy sat plaiting her long hair preparatory to going to school.
+
+Tildy, it must be confessed, was a raw-boned girl, but with a
+low-browed, serious face. Her nature leaned to the solemn side of life,
+as her sister Teeny’s leaned towards what was merry. Matilda liked to
+sit in the grass and dress her locks, or to watch from the doorstep the
+rocks and glooms on each side of her home.
+
+Teeny appeared within, tying her bonnet, the string of her reticule
+across her arm. A bunch of old-fashioned pink roses was pinned to her
+dress, which hooked in front and was just long enough to sweep her
+heels when she walked. Teeny was a big girl who felt quite a young
+woman, since she was “going on” fifteen, ciphered in long division, and
+had finished a sampler with her name, “Christine Banks,” embroidered
+under a beautiful piece of poetry. “We’re takin’ curran’-pie for our
+dinner to-day, Melissy,” announced Tildy solemnly as Doctor Garde’s
+little girl ran up.
+
+“I got some, too,” she responded with triumph. So little made a triumph
+in that region and time.
+
+“’Tain’t sweetened with sugar.”
+
+“’Tis, too! I saw Liza put in heaps.” She sat down on the steps and
+explored her reticule. There was rather a sorry mess in its depths, but
+the slices of bread were reduced again to their proper basis, and the
+other goodies piled carefully on them.
+
+“Why don’t you call me Bluebell?” she suggested with a rather hopeless
+accent.
+
+“’Cause that ain’t your name,” said Tildy, strictly.
+
+“I guess my father always calls me that.”
+
+“’Tain’t your name, anyhow. Your name is Melissy Jane Garde, goin’ on
+eight years old.”
+
+“It’s just Melissy,” cried the younger, doggedly, as if she would like
+to disown that.
+
+“My mother called me Bluebell, too, and she’s gone to heaven. I sh’d
+think you might call me what my mother called me.”
+
+“Your name’s Melissy,” repeated Tildy, looking with undisturbed eyes
+upon the distance. Here the argument dropped, as it usually did. The
+defeated party turned to other things.
+
+“I pretty near fell in the run. The’ was a man come along and scared me
+so. He was prettier than my father!” exclaimed Melissa, pausing after
+this climax; “that is, dressed up prettier; and he said he was coming
+to school to-day. I wonder what he’s coming there for?”
+
+“Prob’ly it’s somebody the directors is sending to whip us,” opined
+Matilda with serious resignation. “They say Mr. Pitzer ain’t strict
+enough.”
+
+“Oh, do you s’pose it is?” cried the credulous little girl beside her.
+“I never got whipped at school yet.”
+
+“Now, Tildy,” exclaimed the pink-faced elder sister, stepping out, “if
+you don’t hurry up we’ll go on and leave you.”
+
+“I think I’ll stay at home,” said Tildy, reflecting on the fine
+stranger’s probable errand.
+
+“No, you won’t,” cried her mother’s voice from an inner room, making a
+pause in the monotonous rattle of a loom; and though it was a plaintive
+voice and not very decided, Tildy was moved by it to get her sun-bonnet
+and follow the other two. They were making a round of the garden, to
+gather pinks, hollyhocks, bouncing-betties, bachelor-buttons, and
+asparagus sprays. Having tied up a bunch apiece, they left the house
+and began their root-matted and rocky ascent. There were levels above
+where the woods made a twilight at noon, where ferns crowded to their
+knees, and some stood as high as their waists. Who could help stopping
+to inhale that breath which is no plant’s but a fern’s?
+
+“There’s vinegar-balls on this oak,” remarked Tildy, casting her eyes
+up as they passed under a dark-leaved tree. So, sticks and climbing
+being brought to bear upon the tree, one or two small apple-shaped
+bunches were brought down to yield a tart juice to sucking lips.
+I do not pretend to say the balls were wholesome. But the same
+lips loved the white, honey-filled ends of clover-blossoms, tender
+sticks of sweet-briar when stripped of its skin, and they doted on
+“mountain-tea,” a winter-green of three rich fleshy leaves, which clung
+all over these heights in fragrant mats. The three girls were lovers
+of Mother Outdoors. Melissa especially gloried in the woods. The noble
+tree arches, the dew, and sweet earth-smell filled her with worshipping
+joy. It was so nice to be a little girl with a sun-bonnet hanging off
+her shoulders by the strings, and the great woods cooling her face, and
+sighing away off as if thinking up some song to sing to her!
+
+In due course they came to three giant ridges of sand. These stood in
+a clear place, and nobody in that region troubled himself about the
+geological cause of their existence in the heart of the woods. There
+they were, too tempting to be resisted. Melissa dropped her reticule,
+Tildy seriously followed her example, and Christine forgot her dress
+hooking in front and her claims to big girlhood. All three mounted
+the dunes, sat down, gathered their clothing close about their feet,
+and shot down the sides as if on invisible sleds. This queer sort of
+coasting was great fun. When it seemed expedient to adjourn, they shook
+the clean sand from their dresses, and the eldest and youngest untied
+their low shoes to turn them upside down. Matilda being barefoot and
+therefore free from such civilized cares, improved the time by taking
+an extra slide, which was too much for the other girls, so they tried
+it again.
+
+Thus the morning waxed later. So by the time they crossed the foot-log
+over Rocky Fork and approached the log school-house, “books” were
+actually “taken up.”
+
+The school-house was chinked with clay and had double doors which
+opened close beside a travelled road. The woods and heights rose behind
+it, and at one side a sweep of play-ground extended into a viney hollow
+where hung the grape-vine swing for which all the girls in school daily
+brought pocketfuls of string.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MR. PITZER
+
+
+Christine stepped over the threshold and dropped a curtsy which dipped
+her dress in the dust. Matilda followed and was taken with a similar
+convulsion on the same spot. Then the smallest bobbed violently; all
+this homage being paid to a somewhat threadbare man who sat behind a
+high desk opposite the door.
+
+Continuous high desks on a raised platform extended around the walls,
+and continuous benches ran in front of them. Here sat the elders of
+the school--the big boys and girls, with their backs to smaller fry
+who camped on long benches set along the middle of the floor, swinging
+their heels and holding spellers in their hands. The benches were made
+of split logs, the flat sides planed smooth, and the round sides bored
+with holes into which legs were stuck; as these legs were not always
+even, boys at opposite ends of a bench could “teeter-totter” the whole
+row of urchins between them. There were no backs against which you
+might rest your shoulders, but any tired little fellow might lie down
+if he took his own risks about rolling off. There had been teachers who
+would not allow the muscles thus to relax. But Mr. Pitzer was a kind,
+soft-hearted old man, who, as Matilda has hinted, was not considered
+strict enough. He had taught the school many seasons.
+
+The directors said he might do for summer, but each winter they
+determined to engage some strapping modern pedagogue who could control
+the young men and wild young women who sallied knowledge-ward during
+the long term. Still Mr. Pitzer was found in his place. He taught
+manners and morals as well as the common branches, and his sweet,
+severe face under iron-gray hair became stamped on every mind that
+entered the double doors.
+
+The tardy pupils, unchallenged, hung their bonnets and dinner-bags on
+nails in the wall, Teeny took her big-girls’ seat, and straightway
+lay flat on her desk in the agonies of writing a morning copy,
+while the other two sat side by side on a bench murmuring the
+first reading-lesson. A hum like the music of many hives sounded
+all over the room. “D-i-s--dis, d-a-i-n, dain, disdain,” crossed
+“in-com-pat-i-bil-i-ty;” and the important scratching of slate-pencils
+in the hands of ciphering big boys, seemed to supplement a breathing
+and occasional sputter of quill pens.
+
+“Second Reader may stand up!” cried the master.
+
+Bluebell’s class, including her tall friend Matilda, formed in a row in
+front of the master’s desk, each holding his reader clinched before his
+face.
+
+A polished walnut ferule lay at Mr. Pitzer’s hand, and the text-book
+sprawled on the desk. He wore spectacles of so slight an iron frame
+that the glasses seemed suspended miraculously between his stern eyes
+and the eyes turned up to him. Like a commander giving some military
+order, he now cried out: “Attention!”
+
+At the signal every girl dipped low and every boy bent forward with a
+bow. It would have been a misdemeanor for the girls to bow and the
+boys to curtsy, and they knew it. Then the boy at the top of the class
+began to read in a voice which could be heard on the opposite side of
+the road; he was followed by a timid little girl who put her nose close
+to the book and spelled and whispered; and she in turn by a merry girl
+who had been put back from the Third Reader when the master was cross,
+for pronouncing ships wrecked, “shipses rick-ed.” Very little did she
+care, for, knowing the Second Reader by heart, it was easy for her to
+rattle off the story of The Three Boys and the Three Cakes, with a
+moral. Bluebell read in a clear, sensitive, appreciative voice, and
+Tildy followed. They spelled the words which the master pronounced to
+them, and had another lesson set. The military order was then varied:
+
+“Obedience!”
+
+At this they saluted as before, and took their seats.
+
+Business went on as usual. The large girls recited in smart, high
+voices, and the boys blundered in monotone, excepting little Joe Hall,
+who was such a mite of a fellow, yet so smart that he knew almost
+as much as the master. Joe had ciphered farther into the jungles of
+arithmetic than anybody else, and could parse as fast as his tongue
+would run. He always had his atlas lessons, and some said had been
+clear through the geography, while his writing was so wonderful that
+the master sometimes let him set copies when he himself was very busy.
+
+“Somethin’s the matter with the master this mornin’,” whispered Tildy
+to Bluebell, as they wriggled around trying to rest their backs.
+
+It was true. He stalked about with his hands under his coat-tails,
+sticking his under lip out. Even Joe Hall’s grandiloquent rendering of
+Fourth Reader text could not draw his mind from some internal strain;
+and after recess the trouble came out.
+
+Mr. Pitzer read the rules of the school. Whenever he had heard
+complaint, he brought out those ponderous rules and visited them upon
+the pupils that they might know what he required of them, even if he
+did not exact it. Every listener, except the new or very dull ones,
+knew these rules by heart. They were written on tall cap sheets in the
+best of flourishes, and covered the whole duty of boy and girl.
+
+To-day the master read them with frowns and a sonorous voice.
+
+“ARTICLE THIRTEENTH!” he thundered at last; “_Every boy or girl in
+going to or from school shall treat with civility all persons whom they
+meet upon the highway, he or she making a bow or a curtsy as the case
+may be. It shall be a high misdemeanor to treat impolitely any stranger
+or strangers in the schoolroom, or the play-ground, or the highway._”
+
+And here as if to test Mr. Pitzer’s pupils in their behavior, a strange
+man did step over the threshold, taking off his hat as he did so.
+
+The schoolmaster stopped and glared. But Bluebell’s heart came into
+her mouth. She felt unreasonably terrified and trapped by fate. For it
+was the curly, glittering gentleman who had promised to come to the
+school-house, possibly on that dread errand suggested by Tildy--to whip
+the whole school!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE GEOGRAPHY-SCHOOL TEACHER
+
+
+“May I have a few minutes’ conversation with you?” said the fine
+stranger to Mr. Pitzer. The schoolmaster bowed stiffly, said
+“Certainly, sir,” with some pomp, and came forward. He evidently felt
+distrust, not to say hostility; but after ARTICLE THIRTEENTH, he was
+bound to set the school an example in politeness.
+
+There was a stricture around Bluebell’s heart while she watched them
+talking in low tones near the door. The stranger was pliant, eager
+and voluble. Oh, _how_ he did want to get at them all with his stick!
+_Would_ Mr. Pitzer give them over to such shame and pain! She reflected
+about the black ripe cherries in her reticule, and wished she had
+propitiated the good old man by giving them to him at recess. The
+school stopped droning, and held its breath, just as the earth does
+before a storm, to catch some hint of this colloquy. Mr. Pitzer seemed
+more and more mellowed to the man’s proposals. The curves of his stern
+face turned upwards; he nodded his head at the end of every sentence;
+and finally, leading the way to his high desk, he told the school that
+Mr. Runnels had something important to impart to them.
+
+Bluebell shut her eyes, and cowered. Little Joe Hall sat bolt-upright,
+and all the big scholars turned around on their seats.
+
+“He’s going to begin with them on this bench,” whispered Tildy to
+Bluebell. Mr. Runnels smiled with his teeth and picked up the ferule.
+
+Oh, how earth brightened again as his business unfolded! The faint,
+worm-eaten odor of the glass-smooth bench which she clutched, seemed
+quainter to Bluebell than ever before. She had heard the Fourth Reader
+class sing out the tale of Ginevra; and that chest, “carved by Antony
+of Trent,” had just such an indescribable, pungent smell, she felt
+certain, as the desk and seats of this school-house. It had always
+given her a pleasant sensation; it now added to her joy; her heart
+expanded; Mr. Runnels was a very nice man. He did not even hint that a
+school ought to be whipped wholesale; Tildy Banks didn’t know anything
+about it. His errand was to organize a geography school!
+
+“The method,” said Mr. Runnels, “is altogether new. I have a fine and
+complete set of painted maps representing every part of the earth’s
+surface, and the exercise of storing the mind with this important
+science is not only vastly improving, but novel and delightful. All of
+you speak to your parents. The charge is trifling, but the benefit will
+be lasting. Everybody is invited free to the organization of the school
+to-night at Harris’s chapel west of this school-house. All the boys and
+girls and young people of the next district will be there. So don’t
+fail to urge your parents to bring you. So many bright eyes,” said Mr.
+Runnels with a charming smile--
+
+The school giggled with delight--
+
+--“so many intelligent faces, instructed by a wise, kind master--”
+
+Mr. Pitzer straightened his back and smiled around--
+
+--“must surely take an interest in this beautiful globe on which we
+live.”
+
+Mr. Runnels went on and gave them a short lecture on geography. He
+told them anecdotes of that ignoramus who did not believe the world
+was round and turned on its axis, because, if this were the case, his
+father’s mill-pond would spill all its water. The children laughed
+uproariously, though few of them had ever thought of the earth except
+as an expanse of rocks, trees and robe-like sward, cleft by the Rocky
+Fork.
+
+Mr. Pitzer and the geography-teacher parted with ceremonious bows.
+The schoolmaster himself made a few cautious remarks to cool his own
+enthusiasm; but the next class, which was the grave elders’ arithmetic,
+constantly broke out with fractional questions about a different
+science.
+
+At last the sun had retreated from the middle of the floor to the very
+door-sill. By this token they knew it was high noon. Spellers were laid
+straight on the benches around the wall, desk lids were shut down over
+their miscellany. Eyes looked expectantly at the master, and all arms
+were folded. He uttered one magic word: “Dismissed!”
+
+The school seemed to turn a complete somersault: every child projected
+himself like an arrow toward the door, whooping, singing, scampering
+and tumbling. Chaos surged to the brown wooden joists. Some nimble
+little boys got on the desks and galloped around, while others slipped
+out through the windows, which were set sidewise instead of lengthwise
+in the log walls, looking like windows that had lain down to dream.
+The master, swinging a thick wooden cane, walked to his house which
+was near. It might confer distinction to go home to one’s dinner, but
+this distinction was not courted even by children who lived in sight.
+Could anything be more delightful than that noon hour! Was it only an
+hour--that time stuffed full of events as a month? It was the kernel of
+all day, at any rate.
+
+Bluebell and Tildy went to their play-house to eat dinner. This summer
+residence was formed by a triplet of trees growing so close together
+as to form a deep alcove. The floor was carpeted thick with moss which
+Bluebell and Tildy changed every few days. They had some gnarly
+chairs, which you might have called chunks. Hanging their sun-bonnets
+up on scales of bark, they ate their dinners in society, much as
+foreign people attend the theatre. For all about them were similar
+boxes, or residences, whose occupants visited, and exchanged samples
+from each others’ reticules, so what was cooked on one side of the
+district was tested on the other side.
+
+Amanda Willey and Perintha Pancost knocked at the bark door of Misses
+Garde and Banks, and were bidden to come right in and take chairs.
+The residence being already comfortably full, however, and no chairs
+visible, they stayed outside and took grass, which was far more
+comfortable. Tildy and Perintha swapped a fragment of cherry-pie
+and a bit of rather stale cake, while Amanda gave Bluebell a piece
+of her cheese for some cherries. These were grave transactions,
+each party examining what she received with due caution, excepting
+Bluebell, who was willing to fling her repast right and left without
+considering whether she got its equivalent or not. Amanda Willey was
+a large-faced, smiling girl with very smooth hair cut short around her
+neck. Over her ordinary dress she wore a long-sleeved pink sack, and a
+pink apron tied about the waist like a grown woman’s. The costume was
+most pleasing in Bluebell’s eyes.
+
+“I got a black-silk apron,” she observed, smoothing and patting
+Amanda’s drapery. “I’m going to ask Liza to let me wear it to geography
+school.”
+
+“I’m going,” exclaimed Perintha Pancost. “The man’s to board at our
+house. He had his breakfast there.”
+
+“I ain’t,” said Tildy. “He looks like a raskil. Mebby he’s come down
+here to rob folks.”
+
+The blue eyes, brown eyes and hazel eyes around her stood out at
+this suggestion. Tildy spoke as if her acquaintance with rascals was
+thorough.
+
+“I don’t think that’s very smart of you, Till Banks,” said Perintha,
+the hostess of the “raskil.” “My pa and ma don’t have robbers at our
+house. He’s the pertiest kind of a man. I like him.”
+
+“So do I,” decided Bluebell with a sigh of relief. Her credulous nature
+had been staggered by Matilda. “I’ll take my Noey’s Ark book to read in
+g’ography school.”
+
+The boys, having swallowed their dinners, were already shouting at
+“Bull in the Pen,” when the girls gathered to take turns at the swing.
+How sweet these allotted ten or a dozen rushes through the air were,
+with some swift-footed girl running under you to send you up among the
+branches! The glee with which you grabbed a leaf, your slow reluctance
+in “letting the old cat die,” and another succeed you! The number of
+games of “Black Man,” “Poison,” “Base,” which can be crowded into one
+noon, has never been computed. Every muscle is strained, the hair
+clings to pink foreheads, lungs and hearts work like engines, and the
+outdoor world is _too_ sweet to be given up when that rattle of the
+master’s ferule against the window sash is supplemented by the stern
+call of “Books!”
+
+Drenched in the dew of health, every little body rushed again to the
+hard benches. Bluebell told herself that she always liked afternoon,
+it seemed so short; and as the sun stooped lower and lower, a lump
+of homesickness grew in her for the old weather-stained house, her
+father’s return from his daily rounds, and the baby’s tow head and
+black eyes which were sure to meet her at the lower bars. Then there
+was the spelling-class which crowned every day’s labor. Orthography may
+not be the most important element of education, but Bluebell thought
+it was, and she had a genius for it. While Tildy swung sleepy legs.
+Bluebell mentally counted her own “head-marks,” and speculated on what
+the master’s offered prize might be at the end of the term. Classes
+succeeded each other, and the sweet dream-producing hum went on, until
+Bluebell found herself again going triumphantly “down foot,” having
+scored still another head-mark.
+
+Then the roll was called, while reticules, bonnets and caps were slyly
+gathered off their pegs and passed from hand to hand, that no one
+might keep the others waiting. Joe Hall responded to his name with
+a shout, while Amanda Willey’s voice could scarcely be heard; some
+pupils answered “half a day;” and for others there was a hurried cry
+of “absent,” not always correct, as in the case of John Tegarden, who
+shook fist and head many times at Joe Hall for shouting absent to his
+name when he was there in the body. Joe ducked his shoulders, and
+intimated by lifting his eyebrows, grimacing and nodding, that this was
+an oversight on his part. And John was obliged to carry his grievance
+outdoors, as he was the first boy on his bench. Dinner-bag and cap in
+hand, he stopped at the door to scrape and say “Good-evening!” to the
+master, receiving a stately “Good-evening” in return. Thus one by one
+they filed out, each child stopping to make that grave salutation,
+until the master was free to close the double doors and fasten them
+with chain and padlock.
+
+It was more than two hours till sunset; but there were long shadows
+in the woods, and an evening coolness was stealing over the beautiful
+earth.
+
+The Rocky Fork foaming over boulders or spreading into still pools at
+the feet of leaning trees, shaded, variable, but clear as spring water,
+cut the home path in two, and was spanned by a foot-log. The wheel of
+Hall’s mill turned lazily here, and the mill-race made Bluebell’s brain
+unsteady. Not so the shady pebbles in the stream. She sat and watched
+them after crossing until Tildy’s voice up the ascent gave her warning
+to hurry.
+
+All the country was in that afterglow of sunset when she reached the
+pasture-bars behind the house. And of course there was the little
+sister at the bars, her curly tow hair dovetailed at the back, her
+black eyes spread and both white claws clinging around the wood.
+
+“Some tump’ny’s tum!” she cried.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+COMPANY
+
+
+The announcement that there was company did not prevent Bluebell from
+climbing the bars and giving Roxy a warm hug, but rather added strength
+to the embrace.
+
+“You little darling, it’s been so long since I saw you! Ear-ly this
+morning sisser went away. Who’s come? Hope it isn’t somebody that’ll
+keep us from playing and having a good time.”
+
+The tow-headed sister spread her nervous little hands and attempted
+description while trotting along.
+
+“Lady with turls: nice, nice lady!”
+
+“Is father home?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Doesn’t Liza know who she is?”
+
+“No. Liza say, ‘Take off your fings. Doctor be home pretty soon.’”
+
+“Oh! It’s somebody to be doctored.”
+
+“It’s tumnp’ny!” urged Rocco. “We goin’ to have plum p’serves for
+supper.”
+
+This settled it. Liza was a discriminating housekeeper who did not
+regale calling patients with her best preserves. The doctor’s house was
+also his office where people came for medicines or treatment, and the
+Rocky Forkers were willing to make it a free hotel; but Liza was not.
+
+Liza had been spinster mistress of the house for twenty-five years.
+Her mother died only the year before her cousin, Doctor Garde, and his
+orphans came, and the short, plump, merry, quick old maid had taken
+care of her mother for a long time. She liked taking care of people.
+It was really for the privilege of taking care of the children that
+she rented her premises to her cousin. He came with two babies, and a
+new medical diploma to build up a practice among the hills, and threw
+himself entirely into work, leaving Liza to bring up the children as
+she saw best. She was a woman with a wholesome soul, and they all
+got on comfortably. While she thought the doctor remarkable in his
+profession, and felt pride in his cases and cures, outside of that,
+being considerably his senior, she took the attitude of a protecting
+aunt.
+
+To-night the children saw her standing in the back door, looking comely
+and important, her black hair sleeked down to her cheeks.
+
+“M’lissy,” she exclaimed--for when Liza was anxious or grave, she
+called the child by her real name--“go into my room and put on your
+blue calico, and your white stockings and slippers. I’ll come and braid
+your hair.”
+
+“Who’s come, Liza?”
+
+“It’s some of your kin. Mind, now, don’t go through the sitting-room.”
+
+Then Bluebell knew that the awful presence was there. She walked on
+tiptoe past the closed door, Rocco at her heels, and slipped up the
+staircase to that half nursery, half bedroom, which the children
+occupied with Liza. It contained some of their mother’s furniture: a
+mahogany chest of drawers, bulging in front; a stuffed rocking-chair
+in which Bluebell told the little sister stories; a crib, and a
+trundle-bed which was not pushed under Liza’s white-valanced and
+quilt-covered four-poster, but stood under a window that the
+cherry-boughs scraped. The room was whitewashed as fair as a lily, even
+to the hewed wood joists. Liza’s dresses hung on nails along the wall,
+and Bluebell’s hung beneath in a row which she could reach.
+
+Her heelless slippers and fine open-work stockings came out of the
+chest of drawers; and she was soon struggling to hook the blue calico,
+but ineffectually, when Liza came up like a breeze, brushed and braided
+her hair in two short tails, tied the tails with yellow brocaded ribbon
+from her own ribbon-box, and looked her over approvingly.
+
+“Now don’t forget your curchy,” she admonished. “Come here, Rocky: let
+me braid your hair, too, while I’m about it.”
+
+Rocky demurred, but it was no use. Her lint locks were swiftly made
+into two tiny strands and also tied across with yellow ribbon, giving
+her an ancient and grotesque appearance. The children trod down-stairs
+a step at a time, hand in hand. Bluebell trembling with bashful
+self-consciousness. It choked her voice and made her dizzy when she
+entered the sitting-room, so that she stumbled on a strip of the
+home-woven carpet laid loose upon the floor. There were a few chairs,
+including one gilt-ornamented rocker, and a case of the doctor’s books,
+in the sitting-room; and nothing more; for the guest in white curls was
+on the porch looking up the amphitheatre of woods surrounding her.
+
+She was certainly a great lady. Her dress of plum-colored poplin had
+a long pointed waist; she wore a broad embroidered collar turned over
+ribbon, and just as the children appeared, put a large, open-faced gold
+watch back into its pocket. Her hair was coiled on the top of her head
+and fastened with a shell comb, two full curls being left at each side
+of the forehead.
+
+Bluebell felt overwhelmed when this lady turned her delicate face
+from the hills and reached two transparent hands toward the country
+children. Bluebell made her obeisance, and the lady seemed pleased with
+the conscientious gravity with which she did it.
+
+“Don’t you know me?” said this lady, pressing a hand of each child.
+
+“No, ma’am.”
+
+“I am Miss Calder. Your father has told you about me? I became
+responsible for you when you were an infant, and you received my name,
+Melissa.”
+
+Bluebell searched her memory painfully. She was very anxious to know
+her namesake, who seemed the daintiest woman alive; but having no
+recollection of the matter herself, she was forced to admit she did not
+know she had one.
+
+“I s’pose father forgot to tell me,” she observed, bringing forward the
+best excuse she could think of for him.
+
+“I dare say,” said Miss Calder. “He has not been the same man since
+your mother died.” The fair old lady began to tremble. She took a
+handkerchief out of the beaded reticule hanging to her arm, and,
+hugging Bluebell to her, cried for several minutes with an agitation
+which shook them both. Bluebell was much embarrassed. She felt that she
+ought to be very sorry, and heaved several deep sighs; but the pain in
+her nose, which Miss Calder was squeezing against the watch-case, kept
+her from fully giving herself up to grief, and it was probably just as
+well, as she had a whole lifetime in which to miss her mother.
+
+The rose-leaf maiden lady dried her eyes, and sat down with the
+children, one on each side of her.
+
+“Are you ’sponsible for Rocco, too?”
+
+“No. I do not know who named her. Your parents were living in another
+place at that time, and your mother died soon after her birth. I have
+not seen you since you were a babe in arms. Your mother was a very
+lovely woman.”
+
+“We’ve got a daguerreotype of her.”
+
+“Indeed! will you let me see it?”
+
+“Father will when he comes. He keeps it locked in his desk drawer.
+I took it to school one day to show to the scholars, ’cause Printhy
+Pancost said she knew my mother wasn’t pretty, and he said I mustn’t
+take it any more.”
+
+The fair lady smiled slightly, and said again, “Indeed!” This appeared
+to be a polite word which she uttered without the least emotion, merely
+to indicate that she was listening.
+
+“What do you study at school?”
+
+“Reading and spelling. I’m in the Second Reader. We’ve read as far as
+the ‘Three Boys and the Three Cakes,’ and we’re spelling in ‘A-base.’
+I could spell over to ‘In-com-pat-i-bil-i-ty,’ but the rest can’t. And
+there’s going to be a g’ography school, and I’ll ask father to send me.”
+
+“Indeed. You are very smart in your studies, Melissa. Little Roxana
+doesn’t go to school?”
+
+“No, ma’am.”
+
+Here little Roxana, unwilling to be presented to company as totally
+unaccomplished, rubbed her long fingers over the lady’s watch-guard and
+asserted herself:
+
+“I can sing at the foonerals!”
+
+Bluebell felt disconcerted. She feared to shock the rose-leaf guardian;
+but Rocco took no notice of her signal to drop the subject.
+
+“I can sing ‘Back any more,’ and ‘Cap in a father’s hand.’” To prove
+which the baby began at once and sang in a clear, bold voice:
+
+  “This is the way I long have sought,
+   I neva’ turn back any more:
+   And mourned a-tause I foun’ it not,
+   I neva’ turn back any more:
+   Away the holy proph-ups went,
+   I neva’ turn back any more:
+   The road ’t leads from bam-shum-ment,
+   I neva’ turn back any more!”
+
+“Why, indeed!” exclaimed Miss Calder. But, like a wound-up musical box,
+changing her tune, Rocco went on:
+
+  “There is a happy land,
+     Far, far away:
+   There saints and glory stand,
+     Bright, bright as day.
+   Caps in a father’s hand,
+     Love cannot die.”
+
+“I know ‘Jucy-crucy-fide-him,’ too.”
+
+“She means ‘The Jews, they crucified Him,’” said Bluebell.
+
+“I sing it to the white chicken’s fooneral, and the black chicken’s
+fooneral, and the speckled chicken’s fooneral.”
+
+“You see,” said Bluebell, hot in the face, but constrained to answer
+the raised eyebrows of this lady who probably never pulled off shoes
+and stockings or rolled down a sandbank, or so much as looked at a
+dead chicken, when she was a little girl, “we got a little graveyard.
+And there were so many pretty little chicks died. And Liza lets us take
+the fire shovel. We dig a nice little hole and fence it all round with
+sticks in the bottom, and wrap the chicky up; then we ’tend like this
+porch was the church, and we sing and have a funeral like they did
+when Mary Jane Willey died--I just preach about what a good chicken it
+was,” stammered Bluebell; “and then we ’tend like we’re cryin’ and put
+it in our box that we pull with a string, and have a percession to the
+grave.” She became so interested in the description that she ended with
+some gusto.
+
+Miss Calder put her handkerchief to her lips, shaking a little, and
+Bluebell felt afraid that she was going to cry again.
+
+“Isn’t that an unhealthy kind of play?” she finally asked.
+
+“Oh no, ma’am--the chickens is just as clean!”
+
+“But your feelings are so disturbed.”
+
+“We just _let on_ we feel bad. We got ten chickens buried, and
+headstones and footstones to ’em all. We enjoy ourselves so much!”
+
+Miss Calderas smile now escaped from the handkerchief and ran up her
+delicate shrivelled face.
+
+“I have something for you in my trunk which may amuse you in a
+different way.” So saying the lady rose and rustled into the
+sitting-room, where in one corner stood a small, round-lidded
+hair-trunk just as the driver from the station had left it. She opened
+this with a key from her reticule, while Bluebell and Roxana stood one
+at each end of it, their hands behind them and their pulses beating
+with expectation. A scent of lavender and rose-leaves came from under
+the cover. Miss Calder lifted musky robes of lawn, dazzling white
+embroidered garments, and her cap and bonnet-box out, before she came
+to certain packages which she methodically unwrapped.
+
+Bluebell swallowed several times, and the little sister opened her
+mouth.
+
+[Illustration: “HERE’S A WAX DOLL FOR YOU.”--_Page 47._]
+
+The first thing which came to sight was a string of blue and white
+beads braided in a rope; that Miss Calder tied around Rocco’s
+honored neck. Then followed a rattle and whistle, also for Rocco, whom
+the good lady had evidently pictured to herself as yet an infant. But
+when two flat packages revealed themselves, “Tales from Catland” in red
+and gold and “Stories from Roman History” in black, flexible backs,
+Bluebell felt unspeakably rich. This was, after all, a comparative
+state. The superlative was reached when the last bundle of all came
+out of several newspapers and folds of tissue paper. There were some
+glimpses of pink gauze, the unmistakable presence of small gaitered
+feet, then the actual dawning of rosy face and flaxen hair.
+
+“Here’s a wax doll for you,” said Miss Calder, making the presentation
+as if wax dolls were a common addition to every well-regulated little
+girl’s family. This was the first of that particular class of dolls
+the children had ever seen. Several cheap ladies with broken heads
+were lying about the house; for whenever the doctor made a journey he
+brought one of the children a doll and the other a book--the books
+being always histories, or solid sciences.
+
+Bluebell, I must confess, was too much an outdoor child to be a tender
+mother of dolls. But this beautiful creature with real hair, woke
+rapture in her. Her breath came short when she thanked the new friend.
+The splendor of such a possession made her ashamed of her unmaternal
+care over the plainer dollies who had fallen one by one into Rocco’s
+untutored hands.
+
+“What will you call her?”
+
+“I think the prettiest name in the world is Georgiana,” said Bluebell,
+hesitating. If this darling must be called Melissa it seemed more than
+she could stand!
+
+“That suits her very nicely,” agreed the fair maiden lady. Bluebell was
+emboldened to go up closer and make her lips into an expectant bud.
+
+“You want to kiss me, do you?” said Miss Calder, smiling; so she
+inclined her cheek towards the bashful, eager little face, and Bluebell
+felt as if she had kissed a white hollyhock’s yielding petal.
+
+“I have some pretty pieces to make Miss Georgiana more clothes. Do you
+know how to sew?”
+
+“I can hem a little, but it sticks my finger.”
+
+“Have you begun a sampler yet?”
+
+“No, ma’am. But Liza’s going to start one for me. Teeny Banks has got
+one done, but she’s a young woman.”
+
+A well-known, ringing neigh came from the lane which led through woods
+from the main road.
+
+“That’s Ballie! Father’s at the bars. I’ll go and tell him you’re come.”
+
+Father had flung himself out of the saddle, and the slender-legged,
+delicate Arabian mare followed him into her stable. Her chestnut coat
+had the richness of satin. She had one white stocking and a white face,
+pink, sensitive nostrils and an arching neck. She had been known to do
+marvels of speed, to breast swollen streams, to pick her way carefully
+around dangerous cliffs in the darkest night. She and her master moved
+together like one of the old sylvan Centaurs; but if Bluebell climbed
+her back, as she sometimes did, the Arabian stepped as gently as a
+nurse.
+
+Accustomed to her father’s habits, Bluebell waited on the barn floor
+until he stabled the pretty creature. She still held Miss Georgiana
+carefully in her arms. He came out, unfastened his leggings, and hung
+them in their usual place. His face was square, serious, and sweet.
+His light hair hung below his high standing collar. He was a young
+man, scarcely thirty, and so lovable when he got into the arms of his
+children. Still, Bluebell had been taught not to address him by the
+diminutive of papa. His own bringing-up had been austere, inclining to
+plain, strong words like father, mother, children.
+
+“See what I got!” cried his little girl.
+
+Father lifted her up, doll and all, relaxing into a smile.
+
+“Where did you get that?”
+
+“Father, Miss Calder has come. And she brought Rocco some beads and me
+some books, and Rocco a whistle, and me a doll, and she’s got a gold
+watch and white curly hair! Oh, I’m so glad! And may I go to g’ography
+school to-night? There’s a man going to teach in the church.”
+
+Father put her down and took her hand.
+
+“When did she come?” he inquired as they walked towards the house.
+
+“Before I got home from school. I guess a man brought her. And,
+father,” advised Bluebell, confidentially, “don’t say anything to her
+about mother, for if you do, she’ll burst out a-crying!”
+
+He looked down at the auburn head with wistful eyes.
+
+It occurred to her afterwards that grown people seemed to pay little
+attention to what children said; for when she came in with Rocco to
+supper, father was showing Miss Calder the daguerreotype, and she was
+crying in her web-like handkerchief.
+
+Bluebell heard her say, “She was like a daughter to me.” The doctor sat
+with his head on his hand. But Bluebell was prevented from witnessing
+their meeting by Roxana’s singular behavior. This lint-locked damsel
+stood beside the house, her hands locked behind her. The whistle
+and rattle lay despised upon the earth, though her beads still hung
+beneath her sulking chin. Bluebell’s heart misgave her. But she tried
+persuasion.
+
+“Darling, don’t you want to go and help sisser hunt up the old,
+_pretty_ dollies, and set ’em in a nice row?” Rocco’s whole body shook
+a negative.
+
+“Would you like to _hold_ the wax dolly in your hands, and be _real_
+careful?”
+
+Rocco kicked backward with her heel to indicate her contempt for the
+wax dolly.
+
+“O dear!” sighed Bluebell, who had been taught it was the duty of an
+elder sister to give up to the younger. “_Do_ you want to take my doll
+right out of my mouth, when it was a present, too, and pull her hair
+out and rub dirt on her face, and break her all to pieces?”
+
+Roxana wriggled a very faint negative. But still it was evident that
+wax doll stood between her sister’s heart and hers.
+
+“I don’t da’st to give her away to you,” pleaded Bluebell, safe
+on that point; still she looked ruefully at the fair Georgiana’s
+dissension-creating face.
+
+“I don’t want the ole fing!” exclaimed Rocco, sticking her lip further
+out and scowling. She really did not know what was swelling in her
+tender little heart.
+
+“Then, honey-dew,” argued Bluebell, whose affection would burst into
+pet names which she would not on any account have had her elders hear,
+“what you poutin’ for?”
+
+She held the disturbing Georgiana aloft.
+
+“Georgiana,” said the elder sister, “I got just one little
+Rockety-popperty, and I love her and hug her, and our mother’s dead,
+so we’re half-orphans. And we play together and have the best times!
+Buryin’ chickens and all.”
+
+Rocco’s long fingers twisted nervously, and one full tear splashed on
+the toe she was scowling at.
+
+“And now a good friend’s come, and brought you, and my little sister’s
+got mad! It makes me feel so bad I don’t want to play! You can just
+stay here under this tree. I’m goin’ off in the woods or some place.
+And our company will want to know what’s become of me, and folks will
+say, ‘she went off and lay down like the babes in the woods ’cause her
+sister didn’t love her any more!’”
+
+Roxana uttered a mournful whoop. Her heart broke under its heavy
+weight, and the freshet washed over her face.
+
+“_I_ ain’t mad, B’uebell,” she surrendered, piteously.
+
+They flew and caught each other in a tight embrace, Bluebell stooping
+to the baby.
+
+“I do love you any more!”
+
+“You old darling!”
+
+“Don’t go off to the woods!”
+
+Rocco was such a delicious little sister in her melting moment, so
+wet-eyed, so tremulous in the breast, clinging with such loving arms,
+that the least pliable person could not resist her.
+
+“No, I won’t go off to the woods, honey-dew,” vowed Bluebell.
+
+“You can have my eggs in the rob--rob--robin’s nest,” hiccupped Rocco,
+who in the triumph of affection gave up all things.
+
+“And you can be Georgiana’s mother, and I’ll be her grandmother! Then
+you’ll own her too, and I won’t be givin’ her away!” This flash of
+Bluebell’s genius fused the whole difficulty.
+
+Rocco’s tears were carefully wiped off on the wrong side of her apron.
+A smile like the brightness after rain spread from her black eyelashes
+all over her face, a reflection of the smile Georgiana had been so
+steadily bestowing on her small maternal relative, her grandparent,
+the dark, weather-beaten house, the cherry-trees, and all animate and
+inanimate nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE GEOGRAPHY SCHOOL
+
+
+After supper Miss Calder professed herself very much fatigued; so Liza
+showed her at once to the best room, and Doctor Garde, before setting
+out on a night-ride, carried her trunk into it.
+
+This gorgeous apartment was situated on the ground floor, opening
+directly from the sitting-room; and as the rest of the family slept
+up-stairs, the timid lady felt an unacknowledged chill running down her
+spine. She considered that she had come into a wild and uncivilized
+region, and remembered the brigand-like workmen at the Furnace who
+seemed to regard her with curiosity.
+
+“Are you not afraid, alone with the children, when Doctor Garde is
+gone?” she asked Liza, while laying out her toilet-set.
+
+“Oh no, I never think of such a thing. Mother and me lived here alone
+so long. They say it is unsafe over in the Harris neighborhood. But
+nobody ever tried to break into this house.”
+
+A screech-owl screamed, and Miss Calder shuddered. These spinster
+ladies were very polite to each other, but they really stood in social
+opposition.
+
+“She’s used to fine living, and she’ll think this is no place to bring
+up the children,” was Liza’s secret fear.
+
+“The children seem healthy and happy enough,” was Miss Calder’s silent
+comment, “but they never will learn manners here. Maurice must be
+roused, and reminded of his duty to them.”
+
+There was a fireplace in the spare bedroom, now filled with asparagus
+and roses set in a huge blue pitcher. The toilet-stand was covered
+with ruffled dimity. The bed-valance was also of ruffled dimity, and a
+mountain of feather-beds, dressed in the best linen and showiest quilts
+the house afforded, offered Miss Calder repose. Liza had once been to
+Fredericktown, and she flattered herself she knew how town-folks fixed
+their company rooms. A chest on legs and a brass-knobbed bureau stood
+in opposite corners. The flowered bowl and pitcher would be eagerly
+seized by china-fanciers in these days. A long gilt-framed glass, with
+a gaudy landscape at the top of it, was shrouded in gauze, like the
+face of a Turkish wife. On each paper blind was represented a colossal
+vase of flowers, so gorgeous that real roses were put almost out of
+countenance by them. And the chairs were all wooden seats instead of
+split-bottom, and had gilding on their backs. On the wall was a framed
+certificate of Liza’s church-membership; and the plaster-of-Paris
+images of a cat and a parrot ornamented opposite ends of the mantel,
+while “Little Samuel” knelt pacifically between them.
+
+“There’s no lock on the door that opens on to the porch,” bustled Liza,
+“but you needn’t be afraid. Nobody could open that door without waking
+you.”
+
+Miss Calder saw this door with cold perspiration, and thought of her
+cozy upper chamber at home, and her two bell-ropes which on the instant
+would arouse Maria and the man.
+
+But she smiled as pleasantly as possible, while thinking, “My nerves
+will not bear such a strain long.”
+
+Liza wished her good-night, and went to put the baby to bed, and attend
+to her milking.
+
+The cows were at the lower bars, waiting in content. Night had not
+fairly set in, for twilight lingers so long among the hills. There was
+dead blackness up the pine slopes, but an afterglow along the valley.
+Bluebell sat on the fence watching these bovine mothers. She had called
+them from the other side of the run, with long intonations: “Su-kee;
+Pi-dey! Ro-see! Su-ukee!” Pidey’s bell had tinkled accompaniment,
+recording their progress on the way. Now it dingled down the opposite
+hill with such a clamor that Bluebell could fancy the knock-kneed trot
+of both cows; and now it thumped as they plunged into the run; then it
+wandered along, pausing over some very sweet bunch of grass, jerking at
+a mouthful of sweet-briar, and finally coming to the bars in perfect
+marching time: “_te-ding_, _te-ding_, _te-ding_, _a-ding_, _ding_.”
+Bluebell had never heard an organ or an orchestra. She thought that
+cow-bell in the dim landscape, with echoes coming back from the hills,
+the most softening music in the world. The sound brought with it a
+smell of roses, of grass after rain, and clover.
+
+But another sound now attracted her ear, and she turned on the fence.
+Ballie was neighing at the upper bars. The doctor had one foot in the
+stirrup and was rising to his seat when his daughter’s voice burst out
+in appeal:
+
+“Oh, father, won’t you please take me to g’ography school?”
+
+She clung panting to the fence. “The whole school’s goin’, and it’s
+only to Harris’s chapel!”
+
+He felt very tender toward his children this evening, though he thought
+himself always too indulgent.
+
+“But I haven’t time to take out the buggy now.”
+
+“Can’t I ride behind you, father? I’m all dressed up ’cept my Sunday
+flat.”
+
+“Well, run and get it then, I can leave you at the chapel, and pick you
+up when I come back. Tell Liza to pin a shawl around you.”
+
+Bluebell was presently climbing to a seat behind the Arabian’s saddle,
+and holding around her father as they trotted away. Her mother’s
+black-silk, heavily fringed shawl was pinned tightly under her chin. It
+must be confessed that Liza had not seen her wrapped. Liza was with the
+baby, and Bluebell knew she would put the horrible old broche around
+her--a wrap beautiful in its time, but now as old as Liza’s self, and
+much the worse for wear. So the damsel knocked hastily at Miss Calder’s
+door, to gain access to the chest within.
+
+Miss Melissa opened it with some hesitation lest it were an early
+housebreaker. She had on a flowered dressing-gown and was brushing out
+her puffs.
+
+“I only want to get my shawl out of the chest,” said the little girl,
+and she hurried to lift the heavy lid.
+
+“Are you going out, my dear?”
+
+“Father’s goin’ to take me to g’ography school.”
+
+“To geography school?”
+
+“Yes, ma’am. I’m to ride behind him on Ballie, and he’ll leave me at
+the door, and call for me when he comes back. It will be such fun!”
+
+Miss Melissa looked as if she hardly thought so. Her inward comment
+was, “Dear me! how negligent and ignorant of a mother’s duty a man is!”
+
+Bluebell dragged out the heavy embroidered black shawl, and ran with
+it. The silk apron was not attainable; but this royal garment and her
+“flat” were more than she had hoped for. The “flat” was a brown crimped
+straw with flopping brim, tied under the chin--a head-covering for
+Sunday.
+
+It was quite an adventure to be going towards that unknown delight of
+geography school, behind on Ballie, who, though kind, curvetted and
+begged to know why _she_ was asked to do double duty like any old hack.
+
+They rode by the skirts of the pines, and down a knotty, steep wagon
+road, over the bridge of the run to the cross-roads. Lights from
+various cabins twinkled along their way. The horse’s hoofs struck the
+county thoroughfare which led past the school-house, but paused at a
+small white building, and here Bluebell alighted. Her mind had been too
+busy for talk, and her young, grave father, occupied also, whistled
+under his breath all the way. It made her feel sad to hear father
+whistle so--it was like the far-off sigh of the pines.
+
+“I’ll stop for you,” he said as he cantered off.
+
+Harris’s chapel was lighted; and through its two open doors you could
+see it was crowded. Its gable-end was towards the road, and a flight
+of wooden steps led up to each door. Bluebell entered on the “women’s
+side.” No kind of meeting could be held in the building which would
+make it proper for these doors to be used indiscriminately. All the men
+and boys entered at one door, all the women and girls at the other; a
+certain partition in the benches separated the house into two sides,
+one of which was composed of bonnets, and the other of bare heads
+having the hair cropped around the ears.
+
+But never had the chapel presented so enjoyable a sight to Bluebell’s
+eyes as now. She liked the nine-o’clock Sunday-school, and even the
+sermon, though the minister always pounded and the echoes of his voice
+made your ears ache; but when the windows were open such pleasant air
+came in, the children looked so nice in their Sunday clothes, and
+their mothers so peaceful, and even ugly old Mr. Harris seemed quite
+pleasant, when he started the singing, keeping time with his foot, and
+rolling out cheerfully:
+
+  “Come, let us anew
+   Our journey pursue,
+   Roll round with the year,
+   And never stand still
+   Till the Master appear.”
+
+But to-night the whitewashed walls glistened under tallow candles stuck
+in tin sockets at regular intervals around them, besides those lights
+in the great chandeliers made of cross-pieces of wood pierced with
+holes. At the pulpit-end of the room, large maps covered the wall;
+and below them stood Mr. Runnels with a long pointer in his hand. The
+seats seemed filled to overflowing with everybody for miles around,
+as Bluebell tiptoed up the aisle. The flat flopped and the fringed
+shawl trailed. Some one put out a hand and pulled her, and she found
+Perintha Pancost had squeezed a seat for her, which she thankfully
+took, settling her little blushing face into the mass. She found Mandy
+Willey on the other side of her. Mandy Willey had on the black-silk
+apron, and her white sun-bonnet. She had also a pocketful of fresh
+mountain-tea, which she divided with the other girls.
+
+“What did you wear your flat for?” whispered Perintha disparagingly.
+“Take it off!” Her school bonnet lay in her lap, and she looked
+comfortable.
+
+“I sha’n’t do it,” whispered back Bluebell with some asperity.
+
+“My maw has an old shawl like that,” added Perintha, fingering the
+fringe.
+
+“Your maw!” retorted Bluebell, stung by the implied stricture when she
+thought herself looking her grandest. She concentrated all her scorn on
+the soft diminutive. “_I’d_ say mother!”
+
+“Humph!” snuffed Perintha.
+
+“Miss Calder’s come,” continued Bluebell in a dignified fashion. “She’s
+a town-lady. She brought me a doll with real hair that you can comb
+out, like mine.”
+
+“I don’t care if she has,” retorted Perintha. “My cousin in Frederick
+has two dolls nearly as big as I am, and _both_ of them has hair!”
+
+So they might have gone on, trying to outshine each other in lustre
+borrowed from their friends and relatives, much as grown people do, had
+not Mr. Runnels now claimed everybody’s attention. He gave a brief,
+plain lecture on the divisions of the earth’s surface. Then selecting
+the map of North America, he requested the best singers to take their
+places on front seats. Old Mr. Harris, who had come to keep a proper
+check on proceedings, felt touched and complimented by this appeal.
+He always led church singing; so, tiptoeing officiously about, he
+weeded out a laughing girl here and an awkward young man there, in some
+other place a middle-aged farmer who was noted for bass, or a matronly
+shrill-voiced sister who responded with reluctance, and placed them in
+array, himself at the head, good-naturedly ready to lend his influence
+to education.
+
+Then Mr. Runnels turned to the old schoolmaster who sat smiling and
+prominent on a chair brought down from the high pulpit, and begged that
+the school-children might be brought forward. Upon this, Mr. Pitzer
+tiptoed along the aisles, summoning this one and that one of his flock
+and ranging them behind the front row, where the heads of some scarcely
+reached above the high backs of the seats. Bluebell felt important and
+excited, and regretted having left behind her Noah’s Ark book, which
+she had proposed to herself as a text-book to the maps. Perintha and
+Mandy forgot to munch mountain-tea. Little Joe Hall sat beside the
+master, on the men’s side, the master secretly proud of this boy’s
+quick mind and alert manner, though pretending to be oblivious to them
+lest parents of other children present might say he “showed partiality.”
+
+The geography-teacher explained the map, and old Mr. Harris was the
+first to go up and “point out” different countries. He made mistakes
+and chirped pleasantly over them, but encouraged one or two blushing
+girls to follow him, and a lumbering boy who was so frightened when
+the pointer was placed in his hand that he could not tell land from
+water.
+
+Then little Joe Hall stepped forward and covered himself all over
+with glory; he had the countries so thoroughly by heart that nobody
+could puzzle him, though John Tegarden confusedly called for “Russian
+Central.” The master smiled furtively around while he took off his
+glasses and rubbed them.
+
+But now the beauty of a geography school came into full play. The
+improvised orchestra was instructed to lift up its voice and sing off
+the map while Mr. Runnels indicated each country with the pointer. The
+melody was a sort of chant, but it was a lively chant, and every rustic
+took it up with enjoyment:
+
+
+  “Greenland, a desolate and barren region,
+   Greenland, a desolate and barren region!
+
+  “Russian America, New Archangel,
+   Russian America, New Archangel.
+
+  “British America has no capital,
+   British America has no capital.
+
+  “United States, Washington,
+   The government’s republican:
+   United States, Washington,
+   The government’s republican.
+
+  “Mexico, Mexico city,
+   Mexico, Mexico city.
+
+  “Central America, New Guatemala,
+   Central America, New Guatemala.”
+
+It sounded so wonderfully learned. These geographical names were
+caught up with gusto by everybody in the house except a few quiet old
+folks who respected “good learning,” but felt that their day was too
+far advanced to attempt it. In short, the geography-teacher and his
+method made an excellent impression; and when he called a recess that
+“signers” might come forward and enroll themselves in his classes, as
+future lessons would be given with closed doors, a majority of all
+present were put upon his lists. Even Mr. Pitzer joined the adult
+class; not that he had anything to learn in the science of geography;
+but he said he always liked to throw his influence on the right side.
+
+“Ain’t your paw going to send you?” inquired Perintha of Bluebell.
+Perintha was promenading with the air of a proprietress, just because
+the geography-teacher boarded at her house!
+
+“Course he is,” exclaimed Doctor Garde’s little girl, anxious for his
+return; “he always wants me to learn everything I can.”
+
+She stood on a bench and stretched up to one of the high windows to
+peer in the direction he had taken. The boys and girls trooped in and
+out enjoying their recess; the elderly people gathered in groups; and
+she felt quite left out and behind the fashion, until little Joe Hall
+called her attention.
+
+“Bluebell Garde, your father wants you.”
+
+“Where is he?” she asked, scrambling down.
+
+“He’s up there talking to Mr. Runnels. I guess he’s signin’ for you.”
+
+He had enrolled her name and paid the fee, in an absent way, but he did
+not seem greatly impressed by the smiling geography-teacher.
+
+“The children’s class will meet on Saturday afternoons,” said Mr.
+Runnels. “Your little girl seems to have a wonderful mind. She has
+learned the map of North America already.”
+
+He said this, drawing his breath over his teeth and bowing in a way
+which made Bluebell uncomfortable, “it seemed so affected”--she had
+heard Liza speak of “affected people” with such condemnation that they
+seemed next door to criminals. The young father looked down at her,
+possibly flattered by this tribute to his child’s talents.
+
+“She needs holding back instead of urging forward,” he said briefly;
+and taking her hand, he nodded adieu to Mr. Runnels.
+
+“Can’t I stay till it’s out, father?” begged Bluebell, trotting by his
+side as he stalked out, his old patients right and left greeting him.
+
+No. He had another call to make on the way home, and had no time for
+the geography school.
+
+So she was obliged to console herself, as they cantered along, with
+rehearsing the chant which meant in her ears a triplet of gruesome
+sounding names for one country:
+
+  “Greenland, a des-o-late and barren region!”
+
+They drew up at Ridenour’s gate. Her father went in, with his
+black-leather medicine-cases called “pill-bags” over his arm, merely
+throwing the Arabian’s bridle over a post. Bluebell crept forward
+into the saddle, and began to stroke the mare’s soft neck. She put her
+foot into the strap above the stirrup and took a firm seat, imagining
+herself flying at full gallop. It would have frightened Miss Melissa
+beyond expression to see her in this unprotected, perilous plight.
+
+Suddenly the flat did flop with violence, and she found herself
+clinging with all her might to the plunging Arabian’s mane.
+
+“I want you!” said the rough voice of a man, appearing through the
+darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE NARROWS AND MARY ANN FURNACE
+
+
+“Oh!” added the man, frightened to see such a little shape cling to the
+plunging horse, “I thought it was the doctor.”
+
+The doctor was fortunately making a short call; and he now appeared to
+quiet the still snorting creature.
+
+“I held on tight, father!” said his little girl, trembling in every
+nerve.
+
+“I didn’t mean to scare anything,” apologized the furnace-man with some
+compunction, though with his own anxiety and errand upper-most; “but
+I saw the horse, like you was startin’ away and I wanted to stop you.
+We’ve had an accident down to the Furnace. I went in to your place, but
+Liza said you’d gone this way, so I come along expectin’ to meet you.
+Eli Ridenour fell over the Narrows.”
+
+“I’ll come,” said the doctor. “Is he at the Furnace?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Well, you go in and tell the family. Cautiously, mind; his mother
+isn’t strong yet. And have them send a wagon with plenty of bedding to
+bring him home.”
+
+The furnace-man entered the house without ceremony, according to the
+custom of the country, and Doctor Garde swung himself again into the
+saddle, taking his little girl this time before him.
+
+“You ought to be in bed,” he observed as they flew up the slope. “Guess
+I better let you down where the lane turns off. You can run along then,
+can’t you?”
+
+Run along that dark lane, half a mile in length, through blackness, all
+alone! Fathers are not mothers; and this father, though the tenderest
+in intention, was so accustomed to heroic methods himself, that he did
+not realize what terror his proposition held for his little girl.
+
+“Don’t make me get off,” she pleaded, patting his shaven cheek. She
+thought of Billy Bowl. It is impossible to explain how this mythical
+character could haunt her after dark. He was a monster of ingratitude
+in a story, and Bluebell had a greater horror of him than of any other
+image her mind could call up. Billy Bowl was a bow-legged fellow who
+slipped into a pit: there he lay bellowing for help--Bluebell could
+fancy his hoarse cries--until some good man came along and pulled him
+out. It was easy to picture this excellent person reaching into the
+pit and taking hold of Billy’s repulsive hand. And being pulled out,
+what did the bow-legged Billy do? He turned around--how strongly the
+case was stated in that!--he _turned around_ and pushed in the man
+who pulled him out! Many a night Bluebell wished Billy Bowl had been
+left in the pit! Many a time did she regret Liza had ever told her the
+story. She believed him always abroad, an element of evil on the air!
+She could not tell any grown person about it. Father would laugh, and
+show the absurdity of the fancy.
+
+Father had not the slightest idea that his little girl nursed any
+Bugaboo or felt her flesh creep at braving Billy Bowl the whole length
+of that lane! With a shade of disapproval, however, he did observe:
+
+“I hope my little girl isn’t a coward?”
+
+Fear of Billy Bowl and general cowardice were two distinct things in
+Bluebell’s mind.
+
+“Course I’m not!” she answered with direct truth. “Didn’t I hold tight
+and not get throwed off? And I didn’t scream, either. But do take
+me along, you never took me to see any patients. I like to go with
+you, father,” confessed Bluebell, half-ashamed to reveal how much she
+enjoyed his society. And she added, patting his shaven cheek again:
+
+“Little father!”
+
+“Little father” was not displeased by the caress. He kissed her on
+the forehead, and thought what a companion she would grow to be for
+him. They cantered past the turning off of their lane. The road soon
+required all his attention. They entered what was known about Rocky
+Fork as the Narrows: a shelf dug out along a precipice. It was only a
+mile or so in extent, but being of semi-circular shape, those who used
+the pass could see but a few yards ahead of them. Above it the hill
+rose perpendicularly in masses of rock and distorted pines as high as
+Bluebell could see. Below it--many jagged, straight-down yards below
+it--the Rocky Fork murmured along a bed of boulders.
+
+About the middle of the Narrows a huge mass of rock hung over the way,
+threatening every passer: it was called the Table. Every hard storm
+brought part of it down, and a dangerous gully was worn under it. The
+road was comfortably wide for horsemen, though in passing, the one who
+had a right to the wall was thankful therefor; but vehicles could not
+possibly pass each other.
+
+Whenever two carriages met on the Narrows, the driver nearest the
+entrance unhitched his horses, fastened them to the rear of his vehicle
+and drew it backward into a broader place. No railing of any sort
+protected the edge. No one but a native, or a person perfectly familiar
+with every step of the way, would cross the Narrows, especially after
+night.
+
+The doctor’s horse picked her way, not too close to the mountain-wall.
+Rock-splinters and flint-dust rolled over the edge and were heard
+dropping and dropping until the brain turned dizzy following them.
+She knew every foot of the road, but snorted frequently as if her
+disapproval of it was unconquerable. Bluebell’s fingers tightened on
+her father’s coat. Her face was toward the ravine. It was a gulf of
+darkness: there was no moon, and it was just as well that little could
+be seen except the white flinty track. Just after they passed the Table
+rock, where Ballie had to tread quite on the outside to keep from
+knocking her rider’s head, they heard footfalls advancing toward them.
+Bluebell knew father would take care of her! still they must turn to
+the right, and the right was the outside.
+
+The footfalls quickened, they thumped tumultuously: it was a horse
+galloping. No man in his senses would make a horse gallop along that
+perilous cut. Bluebell could feel her father gathering himself,
+tightening his hold on the bridle and around her little body to a cruel
+clench. He leaned forward and whispered, “H----st!” to the mare, and
+then shouted ahead:
+
+“Look out there!”
+
+The galloping horse, which they could see was riderless, plunged back
+and reared directly in front of them. The Arabian recoiled, her hind
+feet went over the precipice, and she scrambled like a cat to hang
+on with her front hoofs and regain her hold. Father leaned to her
+neck--Bluebell felt almost crushed for an instant; then they were on
+the solid road, the riderless horse had dashed around the curve, and
+the agile Arabian, trembling in every limb, turned her head back to
+throw the glare of her eye upon her master’s face.
+
+“Well done!” he said, patting her.
+
+She uttered an exultant neigh, and hurried forward with a quicker step.
+
+“Did I hurt you?” the doctor asked his little girl.
+
+“No, sir,” she replied, breathing hard, but proud of having controlled
+herself in this second fright. “There isn’t another horse in the world
+as smart as Ballie!”
+
+“She has brought me out of so many tight places,” said the doctor, “I
+could trust my life to her. But I wish you were in bed.”
+
+“I didn’t make any fuss!”
+
+“No,” said father, “I’m glad you didn’t; you showed your old Irish
+pluck, the pluck of your great-great-grandfather, old Sir James.
+During the Irish rebellion in the last century, rough mobs gathered
+with pikes at every bridge to spear men of his belief.”
+
+“What’s a pike, father?”
+
+“A pole with a sharp knife on the end. Once when he came by with his
+followers the bridge was full, and he rode straight through, fighting
+them on all hands, and the rioters missed the pleasure of throwing his
+speared body in the stream.”
+
+“It was right for him to fight, was it, father?”
+
+“It is right to meet any emergency with pluck, and overcome it.”
+
+Bluebell felt her heart swell. She determined to show her Irish pluck
+in every emergency of life.
+
+The road broadened and a glare fell across it: they had reached the
+Furnace. The Furnace, which was called Mary Ann to distinguish it from
+other furnaces in the ore region, was an open brick building built into
+the hillside. It furnished an industry for many poor men. Here iron was
+melted, and the fires seldom went out. Even in sunny days smoke hung
+over the cluster of houses in a valley below, which was named from the
+Furnace, Mary Ann Post-office.
+
+It was a wonderfully picturesque sight which the riders came upon.
+A flare lit up the coal-dust road, and you could look between brick
+pillars at what seemed to be the centre of the earth on fire. Men
+passed to and fro, thrown into strong relief, and each one wore a
+red-flannel blouse known thereabouts as a “wamus,” a name which
+probably came from “warm us”; the “wamuses” did not lessen the general
+effect.
+
+Bluebell felt excited. She did not miss a point of the picture. Her
+father, she thought, was like old Sir James riding through danger.
+
+But the doctor dismounted at once to serious business. One furnace-man
+tied his horse, and another gave Bluebell a seat on a stool behind one
+of the brick pillars.
+
+“I met a horse galloping around the Narrows,” said Doctor Garde.
+
+“’Twas Eli’s,” said a furnace-man. “It throwed him just at this end
+of the Narrows, and went gallopin’ down to Mary Ann. And just a few
+minutes ago back it came on the homeward road. We tried to catch it,
+and that set it off on the run again. You had a pretty close shave of
+it, didn’t you, Doc?”
+
+“Very close,” replied the doctor. He went to his patient, who lay
+outside on a bed of coats.
+
+Bluebell sat quietly watching the fires and feeling sorry for the
+injured man when he groaned. She heard somebody say it might have gone
+worse with him, and that he was not badly hurt after all. Her head
+settled against the brick pillar, and the men came and went before
+her like figures in a dream. She wondered if it were true, as John
+Tegarden said, that all the coal underground for rods around had been
+on fire since the old furnace burnt down some years before. He said
+horses’ feet sunk through and were in danger of burning off! Then she
+heard frogs in the Rocky Fork singing their loudest, as if to drown the
+far-reaching cry of insects which make the summer night ring; and the
+cool wind and a smell of blossoming laurel rushed over her face.
+
+But, waking next morning on her own bed, she had not the least idea how
+she got there. Nor had she dreamed that the events of that finished day
+were to make a great change in her life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MISS MELISSA FURTHER DISAPPROVES OF THE ROCKY FORK
+
+
+Father had started on his rounds again when his daughter came down to
+breakfast, and Miss Calder and Liza were at table, talking politely.
+Liza wore a cool, faded lawn, one of her best afternoon dresses, over
+which her kitchen apron was tied. Miss Calder, with less of the sun in
+her blood, was in a black barège relieved by white sleeves and collar.
+Each woman seemed so sweet and fair in her way, that Bluebell hardly
+knew which to admire most.
+
+Liza settled the little girl’s dress with a matronly twitch and
+fastened a loose hook or two: then poured out her glass of milk and
+helped her to bread and butter and fried chicken.
+
+“You won’t want to go to school to-day, will you, Bluebell?” she said.
+
+“Bluebell?” repeated Miss Calder, questioningly. “She is not commonly
+called Melissa?”
+
+“Well, no,” replied Liza apologetically; “seems like her mother give
+her a kind of a pet name when she was a baby, because her eyes were so
+blue. But laws! they’re gray now to what they were before she had the
+whooping-cough. Whooping-cough is very hard on children. She had it two
+years ago, and so had Rocco, and I was worryin’ about them the whole
+summer.”
+
+Bluebell had been considering the sacrifice of a school-day. She
+thought of her head-marks, and the probability of Perintha Pancost
+or Tildy Banks accumulating wealth of that kind to her detriment, in
+her absence. She thought of the noon play, and the geography-school
+excitement. Giving up school for the day, and for perhaps as many days
+as Miss Calder stayed, was a serious sacrifice. Still, what little girl
+_could_ go off to school when her friend was on a visit to the family?
+
+“I won’t go,” said Bluebell, hoping Perintha Pancost at least might
+not get the head-mark.
+
+“You must not stay at home on my account,” said Miss Melissa. “I want
+to see your school. Your father said he would be driving by that way in
+the afternoon and would fetch me home.”
+
+“But it’s so far!” cried the little girl eagerly. “Can you walk all
+that way?”
+
+“I think I should enjoy it,” replied Miss Calder, smiling. “I am quite
+a pedestrian.”
+
+Bluebell at once felt it was to be an important day. Teeny and Tildy
+Banks would be aides-de-camp in the march. She would show her friend
+off before the school. Perintha Pancost needn’t take on airs about
+the geography-teacher. She could not remember when so distinguished a
+visitor had honored the school. The whole pageant flashed before her
+mind, even to the finale when her father’s low-seated buggy would be
+whirled up before the step by Ballie, and Miss Calder disappear in a
+cloud of dust.
+
+So after breakfast they set out, Miss Melissa carrying a blotting-book
+to fill with flowers and ferns for her herbarium: a possession
+everybody should have, she informed Bluebell.
+
+Bluebell carried a most superior lunch--not in the calico bag, which
+smelled of stale bread-crumbs and had been used rather freely in
+getting the “last tag” of various girls on separating for the day--but
+in a willow hand-basket with lids, so cumbersome that she envied Teeny
+and Tildy when they sallied forth with their slim reticule. However,
+_they_ had not company.
+
+“And how did you like the singing-school?” inquired Miss Melissa as she
+and Bluebell walked down toward the run.
+
+“It was a g’ography school. Oh, it was _so_ nice! He had them sing the
+countries--I wish Rocco had waked ’fore we started: I’d ’a’ learned it
+to her.”
+
+“This country seems very romantic,” said Miss Calder, inhaling the air
+with delight. “But it needs cultivation. You should see the smooth,
+beautiful hills around Sharon.”
+
+“Is that where you live, ma’am?”
+
+“Yes, that has been my residence all my life,” said Miss Calder with
+nice precision. “And, my dear, you may, if you please, call me Aunt
+Melissa. Your mother called me Aunt Melissa.”
+
+“Yes’m. Thank you,” murmured Bluebell. She was about to curtsy, but
+hesitated lest it might not be a suitable occasion. “Aunt Melissa, is
+Sharon a great big place--as big as Fredericktown?”
+
+“I know nothing about Fredericktown. But Sharon is not a city. It is a
+delightful small town of about two thousand inhabitants.”
+
+Bluebell silently wondered who counted the people. She had vast
+respect for cities and towns. She could not imagine anything ill-kept
+or disgusting about a town. Presently they came to the run, and Miss
+Melissa uttered one or two exclamations as she staggered across the
+stones.
+
+“This isn’t anything to the foot-log,” said Bluebell. “But, oh, Aunt!
+wouldn’t it scared you last night if you’d been on Ballie when she
+slipped over the Narrows! It’s an awful steep place!”
+
+“Yes,” said the lady, turning quite pale; “the man who fetched me from
+the cars drove along there. He assured me that there was no other
+road, or I never should have allowed it.”
+
+“But there _is_ another road.”
+
+“He said there was none. And I have trembled ever since to think of
+returning. I trust your father does not ride that way often?”
+
+“Oh, yes, I guess he does.”
+
+Miss Melissa trembled now to think how soon the little speaker might
+become doubly orphaned.
+
+“We rode that way last night,” repeated Bluebell, “and a runway horse
+come by and pushed us off! Ballie was all off but her fore feet, Aunt,
+and she just jumped back! I was scared,” she pursued, plodding along
+innocently, her dark bare arms dropping with their load of basket; “but
+I showed my Irish pluck and didn’t make any fuss. I didn’t make any,
+either, when father left me on Ballie and went in to Ridenour’s. A man
+come along and made her plunge so she would have run away or throwed me
+off if I hadn’t held tight!”
+
+“Indeed,” said Miss Melissa faintly. But a most determined look grew in
+her shocked, affectionate face. “The poor children,” she ruminated,
+“will not only have the bringing-up of boys, but their very lives will
+be continually endangered by their absorbed young father, if I do not
+interfere.”
+
+“You see we had to go to Mary Ann Furnace to ’tend to a man that fell
+over the Narrows and got hurt,” Bluebell went on; but by this time they
+had reached the Banks’, and Teeny and Tildy were waiting.
+
+Teeny walked beside Miss Calder, trying to feel quite a grown woman
+and striking her dignified heels against her own dress at every step;
+but Tildy hung back and helped Bluebell with the basket. Tildy felt
+a motherly patronage for the smaller girl. They were chums, though
+Bluebell’s arm had to reach up to Tildy’s waist, and Tildy’s arm lay
+most comfortably on Bluebell’s shoulder. Whatever else might be in
+Tildy’s disposition, she was a devoted partisan. These friends seldom
+disagreed. Bluebell accepted Tildy’s solemn dictum with credulous
+readiness, and was usually her partner when the school marched, or
+in the delightful rainy-day game of “Round and round in a green
+sugar-tree, one cold and frosty morning.”
+
+There were, however, two things which Bluebell felt she could not yield
+to Tildy, and these were the spelling-prize, and their one disputed
+“piece” on Friday afternoon when “speaking” was in order.
+
+To be sure, there were plenty of other pieces which might have been
+added to their repertory, such as “_My bird is dead, says Nancy Ray_,”
+“_Twinkle, twinkle, little star_,” and “_I like to see a little dog_,”
+all fresh as the lips that mumbled them in class; but both Tildy and
+Bluebell would speak “_Mary had a little lamb_,” or they wouldn’t
+speak anything! They both loved and doted on this piece: they not only
+knew it by heart, but each claimed it with a jealousy passing that
+of authorship. If Mr. Pitzer called Bluebell’s name first, she flew
+to the middle of the floor and shrilled “_Mary had a little lamb_,”
+with a triumphant wag of her head at Tildy. If Tildy had the first
+opportunity, the case was reversed, and Bluebell, with a sense of
+injury, declined to contribute to the afternoon’s literary exercises.
+The sweet-hearted schoolmaster smiled at their weekly controversy,
+and perhaps the scholars got tired of the ever-recurring lamb; but the
+literary range of the school was not very wide, and there were other
+repetitions than Bluebell’s and Tildy’s.
+
+The schoolward-going group this time walked with decorum past the
+downs. But Miss Calder made frequent pauses on mossy logs while the
+others brought her forage of ferns. They chewed sassafras leaves and
+peeled long withes of spicewood. She could see distant laurel heights
+through breaks in the woods, and they made a long detour to get her
+bunches of the pinky-white blossoms. So it was actually late in the
+forenoon when they came to the foot-log by Halls mill. Though Miss
+Melissa had walked with spirit, she shrank from the boiling Rocky
+Fork, and asked for the bridge, and even proposed going back rather
+than trust the giddy foot-log. But this was not to be heard of, and
+Teeny distinguished herself for firmness. She took tight hold of the
+fluttering lady’s hand, and Tildy walked behind steadying her by the
+dress. So after a tilt and a shriek or two, they brought her safely
+to the other side in time for her to witness Bluebell’s intrepid
+passage of the log, laden with all the baggage of the party except the
+blotting-book, which Tildy went back to bring.
+
+Then they all moved upon the mud-chinked school-house. Miss Melissa’s
+gentle face expressed a refusal to be reconciled to this as an
+institution of learning. She was a professor’s daughter, and had spent
+her days in an academic atmosphere. She had even taught in the Young
+Ladies’ Institute one year after her graduation, in order to ground
+herself more firmly in polite knowledge. This was a long time ago; but
+all her life her society had embraced college-bred people. So to speak,
+Miss Melissa had never come in contact with the common schools of her
+native land.
+
+Mr. Pitzer got down from his desk and met them at the door; and
+Bluebell, who had been whispering over to herself all the way from the
+foot-log a formula of introduction, there kindly suggested by Miss
+Calder, turned red as the old-fashioned roses on the master’s desk, and
+felt her breath broken short by every beat of her heart. But she came
+out bravely with the introduction:
+
+“Miss Pitzer, allow me to present you to Mr. Calder.”
+
+Then she dropped her own curtsy and hid her face in her calico bonnet
+as she hung it up. For some of them _would_ laugh, and she was wrapped
+in flames of mortification.
+
+However, Miss Calder made a grand impression, and the schoolmaster
+walked back three steps to make his bow longer. Then he handed her to
+his chair on the platform, and he himself took a lower seat, leaving
+Bluebell’s friend to appear the autocrat of the school. She looked
+around at the chinked walls and ink-splashed, knife-marked desks, at
+the sincere, reflective, bovine eyes which always distinguish country
+children--eyes that seem as full of woodsy sweets as the violets. And
+she looked at the flushed schoolmaster, who pushed his spectacles quite
+into his hair, and puckered his mouth into very wise shapes while he
+went on explaining to Joe Hall and the big boy who ciphered with him
+a deep problem in common or vulgar fractions. It might have been that
+Mr. Pitzer was out of his depth, though he was a great schoolmaster;
+or that the explanation was too pompous. Miss Calder’s eyebrows went
+up in the very least degree, though not for the world would this
+gentle creature have hurt the self-esteem of any one. After Joe Hall
+and the big boy had marked the extent of their next lesson with their
+thumb-nails, the schoolmaster said some learned things to Miss Calder
+about the importance of mathematics: and as this was a very apt class
+he hoped to take it through the book. And she asked him if the course
+embraced Algebra and Geometry, and was going on to mention Trigonometry
+and the Calculus, when she observed the poor schoolmaster grow red and
+stammer. He did not want to be put to shame before his pupils, but
+spoke out with a humble spirit:
+
+“No, madam, my researches have never extended so far.”
+
+And something in the old man’s tone touched her so keenly that she
+was shocked with herself, and wondered if she, Melissa Calder, had
+been rude! Such a fear drove her to the extreme of kindness and
+gentleness. When the schoolmaster found she was a living and breathing
+graduate--alumnæ were as scarce as authors then--his deference
+towards her became much greater. The true-hearted old gentleman loved
+knowledge; he begged that she would make a few remarks to the school,
+which would be much better than a continuation of the exercises. Miss
+Melissa blushed; but everybody who entered a school in those days felt
+bound to “make remarks” if called upon to do so. So Miss Melissa began:
+
+“Young ladies and gentlemen”--which made the little boys giggle and
+nudge each other; but as her soft, fine, cultivated voice went on, they
+all listened and were drawn to her, except, perhaps, a few who thought
+Bluebell Garde felt herself proprietress of a lion.
+
+Bluebell felt indeed happy. Her reading-class was called after the
+schoolmaster beamed his satisfaction over Miss Melissa’s talk, and
+she read her loudest and glibbest. Then noon came on, and there never
+was a more delightful noon. The hot day brought rank, sharp smells
+from everything: even the dog-fennel along the road yielded a pungent
+fragrance, and jimson-flowers were not to be despised.
+
+Miss Melissa was pressed into the swing by an ardent group, and flung
+up a few times among the leaves, where her white curls danced like
+sensitive spiral springs. And all the big girls sat around her to eat
+their dinners, and talked quite as if they had known her all their
+lives. But Perintha Pancost mimicked her behind a tree, and refused
+to be caught, when Bluebell Garde, the Blackman, patted her one, two,
+three, right on her back! Perintha also had brought the first summer
+pippins in her reticule, and she gave bites to every girl in school
+except Bluebell and Tildy Banks.
+
+The afternoon was devoted to festivity. Mr. Pitzer felt that so
+distinguished a visitor must be entertained. Miss Calder might
+disapprove of him, with everything else she had seen at Rocky Fork, but
+she could not help liking the old master.
+
+Pieces were “spoke,” as a matter of course. Joe Hall, in a shrill,
+confident voice, told them he had
+
+  “Stood beneath a hollow tree,
+     The wind it hollow blew:
+   He thought upon the hollow world
+     And _all_ its hollow crew!”
+
+without one misanthropic shade in his apple face. Two of the boys had
+a dialogue, in which a tiny Mr. Lennox looked up to a lubberly Peter
+Hurdle and told him he was a contented boy and quite a phil-os-o-pher.
+And two of the girls had a dialogue which sounded like one end of a
+telephonic conversation as it is heard nowadays; for one girl shouted
+that she had lost her thimble, Mary, and would you please lend her
+yours; in reply to which you heard only a murmur. There was quite a
+colloquy, and the silent girl evidently gave a great deal of good
+advice, but listen as you might you could only get it by inference from
+what the loud-voiced girl said. Then John Tegarden shouted “_The boy
+stood on the burning deck_,” until he came to the most exciting part,
+when his memory failed and he retreated mumbling and injured, not so
+much by the trick it had served him, as by Joe Hall, who ducked his
+head and imitated John’s slouching, disappointed attitude. John picked
+some clay out of the wall and watched for an opportunity to shy it at
+Joe, but reflected that it might hurt; and being the tenderest-hearted
+boy in the world, he crumbled it slowly away and watched Teeny Banks
+lead out a group of embarrassed damsels and station them in a circle
+around herself, it being understood that she was the mother and these
+her daughters gathered in an easy family group to discuss the seasons.
+One declared her rhymed preference for Spring, another for Summer, a
+third for Autumn, and a fourth for Winter, when Teeny chimed in with
+a sweet monotone informing them that each season in its round held
+certain delights, and they must see the Creator’s hand in all.
+
+Well was it for Tildy and Bluebell that Mary’s disputed lamb was not
+called out that day. For Doctor Garde drove up just at this stage of
+the proceedings, and Miss Calder bade the schoolmaster adieu, and the
+schoolmaster went outside to see her in the buggy, the wind blowing
+the hair from his dear old forehead, while during his absence several
+charges of paper wads were exchanged across the house, to the scandal
+of the big girls who picked the missiles from their hair or dresses,
+and with impressive shakes of the head threatened to “tell master.”
+
+There was too much electricity in the air, and the school was too
+boisterous to settle down to routine again that afternoon. All besought
+Mr. Pitzer to let them have “spelling-school,” even Bluebell, who had
+declined riding home on account of her head-mark; and the smiling
+schoolmaster consented.
+
+They decided to “choose up and spell down,” instead of “choosing
+across.” Then Joe Hall and Amanda Willey, being nominated by the
+schoolmaster, approached each other and took his ferule between them.
+Joe grasped it above Amanda’s hand, and Amanda grasped it above Joe’s
+hand, and this continued until Joe’s hand came last at the top. This
+result entitled him to the first choice; and he and Amanda, taking
+their stations with backs against opposite walls, he chose:
+
+“Bluebell Garde.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+WHICH TREATS OF THUMB-PAPERS
+
+
+Bluebell Garde was deep in a discussion with Tildy Banks, and heard not
+her name till it was repeated.
+
+The conference had begun while the master was out of doors bidding
+adieu to Miss Calder. The afternoon was so hot that little paper-fans,
+made of old book leaves and fastened in the middle with pins, were
+fluttering all over the house; the long windows and the door were wide
+open; still a stifling heat made everybody feel aggressive. And at this
+unfortunate time Tildy made a discovery which she imparted to Bluebell
+in a harrowing whisper:
+
+“P’rinthy Pancost’s got your thumb-paper!”
+
+Bluebell looked across at Perintha. Then she grasped her own
+spelling-book and reader, and turned the leaves with a rapid swish, her
+eyes sparkling more at every turn. No thumb-paper reposed in any of
+its accustomed places. It was made of a leaf of Joe Hall’s copybook,
+and ornamented with birds which seemed to wear pantalettes. Bluebell
+was very neat with her books, which she loved as friends; and not one
+word was erased by a sweaty little thumb-mark. And P’rinthy Pancost had
+_stolen_ her thumb-paper! The school was swarming with thumb-papers.
+Every youngster in his hours of idleness employed himself folding bits
+of paper into the required shape, and it was an art, I assure you,
+which required skill. She could make, or accept from willing hands, a
+dozen others in as many minutes. But that was not the point. She had
+suffered spoliation, and, menacing Perintha Pancost, she cried out in a
+loud whisper:
+
+“You give me back my thumb-paper!”
+
+“’Tain’t yours,” replied Perintha, coolly unfolding it. This was
+a crowning insult. To unfold a thumb-paper was to destroy its
+individuality and make it a mere square scrap.
+
+“_’Tis_ mine!”
+
+“’Tain’t!”
+
+“The master’ll whip you!”
+
+“Yah-yah!” taunted Perintha, whom the weather was reducing to
+impishness.
+
+Bluebell’s tears started, but she staunched them bravely with a corner
+of her apron.
+
+“Cry-baby cripsey!” whispered Perintha, leaning towards her.
+
+“I’ll tell my Aunt Melissy on you!” threatened Bluebell, feeling that
+this authority must crush her.
+
+But Perintha sniffed.
+
+“Your Aunt Melissy’s nobody’s daddy,” she said quite aloud, copying
+from the boys this strong phrase which was calculated effectually to
+put down upstarts.
+
+To be told that you were “nobody’s daddy” was to be robbed of all
+dignity and consideration in this world; it was a snub which the
+meekest and most peaceable must feel. But to have your great-aunt
+Melissa called “nobody’s daddy” was not only a family outrage, but an
+attack on the infallible dignity of all grown people.
+
+Bluebell shook her auburn head and whispered to Tildy, “I’ll tell the
+master what she said!”
+
+But Tildy, constituting herself second in the affair, advised with
+head-shakings and dark looks that they deal with her themselves.
+
+“The master would just make her give you the thumb-paper, and he
+wouldn’t do anything to her,” said Tildy, remembering how she had
+appealed to him against her enemies in vain, and had afterwards taken
+ample satisfaction with her nails.
+
+The master came in, and arrangements were made for the spelling-school,
+during which Bluebell returned to the grievance on her mind. “Mary’s
+lamb” was no wall of separation now. The dark head and the auburn head
+rubbed against each other. Perintha looked defiant, and was evidently
+making partisans of Minerva Ridenour and the other girls on her seat.
+
+“Bluebell Garde!”
+
+Bluebell started as Joe called her name the second time, and went to
+take her place with some pleasure in being chosen first among the good
+spellers. Perintha was chosen nearly last on the opposite side. I am
+afraid there was exultation over this under the auburn mass of hair.
+Joe Hall gave her a handful of wheat from his father’s mill to chew.
+Tildy was below the big boys and girls on Joe’s side, so there was
+no chance to confer with her, if the spelling code had not forbidden
+whispering. Bluebell, therefore, munched her wheat and gave herself up
+to the excitement of the occasion.
+
+They spelled across: that is, the schoolmaster, standing between,
+pronounced a word first to one side then to the other. Alas that little
+words should have slain so many! If he had begun in words of three
+syllables, many of them could have rolled the letters glibly. But among
+the ie’s and the ei’s Teeny Banks and half a dozen other big girl’s
+stranded. The lines thinned rapidly; those who missed, retiring to
+central benches and watching the fortunes of their sides with great
+anxiety.
+
+Fortune favored Perintha Pancost. Easy words came to her, and she stood
+among the last three on her side. Still, with Joe Hall and Bluebell
+Garde opposing, though they stood alone, what could her side expect?
+The contest waxed very hot; and constantly was Perintha Pancost
+favored with words she could spell. Her leader went down; her only
+other supporter went down.
+
+Then Bluebell found herself overflowed with a word that had “ation” in
+it, and Perintha spelling pertly at it stood an instant longer than she
+did. Of course it floored her, but she could now boast that for once
+she had out-spelled Bluebell Garde!
+
+Joe Hall stood up three lines longer, spelling tremendous-sounding
+words; and when he tripped, there was such a storm coming up that the
+master said he would dismiss early that afternoon.
+
+Already the thunder could be heard echoing among the hills. The roll
+was hastily called. Tildy waited outside for Bluebell; under her slat
+bonnet the hair was clinging to her temples, but the gloom of her eye
+and firm pucker of her mouth indicated fullness of purpose.
+
+“When she comes out,” said Tildy.
+
+“Yes,” said Bluebell, piteously, from the depths of defeat and injury
+and physical lassitude.
+
+Perintha’s name came away down among the P’s, and she was ranged
+accordingly on a bench which never got free as soon as the B’s and G’s
+on the girls’ side.
+
+“When she comes out,” repeated Tildy, “we won’t scratch her--”
+
+“Oh, no!” exclaimed Bluebell. She could not bring her mind to that.
+
+“Because the marks would show,” pursued Tildy; “and we won’t whip her
+with sticks.”
+
+“The master might whip us!” exclaimed Bluebell in terror. She prided
+herself on never having been punished at school. And all teachers were
+not like Mr. Pitzer in those days.
+
+“Yes, he might,” assented Tildy, evidently having foreseen that
+objection to the sticks; for when Mr. Pitzer had severe cause he could
+be strict as the strictest.
+
+“But I tell you what we _will_ do,” said Tildy, leaning forward and
+laying the utmost emphasis on every word. She lifted her forefinger,
+and her reticule slid down to her elbow:
+
+“WE WILL CHURN HER!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THEY CHURN
+
+
+A flare of lightning in the northern sky may have frightened Perintha
+as she stepped over the sill; or she may have suspected an ambush at
+each side of the school-house. At any rate, a strong desire to be once
+more under her father’s roof, gave swiftness to the little bare feet,
+and her pantalettes danced at a lively pace through the dog-fennel.
+Her black eyes gave one quick look behind, and after that look her
+reticule, like a swelling sail, stood straight backwards in the wind.
+But Tildy had her before she was more than screened by the fence of
+Martin’s wheat-field.
+
+“Take hold of her other arm!” commanded Tildy. And Bluebell, panting,
+took hold.
+
+“Now churn!”
+
+And they churned. Up and down they churned until it seemed all the
+buttermilk of Perintha’s nature must go to the bottom and the pure
+butter of repentance stand up to be gathered by their correcting hands.
+So interested in their undertaking were the reformers that Perintha’s
+cries and struggles seemed to make no impression on their senses.
+Their sun-bonnets hung by the strings around their throats, and their
+loosened hair switched up and down, keeping time to the churning. It
+was so absorbing a gymnastic performance that Bluebell felt Perintha
+must almost enjoy it, if she did strain to get away.
+
+The churners were brought to a pause by hands laid on their shoulders,
+and lo! there stood Mr. Pitzer with a following of half the school.
+Perintha’s face came out of the crown of her sun-bonnet, all smeared
+with tears and curly hair, and the black-eyed, piteous look she threw
+up to the schoolmaster, cut Bluebell to the heart.
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl was terrified to find herself in the
+position of a culprit; but this was endurable compared to the sudden
+rush of remorse caused by Perintha’s helpless look. She had been
+churning a malicious little imp, and behold here was the grieved face
+of her daily playmate! All the pretty things Perintha had ever done,
+flashed before her. Perintha sent some tissue-paper birds to Rocco
+when Rocco was sick; yes, and she made the baby a set of pasteboard
+chairs in a box house. And what fragrant apples had come to Bluebell’s
+teeth from Perintha’s reticule! She would always let you have the first
+swing, too; and what did that old thumb-paper amount to?
+
+“She didn’t act so till I got mad to her first,” thought Bluebell,
+making one of the principal figures in a procession to the
+school-house, the master’s finger and thumb carrying the lobe of
+her ear. Tildy walked on the other side of him, her ear similarly
+supported. Perintha, bidden to follow, sobbed as mourner behind them,
+and a sympathetic though silent crowd supported her.
+
+This, however, was dispersed at the door. The master waved all
+hangers-on away; and the nearer-rolling thunder gave them additional
+warning. Even Teeny, after wavering with a concerned face around the
+windows, was obliged to take to the foot-log and leave these culprits
+to their fate.
+
+[Illustration: THE PRINCIPAL FIGURES IN A PROCESSION TO THE
+SCHOOL-HOUSE.--_Page 110._]
+
+“Now, sir!” said Mr. Pitzer, taking his judgment-seat. And the thunder
+rolled directly overhead. When Mr. Pitzer said “Now, sir,” to a girl,
+he had forgotten she was anything but a culprit. He took out the Rules
+of the School, and putting on his spectacles, and peering through the
+darkening air, read Article Ninth:
+
+“ARTICLE NINTH: _Pupils are under the jurisdiction of their parents
+from the time they leave home until they appear upon the play-ground.
+But from the time they enter the school-house until they enter their
+parents’ door at night they are under the jurisdiction of the master,
+and accountable to him for all misdemeanors._”
+
+His spectacles flared at the three.
+
+“They ketched me and shook me up and down, and I wasn’t doin’ anything
+to them!” burst out Perintha with a sob, leaving Article Ninth entirely
+aside from the question.
+
+“She stole Bluebell Garde’s thumb-paper,” said Tildy, somber but
+collected. Her reticule dangled from her elbow, and her bare toes
+squirmed along a crack in the floor. Her face expressed determination
+coupled with a gloomy distrust in Mr. Pitzer’s ability to deal out
+justice. A brisk rush of air came through the open window, which made
+the dear old man sneeze and take off his spectacles. Bluebell was
+weeping in the bottom of her apron, which she lifted to her face.
+
+“I thought I was sh-showin’ my Irish pluck,” she broke out, wringing
+her small pink nose; “but I guess I wasn’t! and it makes me feel so bad
+to think I hurt her!”
+
+The master laid his hand on her head. The other hand he laid on
+Perintha’s. Tildy stepped back as if she feared he might have a third
+hand for her.
+
+“P’rinthy can have my thumb-paper,” continued Bluebell; “and I don’t
+care for the other things, ’cause she was good to my little sister when
+my little sister was sick--and I got mad first.”
+
+There was now a hearty duet of sobs performed by Bluebell and Perintha.
+The latter thrust her arm up to the elbow in her pocket and drew out
+the most crumpled and defaced of thumb-papers, which she held out to
+Bluebell.
+
+Tildy put her nose up. She’d like to see herself “knucklin’ under, that
+way, to P’rinth’ Pancost or anybody else!”
+
+But the master’s face glowed in the gathering dimness:
+
+  “Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
+     For ’tis their nature to;
+   Let bears and lions growl and fight,
+     For God hath made them so:
+   But children, you should never let
+     Your angry passions rise--”
+
+One jagged knife of lightning, reflected on the school-house door, cut
+short his exhortation.
+
+“It’s going to storm,” he said, looking up as if the fact had just
+presented itself to him. “You better all run home now, and try to be
+good friends hereafter.” He put up the Articles, took down his hat, and
+busied himself shutting the windows. He paused to say, “Good-evening,”
+three separate times as the three went out curtsying to him for the
+second time that evening.
+
+Tildy stalked straight toward the foot-log. Perintha paused after
+turning her bonnet’s mouth homeward, and twisted back, looking at the
+ground.
+
+“Good-by, Bluebell. I’m going to bring you some pippins to take to your
+Aunt Melissy to-morrow.”
+
+This was equivalent to a full apology, and Bluebell hastened to
+acknowledge it.
+
+“Goody! will you?”
+
+“Yes,” said Perintha, lifting her still wet lashes.
+
+The two little girls looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. It was a
+treaty of peace. Then a cloud of dust travelling up the road enveloped
+them; Perintha scudded away with it, and Bluebell, her mouth and eyes
+filled, ran towards the Rocky Fork after Tildy’s retreating figure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MOTHER OUTDOORS DISTURBED
+
+
+“Wait, Tildy!” called Bluebell, when she reached the foot-log and saw a
+figure climbing the heights beyond.
+
+The wind may have carried her voice away, for it almost blew her off
+the log, and a trampling sound far off, like the rush of an army of
+giants through the woods, filled one’s ears. The heavy basket caught on
+bushes as Bluebell scrambled up the rocky path, and tired her hands,
+while Tildy’s reticule sailed straight on.
+
+“Oh, Tildy, wait!” panted the little girl. Among the windings, or in
+some short cut, Tildy’s figure ever and anon appeared and disappeared,
+and Bluebell faced the storm alone. How black its gloom was in the
+woods! The very rocks and trees which had been smiling landmarks so
+long, seemed strange and threatening. A quick patter caught her, and
+then a deluge mixed with frightful glares and deafening roars burst
+over the world. The trees rocked and twisted, and just ahead of her
+she saw one tall chestnut bend as if swooning, and fall across the way
+with a long, sublime, whistling crash. Even in her terror Bluebell
+heard and felt that wonderful cry of the falling tree which cannot be
+forgotten. The splinters of its broken trunk stood up like pale yellow
+icicles in the air. She made a detour among hazel-bushes to pass it,
+and ran along the path, trembling in every nerve, yet under her fear
+delighting in this revolution which had overtaken Mother Outdoors. The
+warm summer rain dripped from every thread of her clothing and soaked
+her body in its delicious bath. The footway turned into a miniature
+canal; and every tree-trunk stood in startling blackness against the
+general gloom. Before the first dash had quite thinned its gray sheet
+to sprinkles, that far-off tramping arrived in earnest; the storm
+pelted and poured; the lightning flashed in her very eyes, and its
+answering thunder was instantaneous; a tree swept down here carrying
+others with it; and there two went down together, until the whole woods
+seemed cracking and wailing around her.
+
+With streaming garments, and shoes that spurted water at every step,
+the little girl still ran ahead. She could scarcely see the downs when
+she passed them, but they appeared dimly, like the desert islands in
+Mr. Runnel’s maps. Again and again the lightning seemed barely to miss
+her, and she jumped as the thunder crashed around her ears. She ran
+until she was out of breath, and then panted along among the drenched
+ferns. In spite of the confusion and loneliness and closing darkness,
+there was exhilaration in the warm, soaking rain.
+
+It ceased to pour as she passed down the slope; the wind lulled; and
+through openings she could see distant long dark threads stretching
+from cloud to earth, then suddenly disappearing. The confusion in the
+woods died away. But there was no clearing up, no emerald flash of wet
+grass in the setting sun; no rapid drying of branches and laugh of
+leaves. The rank, fresh smell of wet earth was mingled with scents
+from the peppermint that bordered the run below, but the faintest
+suggestion of old dead leaves came with them. The lightning retired
+toward the horizon and threw a silent or distantly answered dazzle
+through the woods once in awhile. And night was coming early without
+any sunset.
+
+Bluebell saw a man advancing through the bushes, drawing showers upon
+himself at every step. She reflected that it was not far to Banks’ now,
+and if he tried to carry her off they could hear her scream; so she
+trotted forward, a desirable object to kidnap, her shapeless bonnet
+hanging around her neck, which it discolored with its strings, her
+dress and pantalettes clinging to every line of her vigorous little
+figure. Still the man paused to parley with her, and his parleying
+consisted in offering her two fingers of his left hand and turning back.
+
+“Oh, father, I’m ’most drowned! And the woods fell down!”
+
+“It’s been a hard storm,” said father. He had a closed umbrella in his
+right hand. Branches and underbrush would interfere with it if open
+here. He paused, setting it against a tree, and reached down to his
+little girl.
+
+“Perhaps I’d better carry you.”
+
+“Oh, father, I’m wet as sop.”
+
+He lifted her up and took his umbrella. He had on his gum coat and
+boots which he wore over ordinary clothing when riding in the teeth of
+storms.
+
+Bluebell threw one arm across his shoulder, from which dangled the big
+basket.
+
+“That might have been left at the school-house,” said father.
+
+“It’s Liza’s,” said Bluebell, “and all the rain has rained through it
+and through my dinner cloth.”
+
+“I might have brought it in the buggy. Did you get across the Rocky
+Fork before the rain?”
+
+“Yes, sir. And Tildy ran on ahead.”
+
+She was progressing royally down the slope, rained on by every branch,
+but so comfortable right by father’s light, long locks. He moved
+sure-footed from stone to stone. The dark was closing around them. The
+cry of frogs and of the disconsolate cows came up from low places in
+the valley. But Doctor Garde’s little girl had the task of telling her
+father she had “been called up by the master” that day. His code was
+stern. He had told her if she received punishment at school and came
+home with complaints, she would be punished again. Bluebell was very
+proud of her standing and integrity at school. The closing night seemed
+so dismal. What would he say if he knew she was called up!
+
+She cuddled her free hand under his ear to have some vantage ground,
+and broke forth:
+
+“I churned P’rinthy Pancost, father!”
+
+“Did you? How do you play that?”
+
+“We didn’t play, father. We did it a-purpose, Tildy and me. We had a
+fallin’ out. And the master called me up after school!”
+
+Father walked on with the low pine-like whistle under his breath.
+
+“But we made up,” his little girl went on, unwilling to enter into the
+enormity of Perintha’s sin against Aunt Melissa; “and she’s going to
+bring apples to-morrow.”
+
+“That’s right,” said father. “Always treat your little mates kindly,
+and obey the master.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” assented Bluebell, giving his neck a little squeeze. “I do
+like the master, father. I guess I’m going to take the prize in our
+class in spelling!”
+
+Father delivered a short whistle, and looked around into her face,
+smiling. This signified that he was pleased. It was his note of
+acclamation over his daughter’s achievements.
+
+“I don’t _think_ anybody else has near as many head-marks as I have.
+Father, won’t it be polite for me to go to school while Aunt Melissa’s
+here? Can’t I go in the _afternoons_, anyhow?” coaxingly.
+
+“Do you like to go so well?”
+
+“Oh, yes, sir! We have such fun noons. And somebody else would get my
+head-marks!”
+
+He did not reply at once, and they came by Banks’s house. The candle
+was lighted, a smell of supper came forth; and Tildy in dry clothes was
+standing at the door.
+
+“Why didn’t you wait?” called Bluebell.
+
+“I couldn’t,” said Tildy, tartly.
+
+“P’rinthy’s goin’ to bring some apples to-morrow,” assured Bluebell.
+
+But Tildy sniffed. “Some folks is awful thick, all at once,” she
+commented.
+
+Bluebell looked down at her father’s ear, and wondered why it was mean
+to make up with folks.
+
+Tildy’s mother came to the door, drawn by the sound of voices, and
+looked out anxiously. She was a very tall, ungainly woman, bent in the
+shoulders, with gray, black-lashed eyes which Tildy’s were like. She
+wore a clinging black calico. Her face was care-worn but very motherly.
+Bluebell knew that her husband was dead, that he had worked at the
+Furnace in the winter, and in the summer farmed his own land, which
+lay along the valley between the hills and the run. He must have been
+a pleasant man, for he was cousin to Liza at home. Mrs. Banks’s name
+was also Eliza; and the neighbors to distinguish them called this one
+“Robert’s Liza.”
+
+“Did she get hurt?” cried Robert’s Liza, when she made out the doctor’s
+armload.
+
+“Not a bit,” he replied, facing around and smiling.
+
+“Come in and have some tea or something before you go on, do! Tildy was
+a sop, and I expect Bluebell’s wetter yet. Teeny got home before the
+trees began to fall, but I’ve been that frightened about the children!”
+
+“We can’t stop,” said the doctor. “I have to start out when I get back
+with this soaked pappoose. The run’s rising, Liza. You’d do well to
+take your crocks out of the milk-house to-night.”
+
+“I’ll do that,” said Liza; “but do _you_ mind the Rocky Fork, Doc--it’s
+dreadful when it gets up.”
+
+“Oh, never mind me,” replied Bluebell’s father. He plashed on down
+the slope with her; and through the humid dusk Bluebell heard the run
+boiling, along with a sound of the Rocky Fork itself, which was quite
+outside its banks, muddy and angry; and she could not be sure that
+certain eddies did not swirl above the buried stepping-stones. But
+father seemed sure of it, for he put his feet through the eddies, and
+then the water reached the ankles of his gum boots. He stepped firmly
+up on the meadow green, and during that short interval between the run
+and the bars, condensed all that he had meant to say to his little girl
+during the walk.
+
+“Put me down now, father,” she said. “Ain’t you tired?”
+
+He put her down and gave her two of his fingers again, while he took
+the basket. Two fingers just filled her grasp.
+
+“How do you like to live at the Rocky Fork?”
+
+This question surprised her so she looked up at him; but his face was a
+white blur in the general dimness.
+
+“Would you rather live in the town where your Aunt Melissa does, and go
+to a fine school?”
+
+The prospect was like a dazzling flash to Doctor Garde’s little girl,
+through even this gloomy weather.
+
+“Oh, yes, sir! I’d like to live there! But”--with a rising pang--“Mr.
+Pitzer is so good, and he let us have spelling-school this very
+afternoon. Do they have mountain-tea there?”
+
+“Probably not. So you’ve been happy up here in the hills, have you,
+Bluebell?”
+
+“Yes, sir.” She could barely remember a home in a city, and one
+pillared church where music was made by unseen people. She had been
+happy, and the Rocky Fork was the only place she had lived in.
+
+“Miss Melissa has been speaking to me,” said the doctor. “I can’t
+attend to Rocco and you as your mother would have done. I want to be a
+good father.” There was an unusually tender tone in his voice.
+
+“Why, father,” exclaimed Bluebell, climbing up the bars, so she could
+take him around the neck when he lifted her over, “you’re such a nice,
+nice man! I don’t think anybody could be gooder; I would be so sorry if
+you was anybody else! I like you, father!”
+
+He laughed half under his breath, and got over the bars with her.
+
+“My daughter flatters me.”
+
+“’Deed, father, I’m in such earnest! ’Deed and double-deed!”
+
+“Ah? Well! Miss Melissa was a great friend of your mother’s, and I
+think she has some right to advise about the future of you children.
+You must be educated.”
+
+Bluebell imagined herself an educated, faultless woman like Aunt
+Melissa!
+
+While she was imagining, her father lifted her up again and kissed
+her, saying as he set her down, “Run right in now to Liza. She has dry
+clothes and a nice supper ready for you.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+BLUEBELL MAKES A POEM
+
+
+In the night Bluebell was wakened by the cherry-boughs scraping her
+window--and how they did scrape! The rain was tramping; it beat the
+house and roared on the shingles; the pines were making a high,
+thrilling noise which she did not know was like the voice of the sea.
+All within was so dry and comfortable; all without so muddy and dark.
+Yet off in the woods there were sweet smells, and birds’ nests tucked
+in forked branches, and the May-apples were rank, and even old rotten
+logs crumbling to yellow dust had a pungent odor of their own. What did
+the birds do in a storm? Did they turn their tails down like chickens?
+And how did the naked birds that were all furry bill and sprawling
+limbs like the baby swallows under the shed-eaves, get along?
+
+Father, on his night-ride, was the thread on which these thoughts were
+strung. She thought of him first, and he ran through everything else.
+Ballie’s firm, quick step was moving on distant roads; the pill-bags
+were fastened behind the saddle; father whistled softly between his
+teeth; and anxious people looked into the storm for him. It scarcely
+occurred to Bluebell to wish him indoors. He and rough weather were
+old acquaintances. She had seen him come to the open fire stamping,
+the frost in his hair, or take off cloth leggings covered with mud, or
+stiff-frozen from the ford. What did he care for summer rain, housed as
+he was too, in rubber coat and boots, and on the most sensible horse
+in the world! Bluebell decided to ask Liza if she might not put on her
+very oldest dress and stand under the eaves where the water ran over in
+a constant shower.
+
+But in the morning everything looked so dreary and soaked that she did
+not care to do it. Clouds scudded close to the earth; the hill above
+the house showed black under its foliage; the elder-flowers by the rock
+play-house were beaten to the ground; and hollyhocks in the garden
+leaned down as if about to swoon. The cherry-leaves had a higher
+polish and intenser green, but little unripe apples strewed the orchard.
+
+Doctor Garde had not come home. Liza said she did not expect him before
+night. In very bad weather she had known him to be gone two or three
+days. Still, she kept some warm chicken in the old-fashioned Dutch oven
+before the fire while she did her baking.
+
+The air was oppressive. But Miss Melissa moved around wrapped in a
+thick shawl. Liza took the roses out of her fireplace and started a
+warmer color dancing over some sticks. The low-scudding clouds began to
+pour again.
+
+Bluebell spent the morning with Miss Calder making doll-clothes, and
+wondering if Tildy’s mother let _her_ go to school. Only a few of the
+children who lived nearest would be there, for so many had to cross the
+numerous bends and turns of the Rocky Fork. They would have to play in
+the house if it did not clear before noon, and the tracks of the boys’
+bare feet would look so funny on the floor. To-day seemed years removed
+from yesterday. This was a bit of dingy autumn thrust through a summer
+day. Bluebell enjoyed the dress-making with zest, but she hoped it
+would clear.
+
+Rocco had her high chair drawn to the kitchen table, and helped Liza
+with the baking. Her tow hair was braided back, the ends turned up and
+tied with black thread, and her slim claws as clean as soap and water
+could make them. She had Bluebell’s little rolling-pin and baking tins
+and Liza’s thimble before her. Liza was making caraway seed-cake; she
+watched the baby fondly, giving her dabs of dough which Rocco rolled
+out, cut up and placed in her tins. As soon as they were baked she
+divided them evenly on two saucers; for Rocco never ate any treat of
+which Bluebell did not have exactly half. She had been known to keep a
+mellow apple or pear from morning till dusk when Bluebell came home;
+smelling it and turning it over wistfully, but waiting its division.
+
+The rain poured while they ate dinner.
+
+“It comes down by bucketfuls,” said Liza. “I do hope Abram will get
+round and look after Liza-Robert’s stock. Lambs is so simple, and hers
+are always gettin’ into the run.”
+
+“Why doesn’t she let her farm to a tenant?” suggested Miss Calder.
+
+“Well, that’s not the way around here. Abram, he’s her brother-in-law
+and my first cousin; he lives about half a mile above us, and he ’tends
+to things for her. Liza’s no manager.”
+
+Soon after dinner Miss Melissa lay down for her daily nap. Georgiana
+sat on the sitting-room mantel in an incomplete gingham dress, smiling
+on the weather with unchanged serenity. Liza went up garret to do a
+small “stent” of spinning. She always spun on dismal afternoons when
+the needle would lag in sewing. She knit winter stockings for the
+family. Bluebell and Rocco followed her, and the wheel could be heard
+soon after the children’s feet ceased sounding on the stairs.
+
+When the children’s feet ceased sounding on the stairs, they were in
+the garret. It was one big dusky room, extending over the whole house,
+with a chasm in the floor through which the stairs came up. At each
+side the roof sloped so that even Rocco might knock her head. There
+were windows in the gables; and from all the rafters hung dried
+peppers, pennyroyal, ears of seed-corn, bags of seed, and sage, and
+of dried raspberries, and blackberries, cherries, and peaches, for
+in those days the art of canning fruit was not generally known to
+housewifery. Liza’s special jams and preserves stood along a system
+of shelves, in stone jars, broken-nosed tea-pots and flowered bowls
+tied up closely with white cloths. The floor was clean and dustless. A
+retired rocking-chair which had lost one rocker in the battle of life,
+was settled in one corner where it lived on a pension of the children’s
+favor. For right by it was their mother’s old trunk, the black and
+white hair worn off it in patches, leaving a tough hide exposed.
+
+In this casket Bluebell kept many of her play-things and all her most
+precious books. She had “Emma and Caroline,” a paper-book some three
+inches square, a diminutive Mother Goose, several histories, and a
+work on geology suitable to advanced students which her father had
+brought her, and her school prizes--notable among them a pink-backed
+volume of Dr. Watts’s hymns which she had learned by heart. Here also
+reposed her last Sunday-school book, which had rather harrowed her
+mind; for it was the Memoir of Jane Ann Smith, who caught fire and
+burned to death; the picture of Jane Ann running out of the mill door
+all on fire, was put in as a lively frontispiece. There were almost no
+books for children in those days. Hannah More’s tracts and memoirs of
+very pious people constituted the library from which Bluebell and all
+the other little Rocky Forkers chose; if it could be called choosing
+when the librarian held the backs of an armload of books towards you,
+and you might pick out only one at a hazard. Bluebell had found one
+delicious story of a little girl whose uncle came and took her away to
+India where she had no end of wonderful times. But most of the books
+were grown-up, or very serious, or consisted of advice to young English
+servants when starting out to service. So Bluebell unfolded from its
+wrappings with tremulous delight that real fairy-book, “Tales from
+Catland” which Aunt Melissa brought her. It was a book with some long
+words in it, but even these were a sonorous pleasure; the Countess
+Von Rustenfustenmustencrustenberg, Grandmagnificolowsky, the tall
+page, Glumdalkin, the cross cat, Friskarina, the amiable cat. Bluebell
+settled into the one-sided rocker, and lived in castles and woods and
+palaces, while the rain beat the shingles directly overhead as if it
+were playing thousands of small castanets, and Liza’s wheel sang high
+or low.
+
+Rocco sat down on the front of a small flax-wheel which worked with a
+treadle, and afforded the baby just sitting-room, to watch Liza spin.
+
+The great wheel stood in the centre of the garret; on its long bench
+lay a pile of wool-rolls. Liza took hold of the end of a roll, attached
+it to the spindle in some mysterious manner, and turned the wheel
+around and around and around with a smooth stick which she called
+her wheel-pin. The spokes seemed to approach each other, then melted
+together into a transparency, the hum rose higher and higher until it
+became a musical scream, and Liza stepped back drawing her roll off the
+spindle into a long woolly thread. Back and forth she moved, from
+the spindle to the gable window; now hurrying up the wheel, and now
+letting it sing, as it seemed, away down in the sloping bench which
+supported it.
+
+[Illustration: LIZA STEPPED BACK, DRAWING HER ROLL OFF THE SPINDLE INTO
+A LONG WOOLLY THREAD.--_Page 134._]
+
+The rain rained on. Bluebell forgot her head-marks. When she had read
+two stories and let the Cat-book sink to her knees, her imagination
+was so stimulated that she craved half-unconsciously to make a story
+herself. But Liza’s wheel put rhythm into her head, and Liza’s presence
+mixed the practical with the purely ideal.
+
+For a long time she sat and thought, constrained to form into shape
+what she had in her mind; and if the thing itself was simple and the
+shape grotesque, many an author since Bluebell will confess to having
+given very poor expression to the finest inspiration.
+
+“I believe it’s going to quit raining,” said Liza as a very pale ray
+slanted through the window and shone on the point of the spindle.
+
+She pulled out the last roll and stopped her wheel.
+
+“What’s that noise?”
+
+It seemed to be some one knocking perseveringly at the kitchen door.
+Liza gave the wheel one more vigorous turn and finished her “stent”
+before she started down.
+
+“I expect it’s Abram,” she said. “Don’t let Rocco fall down the stairs,
+Bluebell, and don’t play with my spinning.”
+
+“No, ma’am, I won’t.”
+
+Roused from the spell which wheel and book had cast, the children
+turned to each other for a romp.
+
+Bluebell paused impressively as she caught the little sister in her
+arms, and proceeded to make a confidant of her.
+
+“Honey-dew, sisser’s made a pretty piece!”
+
+“Piece o’ what?”
+
+“Poetry! Like ‘Poor Jane Ray’ and ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’”
+
+Rocco heard these standards of literary excellence mentioned without
+any emotion.
+
+“I’ll say it to you.”
+
+“Le’s p’ay,” suggested Rocco instead.
+
+“It’s somethin’ pretty--about Liza,” urged the poet, tasting the first
+difficulties of securing a public.
+
+Rocco paused in the mad-career of a tumble and consented to listen.
+
+  “See that pretty maiden,”
+
+(“That’s Liza, you know,” explained Bluebell,)
+
+  “Spinning in the rain.”
+
+“’Tain’t wainin’,” said Rocco; “it’s twit.”
+
+“It was, though. Now you just listen:
+
+  “See that pretty maiden,
+   Spinning in the rain:
+   The wheel goes round and round to make
+   Our stocking-yarn again.
+
+  “The wind goes roar and roar,
+   The wheel roars with its band;
+   The maiden turns it with a pin
+   For fear she might hurt her hand.”
+
+“Isn’t that pretty?”
+
+Rocco meditated. The subject of poetry had aroused other thoughts
+within her; and the faculty of association carried her on from a hymn
+Liza frequently sung to her--
+
+  “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,
+     And cast a wistful eye
+   On Canaan’s fair and happy land
+     Where my possessions lie--”
+
+to the family who represented the idea to her. So without making any
+comment on Bluebell’s poem, she said decidedly,
+
+“I want to go to Jordan Stormy Banks’s house.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+“JORDAN STORMY BANKS”
+
+
+“All well as common, Liza?” inquired Abram, knocking the mud off his
+feet at the kitchen door.
+
+“Yes,” she replied, but with a shade of anxiety. “The doctor hasn’t got
+home yet. Come in, Abram. Have you been over the run?”
+
+“I guess I won’t come in,” said the farmer. He was large-framed,
+stooping, and clothed in homespun wool of an indescribable dull color.
+His wamus was belted in; his broad, slouching hat showed several holes.
+He placed a hand on each side of the doorway and leaned in while he
+talked. “Yes. I’ve been over there. Liza-Robert came nigh to losin’ her
+milk-house last night. The milk-lids was afloat and the spring is clear
+under water.”
+
+“Tuh! tuh!” ejaculated Liza. “And I expect the Rocky Fork is clear out
+of its banks.”
+
+“I should say it was,” imparted Abram deliberately. “It’s half-way up
+the Narrows and all over the meadow t’other side. Table Rock came down
+in that blow yesterday!”
+
+Liza uttered a cry. Table Rock had overhung the Narrows ever since her
+memory began.
+
+“Hall’s mill has been carried off and lodged in the bottom-lands. The
+stone’s sunk and the frame’s split in two or three pieces.”
+
+“Why, Abram!”
+
+“Yes, it’s consider’ble high waters. The Ridenours was out in a canoe
+over their corn-field this mornin’.”
+
+“How’s Eli?”
+
+“Doin’ well, as far as I know.”
+
+“The doctor said he’d maybe have to stay by him a while last night.
+Seems like he was threatened with inflammation.”
+
+“If Doc’s t’other side of the Fork he’ll not ford it for a while. It’s
+all ’round the school-house. Willey told me this mornin’ Mr. Pitzer
+couldn’t take up school till the water went down again. That g’ography
+man’ll have to put off his doin’s, too. There’s a sight of timber down
+on the hill. I don’t know when we’ve had such a storm.”
+
+“Did it do you any damage?”
+
+“Well, no. Uprooted a few apple trees. That’s about all. Any chores
+you’d like done outdoors?”
+
+“I’m much obliged to you, Abram, but there isn’t anything. The cows
+always come up to the bars. I s’pose Samantha’s well?”
+
+“So’s to be around. The children’s folks have come to see ye, have
+they?”
+
+“Yes, it’s a kind of an adopted aunt of their mother’s.”
+
+“Well,” said Abram, taking his hands off the sides of the door, “I must
+get on toward home.”
+
+He came back after going a few steps.
+
+“I’ll look in again before night, Liza.”
+
+“I’d be obliged if you would, Abram.”
+
+Neither spoke of feeling anxious about the young doctor. Still Liza
+girded herself more cheerfully to go out and gather her demoralized
+poultry. A primrose-colored west brightened the whole landscape. The
+beaten-down grass had already begun to lift itself, and a pleasant,
+drying breeze was flowing down the valley. The broken clouds drifted
+to all parts of the sky. Liza gathered drenched and gaping chickens
+into her apron, where they trod upon each other with cold pink feet,
+and piped shrilly for food and comfort. She had a special basket behind
+the stove for these weather-orphans, where their down would curl once
+more, and all of them subside into a buttercup-colored mass, too sleepy
+to peep. There was one chicken that ran persistently through the
+weeds away from her, yet calling with all his might for aid from some
+quarter. He stretched his thin neck here and there and disconsolately
+shook his pin-feather wings. Now lost in a forest of rag-weed, he made
+the tops quiver over him as he ran; and now slipping through the garden
+palings, he scampered dismayed up and down the bank of a deep canal,
+the channel whereof he had known before the deluge as a neat garden
+path between beds of vegetables. Liza reached through and gathered him
+to the asylum in her apron just as she observed Bluebell picking her
+way to the lower bars. The run was roaring through the meadow, and she
+rose up apprehensively.
+
+“Don’t go down to the water, Bluebell. You can’t cross now.”
+
+“But Tildy’s on the other side and beckoned to me: I just want to talk
+across to her.”
+
+“I’m afraid you’ll fall in if you go too near. Remember the run’s up.”
+
+“I’ll be careful. Tildy can’t come over, and she does want to see me so
+bad!”
+
+“You’ve both been weather-bound,” said Liza smiling. “Well, you be
+careful. Where’s the baby?”
+
+“She’s talking to Aunt Melissa. I gave her my new doll to hold.”
+
+Precious as little sisters may be, there are times when the mature
+girl of nine or ten feels that she cannot have them “tagging” after
+her; when she gives them a sop in the shape of her best plaything, or
+engages them in conversation with some elderly and charming relative,
+while she slips out to gallop where heedless baby shoes would have to
+be carried.
+
+Tildy had been signaling at the other side of the run for some time.
+
+Bluebell ran down the wet meadow, feeling joyful at being out of doors
+once more. The hills were half-smiling. She could not help noticing how
+the trees tossed. In the south-west was a cushion of foliage so large,
+so green, so apt to dimple with the wind, that the little girl never
+could help wishing to sit and tumble about on it.
+
+The run showed wide and turbid from the back door, but on near approach
+it seemed a ranting young river. Sticks and even rails were being
+eddied away by what was day before yesterday a few strands of clear
+water.
+
+How wide was the separation between Bluebell and Tildy!
+
+Resentment of the Perintha Pancost truce had been swept from Tildy’s
+face by later occurrences.
+
+“We can’t go to school any more,” she called.
+
+“Oh, yes, we can when the waters go down.”
+
+“The’ won’t be any school-house. The Rocky Fork’s all around it. Our
+spring-house pretty near went, and if the run rises much higher it’ll
+carry off our house and your house, too.”
+
+Bluebell looked back at the weather-beaten homestead.
+
+“It would look like Noey’s Ark. But it says there isn’t to be another
+flood, Tildy, ’cause the rainbow’s put in the sky for a sign that the
+waters shall no more cover the face of the earth!”
+
+“Hain’t been any rainbow this wet spell,” said Tildy impressively.
+
+Bluebell searched the whole sky, and brought her eyes down again
+clouded with apprehension. There had been no rainbow this wet spell.
+
+“I don’t believe it will rise to the roofs of the houses and the tops
+of the mountains,” she cried, with an upward inflection of appeal.
+
+“I wish’t it would. Then you could sit on your roof and I could sit on
+mine, and sail sticks and boats across to each other. I’ve been havin’
+lots of fun with mother’s old bread-bowl. Why didn’t you come down soon
+as it quit rainin’? I beckoned to you.”
+
+“I didn’t see you. Where’s Teeny?”
+
+“She’s helpin’ mother with her weavin’. Why don’t you take off your
+shoes and stockin’s?”
+
+“I don’t know,” replied Bluebell looking down at her low shoes and then
+at the lush, soft grass. She always had envied Tildy her untrammelled
+toes, but her father had a prejudice against bare feet in all weathers.
+Tildy, that fortunate creature, could walk sidewise in the dusty summer
+road, dragging one foot and thus making a beautiful broad mark, with
+stopping posts indicated, like the picture of a fence. But if Bluebell
+attempted it she filled her stockings with dust and rendered her shoes
+a dismal sight.
+
+Tildy now came down to the brink and made her impression in the
+yielding soil.
+
+“Look there,” said she, displaying two fine black slippers of glossy
+mud. “Take yours off, too, and maybe we can wade some.”
+
+Bluebell found a dry stone, sat down upon it, and peeled her feet pink
+and bare.
+
+“Come along up the run,” called Tildy. “I’ve got my boat up here.”
+
+So they scampered along on each side, the ooze coming between
+Bluebell’s toes with a delicious rush.
+
+The bread-bowl beached on Tildy’s side, was ready for service. She had
+a pole to steer it with, and setting it afloat, ran along turning and
+guiding it as anxiously as if it were a bulrush basket with another
+little baby in it. Bluebell ran by her side of the stream, and begged
+that the vessel might make a voyage to her. With a push of the pole,
+Tildy turned its prow, but it got caught against a snag, and she
+labored long to free it. Finally, the cracked and rather unseaworthy
+vessel came triumphantly in, and Bluebell caught it with joy.
+
+The two girls felt as if they had shaken hands across the separating
+stream. Bluebell had some of the baby’s seed cookies in her pocket. She
+wiped the bowl very dry with bunches of grass, and made a nest of fresh
+grass in the centre, on which a handful of thimble cakes were then
+carefully deposited, and the gallant craft started on its return trip.
+
+It moved down stream, and both girls accompanied it. Tildy poled with
+care lest the cargo might get slopped. Now, there was a rail coming
+down stream in the centre of the current, pointing like a long black
+finger to the fact that that bowl must be got out of the way, or there
+would be a collision on the high seas.
+
+Bluebell danced and exclaimed while Tildy poled in set determination.
+Alas for the noble bread-bowl! In despair she stuck the pole into it,
+brought it with a swish to land with its grass and seed-cakes scattered
+to the stream, and losing her balance fell partly in herself.
+
+“Oh, Tildy!” screamed Bluebell, when Tildy scrambled on the bank,
+dripping to her waist.
+
+“This makes the second time this week I’ve got wet,” said she solemnly.
+“I don’t b’lieve I want to wade now.” She sat down on the grass and
+wrung her clothes. Her mood was very sombre indeed.
+
+“I expect I’ll take sick and die,” she said. “Father used to get wet to
+his hide before he took bed-fast. And I’m a good deal his build.”
+
+“Just as soon as my father comes home,” cried Bluebell, “I’ll ask him
+to ride Ballie over the run and give you some medicine.”
+
+“You needn’t throw it up to me that you’ve got a father when I ain’t
+got any,” said Tildy, dismally.
+
+“Why, Tildy! I _never_!”
+
+“You did, too. But mebbe you ain’t got any either, now.”
+
+“My father’s comin’ home to-night!”
+
+“Mebbe he is.”
+
+“He’s just gone to see his patients, and he’s comin’ right straight
+home!”
+
+“Table Rock fell down over the Narrows yesterday.”
+
+“I don’t care if it did!” warded off Bluebell, with quivering lip.
+
+“My Uncle Abram says it could ’a’ hit your father just as easy as not!”
+
+“But it didn’t!”
+
+“But somethin’ may have happened to him. If he tries to cross the Rocky
+Fork now, he’s sure to get drownded! Uncle Abram says he feels uneasy.
+Looky there, now! Mebbe that’s his hat comin’ down the run!”
+
+Bluebell suspended a great sob and watched the black object
+approaching. It reeled nearer and nearer--it looked _so_ much like
+father’s black hat: she saw the band: she saw the brim dip--
+
+“Ho!” cried Doctor Garde’s little girl triumphantly, “that’s just a
+chunk o’ burnt wood, Miss Tildy Banks, and my father ain’t any more
+drowned than you are!”
+
+Tildy, who felt herself more drowned than she wished to be, and
+decidedly uncomfortable--for there is a difference between sky-water
+and run-water--merely responded, “Huh, Madam!”
+
+Bluebell started back to pick up her stockings and shoes. She heard a
+long ringing neigh from the lane.
+
+“There!” she cried, shaking a shoe at Tildy, “there’s my own father
+come home to my house this very minute! I’m going right to the bars,”
+she added, thrusting her tender feet into the shoes after wiping them
+on her stockings, “and I’ll tell him all the mean things you said. And
+I won’t ask him to give you the medicine, so I won’t.”
+
+“I don’t want it,” responded Tildy: “he hain’t got any but nasty stuff.”
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl did not stay to argue. She scampered to
+the lower bars, flung over them, and splashed across the puddles to
+the upper bars. Ballie’s glossy, tossing head appeared around the
+barn-corner. But her saddle was empty and turned to one side, the
+pill-bags dangling, her bridle hung loose, and as soon as she saw the
+little girl, she uttered a neighing scream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+ABRAM HAS A THEORY
+
+
+The Arabian mare’s long cry reached Liza’s ear, also. She was putting
+her chickens in the basket, and having covered them, went toward the
+bars.
+
+“There’s something wrong, the way that horse whinnies,” said Liza
+aloud. “Why, look at her now! He’s been thrown!”
+
+Ballie was walking from one end of the bars to the other, resenting the
+saddle and dangling saddle-bags, resenting the bridle which hung to her
+feet, but more than all distressed by the absence of her master. As
+soon as she saw Liza she uttered another interrogative wailing cry.
+
+A pair of small stockings hung across the fence: Bluebell’s figure was
+flying down the lane at the foot of the pine hill.
+
+“O my gracious!” cried Liza, smiting her hands. “Now _she’ll_ go off
+and get killed. Come back, Bluebell! come back here! She runs right on
+and doesn’t hear me!”
+
+Ballie heard intelligently, and jerked her bridle from under foot,
+seeming, as she did so, to fling a wail after Bluebell.
+
+Liza got over the bars and mechanically relieved the mare, unfastening
+the pill-bags and saddle, and turning the bridle back over her neck.
+Leaving her tied to the post, Liza flung her apron over her head and
+started running towards Abram’s house. It was a mile to Abram’s. When
+she had passed the orchard and was nearly across the east meadow, she
+remembered Miss Calder had been left with only Rocco in the house,
+unconscious of what had happened. Still running, Liza dipped into a
+gulch-like hollow which divided the stony meadow in halves. It was oozy
+and slippery, and she climbed the other side nearly out of breath.
+Abram’s house appeared beyond its orchard.
+
+When Liza had scaled the orchard fence, and recovering breath a little,
+came running towards the front of the house, she found Abram and his
+wife talking with a man in the road.
+
+Bounce, the house-dog, had barked all the way up the orchard, but they
+had never turned their heads.
+
+“Oh, Abram!” she cried. At this Abram looked around, and showed a face
+as distressed as her own.
+
+“We’ve just heard the doctor’s been drowned,” said Samantha solemnly.
+
+Liza was not prepared for this statement. Her burning face bleached.
+
+“Who says so?” she exclaimed aggressively.
+
+“The g’ography-teacher and him both tried to cross the Rocky Fork at
+the ford, and his horse acted up some way and got him off.”
+
+Liza groaned.
+
+“I don’t believe it,” she said next: “why didn’t you help him?”
+
+The geography-teacher was splashed and muddied from head to foot. His
+face looked haggard, and on Pancost’s tall gray horse he appeared
+singularly gruesome. Liza despised him at first sight. She longed to
+pull him from his uncertain seat, and have him punished for this
+trouble for which she unreasonably held him accountable.
+
+“I couldn’t help him, ma’am. I just escaped with my own life, and rode
+as hard as I could to the first house I saw, to give the alarm.”
+
+“There’s four houses between this and the ford! His horse just came to
+the bars! Abram! Why don’t you stir yourself? Go and help him! He isn’t
+drowned, I know. Why, he can swim like a fish! If you’d only stopped to
+be of some account!” she cried, flashing her excited eyes up and down
+the geography-teacher.
+
+“Liza,” said Abram, “I’m startin’ to the stable for a horse. But you
+hain’t heard the particulars.”
+
+He cantered away, and Samantha, who had gone into the house, came out
+with a camphor-bottle. She bathed Liza’s face, while that good spinster
+held to the fence and denounced Mr. Runnels.
+
+“Where’s your particulars, now? If you’d stood by him like a man, as
+he ’a’ stood by you! Where is he? What did he do after he got into the
+water?”
+
+“You don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am,” said Mr. Runnels,
+avoiding her eyes, and speaking in a dejected way without heat. “His
+horse got to plunging and the saddle slipped. The current was so strong
+we were both carried away below the ford, and when I got out, his horse
+had kicked him loose.”
+
+“Ballie kick _him_! She never kicked him!”
+
+“I can’t help that. She was climbing the bank and a heavy log hit him
+and he went under. I called for help, but nobody came. Then I put my
+horse to a gallop and rode as hard as I could to the first house I saw.”
+
+“Sit down, Liza,” begged Samantha, pushing her upon a stool they used
+in picking fruit. Liza sat down. “There goes Abram to the ford fast
+as he can go. And if he don’t find anything he’ll warn out all the
+neighbors. Don’t take on so!” sobbed Samantha in her own apron.
+
+Mr. Runnels turned his horse and followed Abram. Dripping and wretched
+and in need of hospitality as he certainly was, it had not occurred to
+either of the women to offer him anything. He faded from their view
+merely as the bearer of bad tidings.
+
+But a capable woman like Liza could give up to smelling camphor for a
+moment only. Within half an hour she had created a revolution in her
+own house. The sitting-room was turned into a hospital ward, with every
+appliance for restoring wounded or half-drowned people. A fire made the
+black chimney-piece sparkle. Miss Melissa followed her around, awed
+and colorless, but anxious to help. She did marvels of lifting and
+carrying, scarcely knowing it. A chill struck through the air as the
+day closed. Only the baby, who sat in the big rocker with Georgiana
+and the soles of her own feet broadside to the fire, could sing with
+any enjoyment of life. The unusual bustle and the climbing fire seemed
+things of good cheer. Unconscious of any trouble and feeling in a
+musical mood, Rocco improvised recitative, crescendo and diminuendo,
+knitting her fine eyebrows with an artist’s concentration.
+
+“O--my--GOOD--GWacious! Jawgeanno!--I neva’ turn back any mo’. An’ it
+WAINED: AND Juicy-crucy-fied ’im. Cap in my father’s HAN’! An’ the’
+was a little guyl had a nice dolly b’ronged to her sisser B’uebell. O
+Jawge-ANNO!”
+
+Liza-Robert came tiptoeing in on her heavy shoe-soles. She had got
+the news some way, and going nearly a mile up the run, found a narrow
+place where she could get across by the aid of rails and so reach the
+troubled house. She had been crying on the way, and when she saw Rocco
+toasting her soles with such musical satisfaction, the poor woman
+buried her face in her apron.
+
+“Poor little innocent!” she said, passing her hand down Rocco’s head;
+“poor little innocent!”
+
+Rocco was accustomed to Liza-Robert’s widowed expression, and laughed
+up in her face.
+
+“Dreat big doll,” she said importantly, turning Georgiana for
+inspection.
+
+Then, as if a peg had slipped in the music-box of her little chest, she
+straightway struck off again:
+
+“On Missus--JORDAN STORMY Banks’s house, I cast a Rishful EYE!”
+
+Miss Melissa came in from the banistered porch where she had been
+watching, and Liza from the kitchen.
+
+“Did you see or hear anything?” inquired Liza. Her plump,
+well-preserved face looked shrunken.
+
+“Nothing,” replied Miss Melissa, spreading her transparent, trembling
+hands to the fire.
+
+“I’ll make you acquainted with my cousin’s widow, Miss Calder,” said
+Liza.
+
+Miss Calder bowed to the raw-boned, sad woman. Liza-Robert inclined her
+head.
+
+“How do ye do, ma’am?” Then she wiped off a rolling tear with her
+apron. There was a natural majesty in her which fully appreciated
+culture and delicacy in another; but now she met this lady without a
+thought of the difference between them.
+
+“He stayed by me night and day when I had the lung fever, and the other
+doctors give me up to die. If it hadn’t been for him I wonder who’d be
+carin’ for my children now! I’m just a hard-workin’ woman that’s had
+trouble, but he always was as good as an angel to me and mine.”
+
+Liza went to the door; then to the bars. The day was gone: she was
+startled to find it so near twilight.
+
+Presently she came back with an heroic air, patted the prepared bed
+and laid it open, turned a stick on the fire-dogs over, and hurriedly
+brought in a candle.
+
+“I thought I heard some one comin’,” she said.
+
+It seemed to be the tramping of another horse at the bars. Ballie,
+still tied to the ignominious post, neighed to it interrogatively.
+
+Abram came striding in.
+
+“Where is he?” said Liza.
+
+Abram looked at the three women piteously.
+
+“I don’t know. We ain’t found him.”
+
+“Who’s lookin’?” cried Liza with a sharp tone.
+
+“All on this side the Fork. The men goin’ home from the Furnace all
+turned in.”
+
+“I thought mebby ’twas only that curly-headed g’ography-teacher,” said
+Liza. She burst out sobbing in her apron again. Miss Calder sat down.
+Rocco was frightened, and got down with Georgiana hanging across her
+shoulder, to stare at Abram.
+
+“We did get his hat,” said Abram, swallowing as if his very prominent
+Adam’s apple were choking him. “And I have a kind of a theory now.”
+
+He proceeded, without much encouragement, to explain his theory:
+
+“Mr. Runnels says a log hit him and he went down right by the ford.
+They’re gettin’ Ridenour’s canoe and ’ll drag over that spot. But I hev
+a kind of theory--I don’t know whether I’m right or not--”
+
+The three women lifted their heads expectantly.
+
+“My theory is, it didn’t stop there.”
+
+The pronoun sent a shudder through his hearers.
+
+“It’s down below the Narrows, and I’m goin’ to Mary Ann and warn out
+the men for a search there.”
+
+At this hopeless view of the case, Liza walked the floor in a transport
+of grief, and Liza-Robert tried to repress her own sorrow and attend
+to Miss Calder, who seemed fainting.
+
+“Oh, the poor boy! And him so noble-hearted! Night after night, day
+after day, through rain and shine and cold and heat he’s rode! And it
+made no difference whether it was to the rich or the poor! They was all
+alike to him if they needed doctrin’--and he never expected to get pay
+for half he done!”
+
+Here Rocco raised her voice and howled.
+
+“He was good to me,” said Abram. “I never knowed a man I thought more
+of.”
+
+“Honey,” said Liza, coming to the baby, and trying to control herself,
+“Liza’ll put you to bed now.”
+
+“I don’t want to go,” howled Rocco. “I want B’uebell to sit in the
+chair and wock me.”
+
+Liza flashed a glance all around the room. Then a recollection ran over
+her face leaving it more faded.
+
+“Oh, didn’t that child come back? She ran down the lane to hunt him.
+Abram, where’s Bluebell?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+BLUEBELL HAS NO THEORY
+
+
+When Doctor Garde’s little girl started down the unfenced lane, she
+acted on an impulse given by terror. She ran with all her might at
+the side of the lane, tangling her feet in fragrant pennyroyal, and
+bounding over bunches of ground-cherries, so that it seemed a whole
+year before she reached the place where it joined its mud to that of
+the main road. This was a steep, stumpy place: young saplings had been
+ridden down, and bent their bruised backs to draggle torn tops on the
+ground. On the black hill above, all those pines were whistling softly
+between their teeth, as father did. Hundreds of odd thoughts rushed
+pell-mell through the little girl’s mind.
+
+Ballie’s track here melted into others; but as Bluebell had not
+thought of tracing Ballie’s course, she did not pause on account of
+losing the clew. She stood still an instant and looked back toward the
+house. She was so little. Grown-up folks would know better what to do.
+The house was almost out of sight among trees. She had no distinct
+idea except that father was certainly in danger somewhere and must be
+found. The primrose light was fading out in the west. If she went on
+and nobody knew where she was, she might slip over the Narrows and be
+killed, and against this her sound flesh and wholesome blood rebelled
+utterly. Still, her pause was only an instant long: she laced up
+the leather strings of her shoes and tied them firmly, waded around
+mud-holes, and ran on toward the entrance of the Narrows.
+
+Just here the Rocky Fork burst upon her sight. Bluebell held to the
+flint wall feeling giddy. She had never seen such an expanse of water.
+It covered nearly the whole of a wide meadow, and on the side next the
+Narrows licked at the earthen cliff, crumbling it by slow handfuls. She
+felt it was climbing step by step to grab her as she started on.
+
+There was a current like a mill-race over the hidden bed of the Rocky
+Fork. Logs, brush, rails, whole trees, skated along on it. The child
+could not keep her fascinated gaze off this current, and it made her so
+dizzy she was obliged every few moments to stop, reeling against the
+hill-wall and hugging its stones with her hands. She was going in the
+direction of the current. Just as Bluebell entered on this narrow track
+she heard violent galloping begin of a sudden behind her. She thought
+of Billy Bowl, and seizing a root above her head, made herself as flat
+as possible against the wall. She thought also of the loose horse which
+met father and her upon the Narrows, and turned desperately to frighten
+it back. But this horse was a lean gray one and had a rider, and both
+were dripping from head to foot; the rider looked wildly toward the
+Narrows and wheeled his horse away from them. Then he flew away as fast
+as the animal could gallop on a sled road, arching by through the pine
+woods which led to the road past Abram’s, but was seldom used except by
+wood-cutters. He had not noticed Bluebell.
+
+“It’s the g’ography-teacher,” said she hurrying on. “And _he’s_ fell in
+the water and wet all his nice clothes, and he looked _just like Billy
+Bowl_!”
+
+Nothing else happened in her dizzy, long journey around the Narrows.
+Midway she could not look at the waters, but their sound filled all the
+country silence. Bluebell’s road remained in light after the shadows
+settled on them. A huge hole was left over the gutter where Table Rock
+had hung: the earth was broken all around. Bluebell got by it as well
+as she could. When she reached the Furnace the day-workmen were about
+to start to their homes.
+
+All the way around, though Doctor Garde’s little girl had been showing
+as much Irish pluck as she could muster, her chin had shaken with sobs
+and her heart felt bursting with a mighty homesickness for father. She
+looked into the Furnace now, unreasonably expecting to see him on a
+bunch of coats or wamuses, tended as they had tended Eli Ridenour.
+
+She saw glittering eyes and smutted faces, and heard a line of song
+roared out.
+
+“Where’s my father?” she cried to the nearest Furnace-man.
+
+Several came to her at once.
+
+“It’s Doc. Garde’s little girl.”
+
+“What’s the matter, sissy?”
+
+“Is my father here?”
+
+“No. He hasn’t been past the Furnace since night before last. What’s
+the matter?”
+
+“He’s got hurt someway,” wailed Bluebell, the tears dropping to her
+breast. “The horse came home with her saddle all turned, and I can’t
+find him.”
+
+The Furnace-men looked at each other, and the alarm flashed around.
+
+“Which way was he ridin’?”
+
+“I don’t know. I thought maybe he fell over like Eli Ridenour and you’d
+brought him here. Oh, if you don’t find my father, I can’t stand it at
+all!”
+
+“He must have been trying to ford the Fork,” exclaimed the biggest of
+all the Furnace-men. “We’ll go down there.”
+
+They swarmed around each other in what appeared a scarlet confusion of
+unbelted wamuses, then trooped in a hurry to the Narrows. They forgot
+the child. She stood crying beside a brick pillar, too overwhelmed with
+trouble to think of anything but its pain. Where _was_ father? And was
+he badly hurt?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE FORD
+
+
+In an hour the banks about the place where the country road forded the
+Rocky Fork in low water, were studded with what seemed from a distance
+large, unblinking fireflies. And on the stream itself two or three
+other fireflies in a cluster moved back and forth, here and there. Bad
+news need not be telegraphed in the country. It flies faster than the
+wind. The whole neighborhood on each side the Rocky Fork knew that
+Doctor Garde had been carried down in the Rocky Fork, and men of all
+ages turned out in the search.
+
+The Furnace-men brought dried pine sticks for torches. Three people
+paddled Ridenour’s canoe about, trailing light on the muddy water.
+The trees took on a weird appearance as these torches lit up the
+inner mystery of their branches, and some sleepy birds that had just
+comfortably settled for the night, chirped inquiringly. Overhead the
+stars appeared by ones and groups through a clear sky, from which the
+trailing mists were blown away.
+
+The men in the canoe had a log-chain and hook which they trailed along
+the bottom. Others followed the banks down stream, being obliged to
+go around deep bogs and back-waters which nearly covered what had
+been grape-vine thickets. Doctor Garde’s felt hat had been found in
+a thicket by one of the boys, and Abram had ridden off home with it:
+but when he got there he had not had the heart to carry the soaked and
+dreadful token in, but had laid it in a corner of the porch while he
+entered to tell about it and state his convictions.
+
+Mr. Runnels remained by the ford, walking his borrowed steed here and
+there, and stretching fearfully toward every object which attracted
+notice.
+
+“They say Pancost come nigh losin’ his old gray,” said Mr. Willey
+grimly, laying his hand on the neck of this steed.
+
+“I barely got out,” replied Mr. Runnels. “It seemed as if we were both
+to go.”
+
+“What possessed ye to try the Rocky Fork when it’s so high?”
+
+“I wanted to carry around word to all my pupils on this side that the
+lessons would be stopped till the water went down. I was about to turn
+back, but Doctor Garde was just venturing in, and I thought a man might
+follow where he went.”
+
+“Oh, but Doctor Garde wouldn’t turn back from anything! And he had the
+prettiest piece o’ horse-flesh in the whole country. She could swim
+like a duck, and take a straight up-and-down bank, and in the darkest
+night he could give her the bridle and go to sleep. The trouble with
+Doctor Garde, sir, was that he didn’t know danger when he saw it. This
+is a rough piece o’ country, but he’d cut right across the hills, and
+once he got his eyelid cut open riding against a branch, and it hung
+down to his cheek. But he goes home and sews it up himself, and keeps
+on ridin’ as if nothing had happened. Ain’t many men could stand what
+he could.”
+
+“I should think not.”
+
+“No, sir. I couldn’t. And he was the best doctor, sir, I ever had in
+my family. There’s Hall over yonder. His mill went with these high
+waters, but I believe he feels a sight worse about the doctor.”
+
+The men with the grapple-chain hooked something. It was no easy matter
+to keep out of the current and the course of limbs and various flotsam
+from wood-cutters’ piles. They got into a still place scummed over with
+powdered rotten-wood, and here they carefully drew in the laden hook.
+
+Men on the opposite bank called to each other and came running to the
+verge, while those by the scummy bay knotted together and held their
+lights down.
+
+“Have you got anything?” they called.
+
+Those around the hook fell back and looked up:
+
+“No, nothing but a little stump.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+A TRIO AND CHORUS
+
+
+The homesickness for father grew to agony in Doctor Garde’s little
+girl. She stood just outside the Furnace pressing her hands together.
+
+When she was a smaller girl she dreamed once that father was dead.
+It was a smothering dream. Her heart weighed her down so she thought
+she could never skip or play blackman again. Driven by unendurable
+loneliness which nothing but the presence of father could cure, she
+persistently hunted him till she came to an enormous mansion which was
+heaven. Here she asked for him, and was told that he had just passed
+into another apartment, which she entered just in time to see the last
+fold of his garment disappearing through an opposite door. So from one
+vast room to another she still followed, calling him as she ran; but he
+never heard, and she never touched even the hem of his robe. The place
+grander than any town, was full of carvings, pictures and nameless
+elegances, such as Bluebell could not remember ever having seen before.
+Then she was in a forest where a wind-storm had passed. Fallen trees
+made a limitless bridge from her feet into the horizon, and there was
+the most brilliant moonlight over the whole visible world. She was
+crying to herself, hopeless of ever seeing father again, when he came
+walking over that endless corduroy bridge toward her. He came walking
+in a long white robe which covered him with light and trailed on the
+logs, his square serious face full of concern about her. He did not
+seem pleased to find her crying there, though he picked her up and
+soothed her! Then he told her she must be kind to the baby and be a
+good girl; and without her being able to detain him, he turned and
+trailed again out of sight across the moonlit logs.
+
+This dream had made such a painful impression on Bluebell that she
+never had forgotten it. It always came across her mind at serious
+times. It seemed to belong to the same class of untold terrors as her
+superstition about Billy Bowl. But now it came up before her like
+reality. Or perhaps the reality which the child was facing stood before
+her like that dream.
+
+The Fork’s roar came up through humid dusk which was thickening every
+minute to darkness. Some whippoorwills in the trees below the road
+were uttering their cry almost under her feet, so that she heard the
+guttural which preceded it:
+
+  “G’--whippoorwill,
+   G’--whippoorwill!”
+
+But presently out of the intermingled sounds of whippoorwills, water
+and frogs, there came something else very different.
+
+It was not at first distinct; but when Bluebell listened intently, she
+did hear a voice calling:
+
+“Hillo!”
+
+The little girl ran along the road toward Mary Ann until she came to
+where the Narrows broadened to a hilly shoulder which sloped gradually
+to the Fork. Bluebell knew nothing about the descent. Within this hill
+and along under the Furnace, John Tegarden’s coal-fires were supposed
+to be perpetually burning. But her eyes were accustomed to the dark,
+and there was a fine starlight overhead.
+
+It did seem dreadful to come down to the very edge of the Rocky Fork.
+Flecks of foam showed on it like threatening teeth. Black objects were
+continually passing down, out in the current. Sometimes these fish
+etched their fins on the low sky on the other side, when you saw that
+there were twigs and limbs of a floating tree.
+
+When Bluebell had climbed down almost to a level with the Rocky Fork,
+she held on to a bush, and listened.
+
+“Hillo!” called the voice again.
+
+It was farther from her, and must be just under the Narrows opposite
+the Furnace.
+
+“Father! Is father there?”
+
+“Hillo! somebody come and help me!”
+
+“Oh, father, are you drownin’! Oh, what shall I do?”
+
+“Is that you, Bluebell? Who’s with you?”
+
+“Nobody, father, but just myself! I can’t get to you, father--the
+water’s so deep!”
+
+“Don’t think of trying to come to me!”
+
+There was a pause. The Rocky Fork, the frogs, and the whippoorwills
+uttered their voices. Bluebell thought she heard a groan contributed to
+the chorus.
+
+“Oh, father! _are_ you drownin’? Can’t you get out somehow?”
+
+A horse’s feet made heavy thuds overhead: they sounded so loud she was
+not sure he heard her.
+
+“Father! what must I do?”
+
+“Bring somebody here.”
+
+“But you’ll drown while I’m gone!” cried Bluebell, adding a blubbering
+sob by way of period.
+
+“No, I sha’n’t.”
+
+His little girl’s nerves were not equal to facing the bare possibility,
+and she sent up a wail.
+
+“Don’t make a fuss,” came father’s voice, somewhat sternly.
+
+“Who’s that down there!” called a voice from the road overhead;
+“Bluebell?”
+
+“Sir?” She held to her bush and looked up: there was a blurred man on
+horseback against the deeper background of hill.
+
+“Is that Bluebell Garde?”
+
+“Yes, sir. My father’s here in the Rocky Fork, and I don’t know how to
+get him out!”
+
+The man made his horse’s feet clatter, and he could be heard
+immediately afterwards, making his way down the bank himself.
+
+“Who’s that?” called the doctor from his invisible position.
+
+“It’s me, Abram Banks. I don’t seem to make you out, doctor.”
+
+“I’m here in the shadow on a log.”
+
+The Rocky Fork and the frogs and whippoorwills came in with a full
+chorus while Abram paused and caught his breath.
+
+“Can you hold on a bit longer?”
+
+“I think so. The water’s quiet. But my arm’s broken, and I can’t help
+myself, and it may turn me faint pretty soon, again. I’ve nearly
+fainted several times.”
+
+“If you could hold on till I gallop back and get Ridenour’s canoe.”
+
+Bluebell sobbed in her dress-skirt.
+
+“Can’t you get a rope up at the Furnace, Abram? If I had one end of a
+long rope I could fasten it to the log, and then you could tow me to
+where you are.”
+
+“Is it a big tree?”
+
+“No, rather small. I managed to get it out of the current--broke off
+some branches and paddled.”
+
+“Bluebell,” said Abram, deliberately pulling off his wamus and boots,
+“you go up the bank and see what my horse’s doin’. I tied him in such a
+hurry he may get loose, and then we’d be in a box for a way to git your
+father home.”
+
+The little girl scrambled up, holding to the grass in places, and
+before she reached the top, she heard a plunge which told Abram had
+taken to the water.
+
+Abram’s horse was tied to a sapling across the road, and was stretching
+his neck to browse.
+
+The breathing of the Fork and the frogs was interrupted by splashings
+and half-exclamations. Bluebell was reassured by hearing her father’s
+voice more plainly. The log was being pushed cautiously out of its
+harbor. He directed Abram not to turn it towards the current, but to
+steer it against another log. Abram’s replies were interspersed with
+grunts.
+
+It was not a very long time before they struggled up the hill, Abram
+helping the doctor. His own hair was sending little streams of water
+down his wamus, but Doctor Garde was dripping from head to foot. When
+the light from the Furnace fell on him, he showed in a ghastly plight.
+
+“Have you got a knife, Abram?” asked the doctor.
+
+Abram groped in his homespun and brought out what he called a
+jack-knife.
+
+“Now, cut my sleeves open, will you?”
+
+This was done. The doctor took his coats off.
+
+“That rubber sleeve compressed it, or seemed to. It’s considerably
+swollen.” He examined his right arm. Bluebell could see him closing his
+lips.
+
+“Just git on the horse now and I’ll put sissy up behind you. Or can’t
+you manage it?”
+
+The doctor took the horse’s bridle in his left hand, and placing one
+foot in the stirrup, leaped up as he did on his Arabian. But this time
+he sank back and leaned on the plough-horse’s neck.
+
+“Afraid I can’t do it, Abram. A few ribs a little out of normal
+condition, too.”
+
+“Can’t you step on that rock, father?” said Bluebell, caressing his
+sound elbow. In her comfort at having him again, she would have been
+his stepping-stone herself.
+
+The faintness passing away, he followed Abram and the horse to a rock
+and succeeded in mounting from that. The farmer flung up Bluebell
+behind him, and took the bridle. This small cavalcade started at once.
+
+“It’d be safer to go the long way around the hill,” suggested Abram.
+“They’re a-huntin’ you b’low at the ford, and we might meet ’em with
+lights or somethin’, and this horse might cut up. She’s always simple
+along the Narrows.”
+
+“The nearest way will be the safest to-night. I want to get home,
+Abram.”
+
+So they passed the Furnace in a quick walk and entered the Narrows.
+The night-workmen were busy inside, and probably speculating about the
+recovery of Doctor Garde’s body.
+
+“Father,” cried Bluebell, hugging him carefully below his arms, “Ballie
+came home with the saddle all turned over!”
+
+She laid her cheek against his dear wet back, ashamed to make louder
+demonstrations of joy. Now that he was out of the water, the whole
+disaster seemed a mere extension of that painful dream.
+
+“And you started out to find where she left me, did you?” said father
+in a bantering tone which indicated that he was touched.
+
+“Yes, sir, and I thought you fell over the Narrows.”
+
+“Did you say they were searching at the ford?”
+
+“Got out Ridenour’s canoe and draggin’ with a log-chain.”
+
+“Who?”
+
+“The whole neighborhood, nigh about. That g’ography man he first
+brought word to me, and the Furnace-hands heard, and they come. But it
+wasn’t my theory that it--that you’d stop there. I felt pretty clear
+you’d went with the current. Liza, she come runnin’ to tell me some
+mischance had happened to you. The g’ography-teacher, he looked scared
+out a year’s growth,” said Abram, having recourse to the time-honored
+humor of his region.
+
+“He was badly scared.” The young doctor’s face shone with a
+phosphorescent smile. “If I had left him to his fate he couldn’t have
+stood it, perhaps, as well as I can. It was folly in him to try the
+Fork, any way. But he plunged in because I did, and I felt bound to
+help him over.”
+
+“He told us,” remarked Abram slowly, “that you was kind of took off by
+the current and your horse kicked you, and you sunk.”
+
+The doctor laughed.
+
+“Well, he certainly was scared out of his sense. Why, I had crossed
+the current, diagonally, as the mare always takes a swift current, and
+was just at the opposite bank, when he yelled to me. He had come in
+holding his horse’s head down, and it was about to drown; they spun
+around in the current and started down stream. When I got to him I
+seized his bridle and tried to lead him out, and then the horse began
+to struggle, and the first thing I knew I was dropped off and thrashed
+around, and his gray gave me a few kicks which might have been fatal
+out of the water, and I saw Ballie spinning along the road with her
+gearing half off, and the young man getting safely out on his horse. I
+tried to swim, but my best arm was so numb I couldn’t use it, so I just
+kept out of the way of drift as well as I could, and finally found a
+log I could crawl upon. I think he called me once or twice, but I found
+it necessary to fix my whole mind on what I was doing. When I got on
+my log and as far as the Narrows, it took hard work to get out of the
+current. Can’t we move on a little faster, Abram?”
+
+The horse’s pace was quickened. Bluebell had not listened for the
+crumbling of earth below, nor did she much mind the gutter under Table
+Rock hole. Her soul was given up to indignation.
+
+“He didn’t act the man, apparently,” pronounced Abram, having turned
+all the incidents over.
+
+“I’ll never go to his g’ography school again!” cried Bluebell from a
+bursting heart.
+
+[Illustration: “I SEIZED HIS BRIDLE AND TRIED TO LEAD HIM OUT.”--_Page
+183._]
+
+“Tut!” said father, “little girls should be seen and not heard.
+Abram, would you mind trotting? I think I could stand it.”
+
+They trotted.
+
+Bluebell’s face intensified behind the wet back. Her imagination
+rehearsed a scene. She put Mr. Runnels before the geography school, and
+especially before Mr. Pitzer’s spectacles, and pointing to him said,
+“He is just as bad as Billy Bowl, for he let my father get pushed into
+the Rocky Fork after my father had helped to pull him out! Old Billy
+Bowl! Old Billy Bowl!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+DOCTOR GARDE LISTENS TO REASON
+
+
+The run had gone down, and the Rocky Fork was within its banks and
+falling every hour. Hall, with a number of his neighbors, was raising
+another mill on the site of the old one, and Mr. Pitzer’s boys went
+down at recess and noon to watch the process and get in the way.
+
+Wreaths of drift on the play-ground showed where the water had been,
+and the lower logs of the school-house had threads of green springing
+in their cracks and knot-holes.
+
+Everybody had heard how Doctor Garde got into and out of the Rocky
+Fork, and the geography-master met some rough bantering which he
+answered as best he could. The young men in his night school talked
+in knots in the graveyard about tar and feathers for him; but tar and
+feathers were a favorite subject with them, principally because they
+had never seen any and had some curiosity about the effect of such a
+combination. Mr. Runnels did his best to remove the prejudice against
+him, and he was so amusing, they forgave him, especially as Doctor
+Garde had nothing more to say about the matter.
+
+Doctor Garde was badly hurt; and one of the other country doctors
+who set his bones made sad work with the swollen arm. The whole
+neighborhood on the safe side of the Fork got upon their plough-horses
+and came to see him, according to custom. Healthy as his physique
+was, so many strains and annoyances brought on fever, and Liza-Robert
+hovered mournfully around the kitchen, taking Liza’s place, while
+Liza nursed him past the worst days. Miss Calder took charge of the
+children, though one of the doctor’s fancies was to have them both
+placed on the foot of his bed where he could see them while they sang
+to him. With one hand propping up his head, he watched them through
+half-smiling eyes.
+
+Ballie neighed long and frequently in her stable. Bluebell fed her
+standing on the barn floor, and smoothed her velvet nose, telling her
+minutely all that had happened, and whether father was better or worse.
+Still, Ballie felt lonesome; and as there was no stable boy to groom
+her down, Liza at last turned her into the meadow, where she sailed
+like a lark.
+
+On Saturday afternoon Tildy Banks, bare-footed, slipped into the
+kitchen.
+
+The doctor was very much better. She edged to the room where he lay,
+and looked in. It was warm, dazzling weather, and all the doors stood
+open.
+
+Father was having his dinner. Bluebell and Rocco camped beside him,
+occasionally getting a bit, and finding the invalid fare a great deal
+nicer than their own unlimited dinner.
+
+“There’s Tildy!” said Bluebell; “come in Tildy: Rocco’s telling father
+a story. And take a chair.”
+
+“I don’t want to,” responded Tildy, briefly.
+
+The doctor turned his head and asked her how Jacob the soap-boiler was.
+Tildy’s eyes snapped; for Jacob the soap-boiler was an imaginary person
+whom the doctor placed before Tildy’s mind as a possible future tyrant.
+He found the children one day playing a very stately play, with much
+curtsying and singing:
+
+  “Here come three lords just out of Spain
+   A-courting of your daughter Jane.”
+
+  “My daughter Jane she is too young
+   To listen to the wiles of a flattering tongue.”
+
+Tildy was especially serious in the performance; and he at once put in
+a plea for another and absent lord, by title, Jacob the soap-boiler who
+desired his loyal duty to Matilda instead of to Jane.
+
+“He’s about as well as usual,” she returned with a stoical countenance,
+but her nails felt quite long.
+
+“The’ ain’t any soap-boiler,” now pleaded Bluebell, making coaxing
+faces to her father. “And then what happened next, Poppetty?”
+
+The baby leaned her head towards one shoulder and then the other in a
+bashful pause.
+
+“I guess there isn’t any more of it,” suggested Bluebell.
+
+“Yes, the’ is, too! ’Nen,--’nen--’nen they eat haws and forn-berries
+and winter-dreens, and ’ey didn’t have good honey and bwed and
+chickun--’tause the’ wasn’t any. An’ the boy say to his sisser,
+‘Don’t try: I git a gun I shoot!’ And birds put leaveses all over
+’em. ’Nen they laid down on drown’; an’ the ole bad mans go off and
+fight wizsor-ruds an’ ’ey git killed. An’ the’ wasn’t any church-house
+or anyfing. Thus’ trees all ’roun’. An’ the babies didn’t have any
+krunnel-bed, nor any nice drurio wiz drors to keep the’ Sunday clo’es
+in. An’ the birds put leaveses all over ’em. An’ they rished they was
+to their house. An’ they bofe died. ’Nen they touldn’t go any furver
+’tause they was so tired! They thus’ laid them down and _di-de_!”
+
+Rocco folded her claws and fixed her black eyes impressively on
+father’s face.
+
+“An’ birds put leaveses all over ’em,” she repeated.
+
+“Yes,” said father, “that’s a very mournful tale. Now, if you’ll kiss
+me very carefully you may both get down and run out to play. I ought to
+get a nap.”
+
+They both kissed him very carefully and went out with Tildy.
+
+Tildy dug her toes into the soil, and made the following remark:--
+
+“Come, and go to ’r house.”
+
+“Well, if Liza’ll let us.”
+
+“She told mother you could come to-day. Mother sent me over to fetch
+you. They don’t want you ’round while your father’s so sick.”
+
+“He ain’t so sick! He’s ’most well.”
+
+Tildy looked fixedly at her toes:
+
+“He looks awful bad.”
+
+“Well, I guess you would, too, if your ribs and your arm was broke!
+That day we played down by the run you said he was going to get
+drowned, but he didn’t!”
+
+“He come nigh it,” observed Tildy, with satisfaction.
+
+“Well, he didn’t get _clear_ drowned, nor he ain’t goin’ to, for all o’
+you!” retorted Bluebell with stinging asperity.
+
+Tildy dug her toes into the soil, ploughing quite a furrow.
+
+“My father’s got a pretty verse on his tombstone,” she said,
+suggestively. “It says:
+
+  “‘Remember, friends, as you pass by,
+    As you are now, so once was I:
+    As I am now, so you must be--
+    Prepare for death and follow me.’”
+
+“That’s on ’most all of ’em in the graveyard!”
+
+“And it’s what they’d put on your father’s.”
+
+“Tildy Banks, I don’t like ye!”
+
+“The’ ain’t no love lost betwixt us,” observed Tildy; and she turned
+toward home.
+
+Bluebell felt bruised and astounded. Rocco stood by, gazing up through
+the tunnel of her sun-bonnet.
+
+“You’ll feel sorry when I’m gone off to live somewheres else!”
+
+Tildy pursued her way deafly, straight as an Indian.
+
+“Tildy!”
+
+The distance widened.
+
+“Tildy, what did you go and get mad for? Are you leavin’ us? I don’t
+think that’s a nice way to mind your mother!”
+
+Tildy paused near the bars, and turned, but without any intention of
+stooping to parley.
+
+“Melissy Garde, if you’re goin’ to ’r house you better come on.”
+
+Roxana’s sister came on, hurrying her by the hand. It was such a grief
+to be at variance with anybody, and especially with Tildy, who must
+indeed love her, they had played together so long.
+
+Tildy helped the baby over the bars, and they all proceeded down the
+meadow in silence. Ballie was scouring across the flank of the hill,
+making the woods echo with her whinneys. Whatever was green looked
+densely so, and the shade was black against the light. The more distant
+landscape seemed to vibrate in the heat. Grasshoppers fled from their
+approach in every direction, and down the run Pidey and Rose stood up
+to their knees in a deep place, chewing their cuds and switching their
+tails. On such a summer day Nature is a tender mother: the outdoor
+world is better than the best fairy-books.
+
+“You ought to see my doll Aunt Melissa brought me,” began Bluebell in a
+conciliatory tone. “Her face kind of melted.” At this moment Bluebell
+felt she could bear that sad change in Georgiana if it would only
+mollify Tildy.
+
+“She’s wax, you know, and Rocco held her too near the fire, and one
+cheek run, like she cried the red off.”
+
+“She did try!” exclaimed Rocco, in distress.
+
+“Liza tried and I tried and Jawgeanus tried--_I_ didn’t hurt her,
+B’uebell!”
+
+“No, honey, you didn’t. Aunt Melissa says she thinks she can paint it
+over.”
+
+Tildy stalked ahead, helping to lead the baby.
+
+“Did you go to school yesterday, Tildy?”
+
+“I gener’ly go to school!”
+
+“Did you get the head-mark?”
+
+“Your dear Printh’ Pancost got that.”
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl looked piteously at the uncompromising
+sun-bonnet.
+
+“I wish you’d got it, Tildy.”
+
+“_I_ don’t care about head-marks.”
+
+“But I’d rather you’d have the prize than anybody else if I go ’way.
+We’ve always been cronies, you know.”
+
+Tildy’s sun-bonnet turned its mouth toward her, and the scrutinizing
+gray eyes focused themselves on their affectionate minion.
+
+“If you’d been some folks’ young one you’d had to go to school every
+day after the water went down.”
+
+“Well, Tildy, I felt too bad to go when my father was so sick. And I
+guess he isn’t goin’ to send me any more. We’re goin’ to move away!”
+
+Tildy’s countenance softened by degrees to actual wistfulness. Still
+she combated the assertion.
+
+“That’s just talk. My mother says he won’t leave the Rocky Fork.”
+
+“Oh, but Liza and Aunt Melissa and him say it’s so. Aunt Melissa wants
+us to live at her house, and she knows lots of people that will let my
+father doctor them. And maybe I’ll go to a seminary,” said Bluebell
+with awe. “That’s a grand, very fine school, Tildy, where you learn to
+play on a py-anna, and paint flowers, and everybody studies big books!
+Aunt Melissa says, ‘You are running too many risks, Maurice, and how
+are you going to educate the children?’ And he says, ‘I thought of the
+children when I was in the water.’ Liza she cried on her apron, and
+Aunt Melissa took her handkerchief out of her reddycule and cried on
+that, and father looked very solemn and says, ‘They owe everything
+to you, Liza.’ Then Liza says she won’t stand in anybody’s light, and
+she’s seen it all along. So they talked a good many times. And every
+time, they talked more like we’s goin’ away. Liza has begun to knit my
+speckled white-and-red winter stockings.”
+
+They had now reached the run. Tildy took Roxana up and lifted her
+across the stones. On the other side, it was her proposal to make a
+saddle to carry the baby up the slope. So Bluebell grasped one of her
+own wrists, palm downward, and Tildy grasped one of her own, and with
+their free hands they then grasped each other’s free wrists, thus
+forming a square and substantial seat on which Rocco sat down when they
+stooped for her. She held to Tildy’s shoulder and Bluebell’s neck as
+they went on. Riding on this kind of saddle is most exhilarating. If
+your bearers stumble you have the chance of alighting on your feet, yet
+you see the world from an elevated position and at your ease.
+
+They heard the loom before they entered the house. Mrs. Banks was
+weaving, and Teeny was sitting on the doorstep in the shade, sewing
+quilt-pieces. Teeny was quite devoted to this industry. She had a very
+young-womanish air. Her hair was twisted in a knob with some pinks in
+it, and her mother’s largest apron was tied around her plain-waisted
+dress.
+
+The floors were all bare at Liza-Robert’s house, though she wove
+endless carpets for her prouder neighbors. The children went into the
+loom-room, which was nearly filled by that huge frame. There were
+threads stretching diagonally and crossing each other in front of her,
+between which she shot a shuttle from side to side; then she pulled an
+overhanging frame-work twice, and it sent the bobbin-thread, which was
+called a filling, home to its place in the web, with a not unmusical
+sound. The web this time was a linsey cloth with variegated threads
+through it, intended for the girls’ winter dresses.
+
+She took Rocco up on her lap, let her struggle to guide the shuttle
+through, and made believe that the baby pulled the frame-work.
+
+“Little innocent!” said Liza-Robert; “it’ll be the only stroke she’ll
+ever weave. They have things different in fine towns.”
+
+“I want a drink,” said Tildy. She went out, followed by her faithful
+Bluebell. They ran down to that spring-house spared by the late flood,
+and opened the door into its coolness. The ground was clear again,
+and the yellow-faced crocks stood in their accustomed places with the
+overflow of the spring purling around them. The spring itself was so
+clear and cold and alive to its duty that there was pleasure in only
+hanging over it to see your face below. Tildy broke off leaves from
+peppermint stalks, and bending them so they could be pinned with stems,
+made cups for Bluebell and herself. They dipped and emptied these
+thimble-sized cups until the breasts of their dresses were wet, utterly
+ignoring the gourd which hung on a nail just at hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+BLUEBELL AND TILDY
+
+
+Then they went behind the garden and along the eastern hill-slope, and
+gathered unto themselves large families of elders.
+
+A little girl who has never played with these woods-babies cannot
+realize the delight there is in them. Warm from the sun and freshly
+green, they seemed more _alive_ than the most complete doll. It always
+gave Bluebell a heartache to come upon a pile of withered elders left
+from a former play. She would dig out Rosa, or Lilly, or Alice, and
+look sorrowfully at the crackling drapery and shrunken body of that
+departed companion.
+
+The elders were in bloom, so Tildy and Bluebell “p’tended” the white,
+fragrant smear made of so many little cups was a daughter’s white
+skirt hanging below her green gown; for it was quite the thing then
+for a child’s embroidered skirt to show its rich hand-work below the
+short dress. The girls plunged into the midst of the elder thicket,
+surrounded by its incense, and came out with rustling armloads. To make
+an elder doll, you break it smoothly from the parent stem, and how
+beautifully the pith shows in the top of its head! then you leave arms
+at a suitable distance below--the elder’s branches spring on exactly
+opposite sides--and strip all the leaves from these, except three at
+the extremities, which are hands. And last, you give the darling a
+length of bare stem for waist, and place her before you to admire the
+delicate brown bark of her face, which has an expression individual and
+distinct from the faces of her sisters.
+
+Tildy and Bluebell sought their favorite play-houses up the hill, their
+arms loaded, and each leading an active young elder by the hand. The
+play-houses were some distance from their school-path.
+
+“We ain’t been here for so long,” remarked Bluebell, panting up the
+steep with her family; “I wonder if anything’s broke our acorn dishes?”
+
+Tildy’s house was a big rock cropping out of the soil. She had
+“up-stairs and down-stairs,” for it was easy to go around behind and
+step on the top of the rock. Her down-stairs was well rugged with moss,
+but the gray floor up-stairs stood bare and cool in the wood-shadows.
+Bluebell’s residence was a mighty stump, cut clean and smooth at the
+top. She had dragged a fragment of rock near for a doorstone, and lived
+on that smooth, many-ringed floor. She had a back kitchen, of course,
+behind the stump, where her acorn delft was stored on little shelves
+made of bark, propped with pebbles from the run. A fleece of vivid
+moss, finer than the most gorgeous Persian rug, covered this kitchen.
+The late storm had only brightened this; but alas! her shelves and
+acorn cups were all to be built and stored again.
+
+They placed themselves in their respective dwellings, surrounded by
+daughters, and talked across.
+
+“Now, le’s play _Thinks-I-to-Myself_!” said Bluebell; “it’s such a
+funny book; and there’s Miss Mandeville, and Robert, and Miss Twist,
+and old Mrs. Creepmouse--ain’t that a queer name, Tildy! I read it all
+through, and skipped the parts where it was long. You have one of your
+dolls be Robert, and I have one of mine be Emily Mandeville.”
+
+Tildy allowed this to be done. The hero of _Thinks-I-to-Myself_ was
+made of a very jaunty elder switch; and the girls put themselves into
+parts and at the same time moved their puppets. Robert sent a valentine
+of a grape-vine leaf to Miss Mandeville; and Miss Mandeville used the
+language which she did in the book; and Miss Twist appeared at the ball
+pinned all over with flounces of her natural bloom, while an emerald
+chain of grass graced her neck. It was very interesting; but when they
+came to the marriage of the hero and heroine, the movers of the drama
+were at a loss for a suitable ceremony. They had never seen a wedding.
+
+“Just join their hands,” said Tildy, “and I’ll say
+‘Bow-wow-whiddle-ink--Bow-wow-whiddle-ink!’ That will do as well as
+anything.”
+
+So the three-leaved palm of Miss Emily was laid in the three-leaved
+palm of gallant Robert, and twisted together, and the couple propped by
+a tree. Overhead great branches were rocking with a musical rustle,
+and further up the hill a squirrel barked. Ants crept up the drapery of
+the bride-expectant, and a bunch of ferns moved as if to fan her.
+
+Tildy took her stand in front, and Bluebell stood by, grouped around
+with the other characters in _Thinks-I-to-Myself_, such of them as
+could not stand lying gracefully on their backs. Tildy opened her mouth
+and said “Bow--” when Teeny, leading the baby, appeared on the scene.
+
+“Didn’t you hear me call you to supper?” she asked.
+
+“No, we didn’t hear anything.”
+
+“What you doing?”
+
+“Ain’t doin’ anything,” returned Tildy, somewhat shamefaced. Her
+weakness for elders was something Teeny failed to appreciate.
+
+“We’ve played a story out of a book,” explained Bluebell, “and now
+they are standing up to get married, and Tildy is going to say
+‘Bow-wow-whiddle-ink!’”
+
+“No, I ain’t!”
+
+“Oh, Tildy, please go on. And old Mrs. Creepmouse died, and we buried
+her under grass, with bushes for stones at her head and feet.”
+
+Teeny gurgled in her throat. She was a real grown young woman, you
+know, who sewed quilt-pieces and had one “Rising Sun” and “Pride of the
+West” done and quilted in shell-pattern and laid away. Still she did
+not laugh out loud, and kindly volunteered to help the bridal party out
+of their predicament.
+
+“You can marry them by the old Connecticut law.”
+
+“How, Teeny! Oh, you do it!”
+
+So Teeny approached and said:
+
+  “By the old Connecticut law,
+   I marry this Indian to the squaw;
+   Kiss her and take her for your bride:
+   Now I pronounce you man and wife
+                          All your life.”
+
+“Oh, how beautiful that was!” sighed Bluebell. “It doesn’t make any
+difference ’cause they _wasn’t_ Indians, does it? Now le’s put ’em in
+the houses, and cry ‘good-by.’ Everybody in the book _cries_ when they
+talk. I don’t see what made ’em cry when they just say something. It
+says ‘cried my father,’ ‘cried Miss Mandeville.’ I s’pose they felt
+bad.”
+
+Rocco helped to pile the elder-people, who had served their time and
+must lie shrivelling to-morrow, upon the rock and the stump. Then the
+human dolls who would have so many stories to play in their lives, went
+down hill chattering together, and sat on split-bottomed chairs around
+Liza’s table. Rocco was lifted by _Josephus_ and the other available
+books in the house. Their most luxurious dishes were custard and red
+currants; and the yellow faces of some of the crocks had yielded up
+their rich wrinkles, and they had cookies, which Liza indulgently let
+them crumble in the cream.
+
+“Don’t go home yet,” commanded Tildy, when the first star was trembling
+out of the evening light and the household gathered outside the door
+on chairs or step. “I’ll take you clear to the bars, so you won’t be
+’fraid if it’s dark.”
+
+“I ain’t a coward,” remarked Doctor Garde’s valiant little girl.
+Doctor Garde’s baby sat by Liza-Robert’s knee. The evening milking
+was strained away in the spring-house, and the day’s tasks were
+told. Teeny had pieced a dozen blocks; the mother folded her bony and
+work-worn hands, and looked toward the horizon with patient, meditative
+eyes.
+
+“Hush!” said Tildy; “if you’d hear mother tell about the child in the
+blackberry patch, it ’ud make you a coward!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE CHILD IN THE BLACKBERRY PATCH
+
+
+“Tell it,” begged Bluebell.
+
+Liza-Robert removed her eyes from the horizon and shook her head at
+Tildy. Her own girls were companions, to whom she freely imparted the
+most eldritch tales and wonders; but Doctor Garde objected to having
+his children’s imaginations tinctured with the folklore of the region.
+She was so tender and indulgent, however, that no child need plead with
+her long. All gathered closer around her knees to hear the story of the
+child who wandered in the blackberry patch.
+
+“It was just after I was married,” said Liza-Robert, “and long before
+Christeeny was born, that Robert come home one night from the Furnace
+and told us he had heard something in the blackberry patch. That was
+before we bought this land, and we lived in part of the old homestead
+and Abram’s folks lived in the other part. It was a good three miles
+to the Furnace, but Robert walked there and back every day, and usually
+got home after dark. This was a summer night, and drizzlin’ rain. He
+said it was yellow in the west, and the last thing the sun did as it
+went down was to make a rainbow, and that rainbow stood with one foot
+across the Rocky Fork, and the other away up in the laurels. Robert he
+crossed the blackberry patch about dusk.”
+
+“I know the blackberry patch,” said Bluebell. Her mind mapped and
+tinted it. A high, undulating place terraced around with hills, and
+a large notch of sky showing in the west; blackberry thickets were
+grouped over it; there the katydids and cicadæ sang unceasingly, and
+grasshoppers thumped all over you, penetrating to the tightest part of
+your clothing, apparently seeking to be crushed, or to be relieved of a
+leg, while their bulging eyes expressed sulky reproach. It was a very
+lonesome place, full of echoes, and rank with grass, in which some of
+the boasted copperheads of the region had been killed.
+
+“But it was lots wilder then,” pursued Liza. “Part o’ the bushes have
+been grubbed out since that time. But there was a sort of path some o’
+the men livin’ on the east road had worn right straight through it.
+
+“So Robert he was about the middle of the patch when he hears a child
+begin to cry like its heart was breaking. Thinks he, somebody has been
+here pickin’ berries to-day, and left a child behind. So he begun to
+call to it and tell it not to be afraid, Bob Banks was there, and he’d
+take it home. He waded into the grass and looked in different places
+for it. Now it seemed right at his hand, and now it would sound away
+off up the hills. It was the most mournful crying he ever heard; but
+hunt as he might he couldn’t get sight of the child. So, after waitin’
+till it got too dark to see, he came home, and was for going back with
+Abram and a lantern to find that child.
+
+“They got the lantern and went back and hunted that patch high and low,
+but never saw any child nor heard any cheep of it, and their wamuses
+was ready to wring out when they got home.
+
+“Next day was Sunday, and we all went to mornin’ meetin’. The neighbor
+women hadn’t any of ’em been blackberryin’ the day before, and hadn’t
+heard of any lost child. So we’d have laughed at Robert if Eli Ridenour
+hadn’t come past the Furnace Monday with _his_ story. _He’d_ heard the
+child in that patch. He was coming through there about midnight Sunday
+night, when the most sorrowful cryin’ anybody ever heard begun right
+close to him. Eli was always cowardly, and he took to his heels. He
+said it sounded like a woman swishin’ through the grass with her long
+dress, and cryin’ lonesome-like. But Robert stuck to it, it was more
+like a child scared half to death.
+
+“People begun to think there was something wrong with that patch. Some
+said it was a gang of bad men that wanted to steal and had a cave
+somewhere near the patch; for there was a gang took in a cave ’way up
+the Rocky Fork when I wasn’t much older than this baby. Mother Banks
+often told about it. And some said it was a child brought there to be
+lost and wander ’round till it died--”
+
+“Like the babes in the woods,” murmured Bluebell.
+
+--“By folks that wasn’t as good as they ought to be. And all kinds of
+stories were told. Some saw it settin’ ’way up in a tree all in white,
+and some heard it under the ground, as if it was buried up and couldn’t
+get out. Mr. Willey offered to go before a ’squire and make affidavit
+that he saw its eyes through the bushes, and they looked like live
+coals.
+
+“So the neighbor men got together and stayed in the patch at night;
+they was bound and determined to find that child. They didn’t hear
+a thing of it, and along in the night all of ’em fell asleep except
+Robert and Mr. Willey. They were all lying on the grass by a lot of
+blackberry bushes, and several of the men had their guns, for there was
+all kinds of suspicions, you know. And Robert said all of a sudden that
+crying begun again, up the hill at the back of the patch, and it was
+enough to melt a heart of stone. Mr. Willey and Robert they takes their
+guns, and they slips along--”
+
+The children clustered closer to Liza’s knee. Rocco opened her mouth;
+her black eyes scintillated through the dusk; and Bluebell threw a
+glance at the dark woods above the house.
+
+“So they slips along and along, close to the ground. It was starlight
+enough to make things out pretty well. And what do you think they came
+across right at the edge of the woods?”
+
+“Oh, a little lost baby!” cried Doctor Garde’s little girl, “just like
+Mr. Post in the First Reader! I always loved that story.”
+
+Tildy puffed in derision.
+
+“It was somethin’ with great big shinin’ eyes--”
+
+“Oh,” pleaded Bluebell, “it _wasn’t_ the thing that came after Peggy’s
+Gold Leg?”
+
+“No,” said Liza, laughing; “it was an animal a good deal bigger than a
+dog; and it was all ready to spring off of a limb at them when Robert
+fired his gun, and over it rolled!”
+
+“’Twas a painter!” announced Tildy, with a flourish of triumph.
+
+Bluebell crouched in her seat. Had Tildy pronounced it “panther,”
+this would have meant little to her. But a “painter!” The Rocky
+Fork colloquialism bristled with terrors. A “painter” had degrees
+of ferocity which even a bear could not attain. Lions were the only
+superiors to “painters,” and, after all, the name of lion had not that
+hollow, frightful sound to be found in “painter!”
+
+“O my!” breathed Bluebell.
+
+Roxana hid her head under Liza’s apron.
+
+“They skinned it,” said Liza; and this enabled the children to breathe
+more freely. A skinned “painter” cannot be as formidable to the mind
+as one with his robes on. “And we’ve got the skin yet. I’ve heard tell
+painters would cry like women or children to draw folks near so they
+could eat them. But that’s the only one shot on the Rocky Fork since
+this country was new. We always called it ‘The Child in the Blackberry
+Patch.’”
+
+There were those dear elder dollies lying in the play-houses up hill.
+All night they must hear the trees whisper--now low, as if just
+dropping asleep; now loud, and breathing deeply, as if startled by
+something more than a fresh breeze: they must hear the mysterious
+crackling of twigs, the fall of some crumbling part of a rotten log,
+the hoot of night-owls, the rattle of the tree-frog, and the dense cry
+of insects which made the air one unbroken sheet of sound; the dew
+would gather on their barky faces. Of course they were nothing but
+elders--but were they at all afraid?--or telling “painter” stories
+among themselves? Hour by hour their juices would dry, and to-morrow
+the bright and blooming Emily Mandeville and the bedizened Miss Twist
+would be old and withered elders, and day after to-morrow you might
+grind them to powder!
+
+A voice calling from the lower bars with a horn-like rise and fall--a
+homely, but a comfortable sound--summoned not Rose and Pidey, but the
+children, to come home.
+
+“Ah!” sighed Bluebell, as she rose reluctantly. She was very loath to
+ask, but she wanted to know so badly. “That painter’s _dead_ now, ain’t
+it, Liza?”
+
+“Why, honey, it was killed long before Teeny was born!” This was indeed
+a relief.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE LAST TIME
+
+
+When everything was settled, the Rocky Forkers said they were not
+surprised that Doctor Garde was going to move. A man always ought to
+better himself; but they hoped he _would_ better himself. The Rocky
+Fork was rough and hilly, but some towns might be worse.
+
+Miss Calder was to take the children home with her; but the doctor,
+able to ride about with his arm in a sling, had to collect fees and
+settle his business before departing to a new field.
+
+So Bluebell came the last time to the log school-house. She might not
+see it again.
+
+“The children shall visit you every summer, Liza,” said the young man.
+
+“And you must come to see them,” urged Miss Melissa. But Liza knew the
+old time was forever broken up. And Bluebell knew that when she came
+back the school-house would not be her school-house, nor Mr. Pitzer,
+if he still reigned, her master; yet in her bustle and anticipation,
+regrets were crowded to a corner of her mind, and she felt important
+on this last day. Mr. Pitzer had written a beautiful parting address
+to her on half a tall foolscap sheet, in his fairest hand, upstrokes
+light and downstrokes artistically shaded, with such wonderful turning
+W’s and other capitals, throwing fantastic vines all around. He had
+ornamented the top with a bird and a fish in red and green inks, each
+being deftly finished by a continuous flourish without the pen having
+been lifted from the paper. The address began, “Dear Youth;” and went
+on to describe life as a stream, and a child as a young voyager who was
+bidden to beware of quicksands, whose sky your old friend hoped might
+be ever free from storms. In concluding he said, “How touching is a
+young and interesting mind just unfolding its petals to the sunlight!
+Whoever shall bring it to perfect flower, it will always be a source of
+pleasure to your old friend to remember that he was the first to lead
+it in the ways of knowledge. May heaven bless and richly endow my young
+friend!
+                                                 “Your schoolmaster,
+                                                        “THOMAS PITZER.”
+
+Bluebell folded the paper reverently. She could not read many of the
+words; it was necessary to add more years to her life before this
+production could be appreciated in its magnitude. But she was very
+grateful for such a testimonial, and some odd tender string began
+vibrating in her little heart. Oh, dear Mr. Pitzer! and dear old
+benches that smelled like the chest carved by Antony of Trent! The
+very dunce-cap was a thing of joy when she thought of it! How funny it
+looked on a blubbering little boy who would not repent of his misdeeds
+until he was stood in the middle of the floor with that paper cone on
+his head! Should she ever know again the hungry smell of a reticule
+that has a few stale crumbs in it? She had her way all day. She
+visited, and when she and Tildy asked to go after the water, not a soul
+in school would have been a rival candidate for the same office.
+
+They brought back bunches of honeysuckle from Langley’s well, and the
+smell of that flower became forever associated in Bluebell’s mind with
+worm-eaten benches, clay-chinked walls and the stirring air of the
+hills. She wore her best blue calico, and felt so dressed up as to
+have lost part of her identity. So Tildy rested the pail-handle on a
+stick, and silently carried the short end herself. And when they put
+the water-pail on its bench in the corner, Joe Hall got permission to
+pass it around (another fat office in primitive school-life), and not
+one mouth within those walls could refuse to press the dripping gourd
+when it presented itself, splashing cold drops on bare feet, or sending
+delicious shudders through thinly covered limbs. When Joe Hall reached
+Bluebell, he dropped in her lap not only a thumb-paper bearing her
+name, but a lot of birds ingeniously folded in the pattern generally
+accepted by the school.
+
+Perintha Pancost had her pocket so bulging full of new apples that
+it weighed her down, and all the scholars on her bench swallowed
+expectantly. But, one after the other, they were passed to Bluebell,
+through hands which only stopped them on the way for a smell; so
+Bluebell’s pocket bulged, and she and Perintha exchanged the most
+amiable and confiding smiles. Mr. Pitzer was so busy mending pens that
+he perhaps saw no occasion for bringing out and reading that article of
+the rules which forbade eating “_apples, condiments, and nuts, or going
+to dinner-bags in school hours_.”
+
+How kind all those boys and girls were! John Tegarden showed her the
+“Death of the Flowers,” in the Fourth Reader, which he was learning
+to speak before summer school was out, for the “last day;” and, as it
+had a melancholy tone, Bluebell felt vaguely complimented. She would
+be away off in Sharon on that day; she would not even see the prizes
+distributed, to say nothing of missing that spelling-prize herself.
+
+Some of the parents who were not too busy harvesting, would be there in
+their Sunday clothes; the children themselves would appear in different
+character, all shod in stiff shoes or jaunty slippers; the fortunate
+girls in white dotted swiss, or book muslin, with rosettes of ribbon
+in their tightly braided hair, the poorer ones in starched calico; the
+boys dressed exactly like their fathers, and looking like little old
+men, very much subdued by the calamity of clothes.
+
+But still there probably were grander gala days in Sharon.
+
+Amanda Willey would have Bluebell stand next to her in the ring at
+noon when they played “_I lost my glove yesterday, found it to-day_.”
+Of course Tildy stood on the other side, and Perintha, who went
+around with the glove--which was simply and solely an empty reticule,
+there being no glove in the entire school wardrobe--dropped it behind
+Bluebell. They abstained from “_Drown the Duck_,” because she hated the
+tiresome ins and outs, and was sure to be drowned by dashing straight
+at the leader.
+
+Even the boys left “_Bull in the Pen_,” and “_Mad Dog_,” to say nothing
+of “_Base_” and “_Three Old Cat_,” and condescended to play for once
+with the girls, if the girls would play that variation of “_Hide and
+Seek_” known to them as “_Hickamy-dickamy_;” and to Bluebell was
+reserved the right of repeating the cabalistic formula by which the
+panting and eager crowd was narrowed down to the one party who had to
+hide his eyes. With dipping forefinger she went the rounds, rejoicing
+in the liquid roll of the words:
+
+  “Hickamy-dickamy, aliga-mo;
+   Dick slew, aligo-slum;
+   Hulkum, pulkum, peeler’s gum:
+   France--you’re out!”
+
+The lot fell on Minerva Ridenour, that little baby-faced thing who was
+always standing about with her mouth open, as if perpetually astonished
+at the world, and who could not even eat an apple without showing how
+her white first-teeth made cider of the fruit. There were plenty of
+places to hide: behind logs and trees, behind the school-house and the
+school-house door. Before she had counted a hundred, with her eyes
+hid against the base, not a bobbing head or glint of calico could be
+seen in the landscape; and when, rubbing the smear which darkness had
+made, off her sight, she wandered cautiously a few yards from the base,
+lo! there were a half a dozen long-legged fellows patting it, having
+swooped from overhanging branches or from behind logs. Forms appeared
+everywhere, and the little Black Man ran valiantly, but overtook
+only one or two at the base, where she patted excitedly, calling the
+individual names of the entire school, until she was checked, and
+reminded if she called anybody’s name before he appeared, that party
+could “come in free.” Joe Hall and John Tegarden remained out when all
+the rest stood in a scarlet and perspiring group! and it was ludicrous
+to see Minerva fly back to the base as if drawn by an elastic rope
+which she had stretched, every time an alarm rose behind her or she
+saw a suspicious spot. On the other hand, the found majority shouted
+warning or encouragement to the invisibles:
+
+“Lay low, Joe!”
+
+“Run, John, now’s your time! Run! run! run!”
+
+John had hid in the hollow towards the Rocky Fork, and his long legs
+at his distance were pretty equally matched against Minerva’s tardier
+feet at her distance. It was an exciting moment, in which the majority
+patted its hands and knees and shouted with all its might. Minerva came
+in gallantly, but John reached over her at the last instant and patted
+the base: “One, two, three!” And then his impetus carried him sprawling
+on the ground. It was John’s nature to throw his entire sensitive soul
+into what he undertook, and he did not enjoy the girls’ laughing and
+the boys’ hooting as he scrambled upon “all-fours.” He did not know
+he was to do martial service for his country and to die the death
+of a soldier. The noble possibilities of the boy were at that time
+only apparent in his tenderness of heart. It was an aggravation to an
+awkward fellow like John to see Joe Hall sail in and encircle the base
+while Minerva was farthest from it, as if Mercury’s wings grew on his
+neatly moving heels; pat it triumphantly, and step back with his head
+up, as if graceful success was a matter of course for him.
+
+Oh, they had so much fun! If there was anything in the world more
+exhilarating than running right through when the Black Man calls,
+Doctor Garde’s little girl had yet to encounter it. Then there was
+that similar play, with a shiver in it:
+
+  “How many miles to Barley-bright?”
+  “Three score and ten.”
+  “Can I get there by candle-light?”
+  “Yes, if the witches don’t catch you!”
+
+But the school-day ended. Bluebell put her reader and spelling-book
+into her reticule. She got one last head-mark. And the lessons the
+higher classes had read that afternoon, made a background of thought
+in her mind--the magnificently worded “Con-fla-gra-tion of an
+Am-phi-theatre,” and that rousing story of a son’s return, beginning,
+“It was night. The widow of the Pine Cottage had laid on her last
+fagot.”
+
+One by one the boys and girls went out, bowing or curtsying to the
+master, and he laid special emphasis on the “_Good_-evening” which he
+gave Bluebell.
+
+How soon it was all over! And how soon the very evening before her
+departure had come! The clothes she was to wear on the journey were
+laid out on a chair, and her mother’s trunk brought down from the
+garret, repaired and packed. After all, it was decided to let Roxana
+stay with Liza until her father was ready to depart. In her own
+flutter, Bluebell scarcely anticipated missing the baby.
+
+Tildy came over to stay all night, and they played until late. She
+brought her John Rogers’ Primer as a parting gift for Bluebell to
+“remember her by.” Its frontispiece represented the martyr, John
+Rogers, burning at the stake, surrounded by soldiers with axes, and his
+numerous family, in very short-waisted gowns or mature-looking coats.
+The delightful rhymes within its covers almost repeated themselves:
+
+  “Time cuts down all,
+   Both great and small.”
+
+  “In Adam’s fall
+   We sin-ned all.”
+
+  “Zaccheus he
+   Did climb a tree,
+   His lord and master
+   For to see;”
+
+and many others with an old-fashioned tang like that of a winter apple
+kept far into the spring. And there was, besides, John Rogers’s
+address to his children. On receiving this precious pamphlet, Bluebell
+drew from her own stores her oldest and dearest book, the “_Hymns
+for Infant Minds_,” in pink pasteboard covers. There was this prime
+favorite:
+
+  “My father, my mother, I know,
+     I cannot your kindness repay;
+   But I hope as the older I grow,
+     I shall learn your commands to obey.
+   You loved me before I could tell
+     Who it was that so tenderly smiled;
+   But now that I know it so well,
+     I should be a dutiful child.”
+
+And there, too, was Mr. Pitzer’s battle piece:
+
+  “Let dogs delight,” &c.,
+
+And,
+
+  “I thank the goodness and the grace
+   Which on my birth has smiled;”
+
+with dozens of other gently stimulating hymns which Bluebell had long
+known by heart. In giving this book to Tildy, she gave as nearly a part
+of her identity as could be separated from herself.
+
+Morning came--early, but moist and shady among the hills. The girls
+were up before anybody else in the house. Tildy hooked Bluebell up with
+maternal care, and combed the tangles out of her hair with an energy
+which came near straining their friendship at that last moment.
+
+Then Liza bustled about breakfast, and the baby waked in the unusual
+stir. Miss Melissa moved out of her chamber in the dignified habit
+which she had laid aside after her arrival at the Rocky Fork. Father
+did not ride away until the party was ready to start. Abram with his
+spring-wagon was to drive them to the station: father was still a
+left-handed horseman.
+
+The last, and almost the very best, breakfast of Rocky Fork life was
+just over, when Robert’s Liza and Teeny came trailing up the meadow,
+their dresses deeply touched with dew. Teeny brought her rough-coated
+china lamb as a parting gift; she had outgrown such toys; but Bluebell
+could only give her a kiss in return, for all her treasures were under
+lock and key.
+
+Then a rattling was heard along the lane, and Abram appeared with his
+horse and spring-wagon. He had two split-bottomed chairs for his
+travellers, but for himself, a board across the wagon was good enough.
+He let down the bars, and drove in to take on the trunks. And then
+Bluebell realized that she was going away from home!
+
+Does the child leave you so lightly, old weather-beaten house! Never
+mind. Years will bring you your revenge: you will live in her mind
+forever, a symbol of joy which does not come when we are older.
+
+She is squeezing the little sister, responding to Tildy’s stoical
+hug--and Tildy starts straight to the lower bars, her brimming eyes
+turned from the company. Liza-Robert is caressing her with some pious
+words, and now she is tight in Liza’s arms, just realizing how soft
+and comfortable and dear they have been. She hangs to Liza while Miss
+Melissa makes her adieux, and Teeny gives her another pat as Abram
+hoists her into the vehicle.
+
+Father is ready on his Arabian to ride beside them as far as Mary Ann
+post-office. They will take the long way around the hills.
+
+The bars are put up behind them. Bluebell looks back and sees her
+group of friends moving into the house, and hears Rocco’s voice--like
+the voice of the old house--calling persistently:
+
+“Good-by, B’uebell, good-by! Good-by, B’uebell!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE FIRST RAILROAD TRAIN
+
+
+“Father,” said Doctor Garde’s little girl, when she saw the branching
+road ahead on which he must ride away from her, “you won’t get into the
+Rocky Fork again, _will_ you?”
+
+“If I do, it will barely reach my saddle-girth now,” replied father,
+smiling.
+
+“But you’ll be careful, won’t you, father?”
+
+“Yes, I’ll be careful.”
+
+Both his horse and Abram’s wagon were checked when the roads separated,
+while a few adieux were said. He shook hands with Miss Melissa and
+kissed his little girl. In a few moments he was cantering away, and
+Bluebell felt launched on the unknown world by herself. There was
+Abram, however, a figure to whom she had been accustomed so large
+a part of her life. And though he seemed nothing but a figure
+now, driving silently and looking straight ahead, for Abram was a
+reticent man, he was most significant of home. It was a long drive
+to the railroad station. Mary Ann post-office was quite back in the
+wilderness, and Bluebell had always thought it a suburb of the great
+world.
+
+They stopped in the woods far from any house, and had their dinner.
+Liza had put up the best of lunches and plenty of cold tea. Abram
+unhitched his horse and led it to a stream to drink; then he took a
+sack of feed from the space behind the trunks, and fed it. Miss Calder
+and Bluebell sat on their chairs, but Abram took his dinner resting on
+the grass. When they had stopped half an hour by Miss Calder’s time,
+he hitched the horse again, and they moved briskly forward lest they
+should be too late at the station for the afternoon Baltimore and Ohio
+passenger train.
+
+As they came down a slope. Doctor Garde’s little girl saw what she
+thought was an immense long boat sliding across a grassy plain with
+a roar which terrified her. It was as strange a sight as a blue or
+scarlet moon in the sky.
+
+“Oh, look at that!” she cried: “what is it?”
+
+“That’s the east-bound passenger,” said Miss Melissa. “Our train will
+be down soon now.”
+
+So that strange vision was “the cars.”
+
+She had heard of their rapid motion, and was prepared to see them shoot
+like a meteor; they were a little disappointing in that respect. But
+the smoke, the noise! And the possible danger! Suppose that train had
+changed its direction, and had run up the slope straight at Abram’s
+wagon! Bluebell had no doubt the mysterious sliding power could move
+where it pleased. But when they alighted at the station, she saw
+stretching in front of it, and as far as eye could see on each side
+until the parallel lines became points or disappeared behind hills,
+iron rails laid on a prepared road. This was the railroad; the flying
+boat could not leave it for a turf track and prosper. Here was matter
+for congratulation; but a new fear arose in the little girl’s mind
+which she would not on any account have betrayed. If the cars ran on
+wheels, as Aunt Melissa explained that they did, how _could_ those
+wheels keep from slipping off the polished tops of the rails? and if
+they departed ever so little, Bluebell knew what must follow. Her
+vision of riding on the cars began to take a lurid nimbus. Still, other
+people had ventured and lived.
+
+The station was a small, lonely building, but several handsome
+farm-houses could be seen in the landscape. There were two rooms
+inside, in one of which a little machine clicked all the time. There
+were poles all along the railroad, with wires stretched along their
+tops, and Bluebell noticed that these wires came down through a window
+to this machine. She knew what that was. It was the telegraph. She had
+heard things went more quickly over that than over the railroad.
+
+“I hope father and Rocketty will ride on that when they come to Aunt
+Melissa’s house,” she thought. “Wouldn’t the baby’s eyes pop when they
+went spinning along so fast! But what do folks do when they get to the
+poles? I should think the tops of the poles ’ud hit ’em. I guess they
+just swing round the poles and go on. I don’t believe I could go very
+fast if they _was_ telegraphin’ me.”
+
+Miss Melissa sat on a bench in the station. Abram had attended to the
+tickets and had the trunks marked for delivery at Newark. He then drove
+his horse some distance away, and having secured it, came back to see
+his party off.
+
+Bluebell slipped her hand into his and stood by him on the platform.
+
+“You’ll soon be off now,” said he.
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Are you glad to get away from the Rocky Fork?”
+
+“Oh, _no_, sir! But I want to learn at a big seminary.”
+
+“That’s a fact,” said Abram, as if deliberation had convinced him of it.
+
+“Mr. Banks, I s’pose you’ll see Tildy?”
+
+“It’s likely I will; yes, it’s pretty likely.”
+
+“If you do see her, I wish you would please tell her to write to me; I
+forgot to ask her.”
+
+“I don’t know’s she can write.”
+
+“But Teeny can. And Tildy said she was going to have a copybook as soon
+as her mother bought her some foolscap paper. I am going to learn to
+write. I am going to play music, too, Mr. Banks.”
+
+“Yes, it’s likely you’ll learn a heap of fine things.”
+
+“Don’t you s’pose Teeny would write a letter _for_ Tildy?”
+
+“That don’t seem onreasonable,” admitted Abram. “Christeeny writes
+a fair hand. Robert, he was a good scholar. He read the Bible and
+Josephus clear through.”
+
+“Yes, sir. And Joe Hall said they were singin’ so nice at g’ography
+school now.”
+
+“That’s good learning,” said Abram, drolly; “but ther’s many another
+thing a man’d better know than singin’ g’ogr’phy. F’rinstance: how to
+ford a creek!”
+
+Before Doctor Garde’s little girl could do complete justice to
+this pleasantry, which she and Abram, of all persons, were able to
+appreciate, the air was rent with a scream that turned the whole
+landscape for one instant into a nightmare.
+
+“That’s the cars,” said Abram; “don’t you see the smoke comin’ round
+the hill?”
+
+Miss Calder came out on the platform. The glittering monster of the
+rails bore down upon them as if determined to have their lives. The
+station agent stood ready to attend to baggage or express matter.
+
+Before Bluebell could get her breath evenly, she was being helped
+up steps after Miss Calder, was walking along a long narrow room
+with windows on each side, and being seated beside Aunt Melissa on a
+velvet-upholstered seat. Red, bright velvet, gayer than Rocco’s best
+flowered winter dress which Liza made of a remnant of brocaded velvet
+among mother’s things. The seats were very soft and spongy, too.
+Bluebell furtively bounced up and down while Miss Melissa was settling
+comfortably. She sat on a seat facing her. A man obligingly turned
+it over for them. All at once the station began to slide backwards;
+and before she could recover from this, the woods and hills gently
+slipped away as if they had grown tired of such everlasting rest. The
+train was moving! What was a wagon or a horseback ride compared to
+this! Teetering on a sapling, or on a board stuck through the fence,
+or swinging in a grape-vine, must forevermore be secondary methods of
+motion. But where was Abram? She stretched her head out of the open
+window, and Miss Melissa nervously pulled her in just in time to save
+her flat from a flight.
+
+But Bluebell had seen Abram far back, plodding up the road behind the
+station.
+
+“I didn’t bid him good-by,” she thought ruefully, as this last symbol
+of her country home vanished from sight. She felt a momentary pang,
+such as maybe shoots through a little plant torn from its cherishing
+ground to be transplanted.
+
+But there was Aunt Melissa sitting up so grand, her veil over her face
+and her delicate gloved hands enclosing her vinaigrette, ready for the
+headache which threatened her when travelling. She was a symbol of that
+larger life opening before the child.
+
+Miss Calder was suffering a peculiar martyrdom. In every fibre of her
+sensitive nature she felt that she had robbed the lonesome spinster
+among the hills, who had not half her resources. But, on the other
+hand, she had but performed her sacred duty to the dead and the living.
+She knew she was considering the welfare of the children more than her
+own wishes. It was a waste for the refined young doctor to spend his
+life and energies at the Rocky Fork when by her influence she could
+help him to a position better suited to him. He was so humble and
+sorrowful himself, he had not considered that he owed a future to his
+dead wife’s children.
+
+Still Miss Melissa felt she had performed a very painful duty, and
+regretted that she had not done it years before; for anything neglected
+brings with it long arrears of interest.
+
+But Bluebell was in a fever of delight. Every object seen on that
+journey was stamped upon her mind for life.
+
+When they slid into Newark, at which point their trip by rail ended,
+the city glamour enveloped her. To be sure, they passed squalid houses,
+worse than the most illy kept cabins about the Rocky Fork; and she got
+swift glimpses of dirty children and pens of back yards,--in short, of
+all the unsavory sights which spot the outskirts of a city. But these
+seemed picturesque. The folks must have a good time living “in town.”
+If the children were filthy, they could have candy every day, probably,
+and walk on sidewalks. Teeny said folks in Fredericktown never soiled
+the soles of their shoes. And oh, how beautiful the tall buildings
+were, when the slowly moving train, ringing its bell in state, gave
+glimpses of them! Streets stretching far as eye could see, carpets, dry
+goods, immense windows, people hurrying about dressed in their Sunday
+clothes and looking as if they felt the importance of living in town;
+carts rattling, long painted and gilded carriages with a man riding on
+top, appearing and disappearing around corners; and more than all, the
+roar of human life! How grand was a city! She even loved the smell of
+it, which consisted principally of escaping gas, not in good odor with
+more experienced noses.
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl was in a nervous hurry to follow Aunt
+Melissa out of the train when it stopped. She remembered its
+imperceptible starting, and what should she do if it carried her off
+by mistake? A man in blue clothes lifted her down from the last high
+step, and she kept close to Miss Calder. From the dingy brick dépôt
+came a light-haired, smiling man in very neat clothes. He carried a
+whip in his hand.
+
+“How do you do, Archibald?” said Miss Calder with great affability.
+“Have you got the carriage here?”
+
+Archibald took off his hat and bowed, smiling all the time in the most
+laughter-provoking way, and replied that he was quite well, and hoped
+he saw Miss Calder looking well. The carriage was on the other side of
+the dépôt.
+
+Miss Calder said she was in excellent health, but felt threatened with
+a headache and would be glad to get home. She hoped everything had gone
+well.
+
+Archibald assured her everything had moved as usual, except the house
+didn’t seem the same; and he would put her trunk up behind the carriage
+immediately if she could wait one minute.
+
+“There are two trunks,” said Miss Calder: “that one beside mine which
+that man is pulling out of the way, is Melissa’s.”
+
+Archibald applied himself to loading the baggage on a rack behind the
+carriage. Then he made haste to open the door, let down the steps,
+and help his mistress and her charge in. The carriage was roomy and
+comfortable, and drawn by two fat sleepy-looking horses, black as coal
+and groomed until they glittered. They seemed on the best of terms with
+Archibald, who called them Coaly and Charley.
+
+Miss Calder leaned back with a satisfied sigh as they started. The
+cushions were easy and the stuffed back supported one to the shoulders.
+
+It was quite sunset when they left Newark behind and drove towards
+the yellowing west. The three or four miles intervening between the
+railroad town and Sharon was a succession of lovely landscapes, and
+seemed one of those suburban extensions which rich men love to beautify
+with their villas. There was no ruggedness like that about the Rocky
+Fork. The hills rose in majestic proportions but softened outlines. In
+the afterglow left by sunset the country had an unearthly beauty. The
+road constantly broadened; villa after villa appeared, each standing in
+spacious grounds. They reached the top of an ascent, and saw Sharon
+set below, surrounded by hills and glittering like a huge topaz in
+the evening light. As they descended they lost sight of her. She was
+drowned from view among her abundant foliage. Bluebell began to think
+the road had turned aside from her, when they came sweeping around a
+curve and past an artificial lake, and were in Sharon’s main street,
+so broad that many carriages like Miss Melissa’s could drive there
+abreast. The street was quite lively with carriages, and Miss Calder
+exchanged greetings with numbers of people. One tall white building was
+beginning to glitter with lights from roof to ground. She knew it must
+be an important place, and asked with awe what it was.
+
+“That’s the seminary,” replied Miss Calder.
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl felt almost dizzy as she was obliged to
+withdraw her eyes from the great mill of learning.
+
+They drove far up this wide street and turned down another. The
+carriage stopped. Archibald opened a gate and drove half-way around a
+sweep under tall trees, and brought them to the steps of a large old
+house. It was brick. Bluebell could see vines massed over one whole end
+of it. There was a tall pillared veranda extending along the entire
+front.
+
+The hall-door was open, and within, a globe of light hung suspended
+from the ceiling. Bluebell thought of the Discontented Cat who went to
+live with the Countess Von Rustenfustenmustencrustenberg, as she was
+ushered into this hall and the double parlors which opened from it.
+She walked on bouquets of velvet flowers as large around as a tub. The
+lofty rooms appeared to Bluebell one vast collection of treasures. She
+did not know there were such pictures, such chairs and ornaments and
+lounges and curtains in the world.
+
+In this house three or four generations of Calders had lived and died.
+It was the first fine house built in Sharon by one of the Massachusetts
+colonists when the country was new. It had been remodeled and added to,
+and its furniture changed with the family tastes or fortunes. But the
+Calders never destroyed an old thing. Its former belongings were sure
+to be preserved in some way.
+
+Miss Melissa entered her own room which, opened from the back parlor,
+and took off her wraps, bidding Bluebell take off hers also. And again
+Doctor Garde’s little girl was astonished by the sumptuousness of her
+surroundings. Then Aunt Melissa opened a door into a bathroom, and
+refreshed herself by bathing her hands and face at a marble stand, and
+called Bluebell to do likewise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+MISS BIGGAR
+
+
+But in spite of its beauty and spaciousness, this seemed rather a
+lonely house, Bluebell thought, when she was ready for tea, and had
+nothing to do but gauge her surroundings. Aunt Melissa floated about,
+showing fatigue in every motion, but anxious to examine into the state
+of her house. Doctor Garde’s little girl wished for Rocco, or that
+Tildy would walk in, poking her toes into the pile of the carpets.
+Wouldn’t Tildy be s’prised! About this time, she and Teeny were sitting
+on the front steps. And the wind from around the hill was rustling
+through the elders--dear elders! Rose and Pidey were standing to be
+milked. There was moonlight all over the Rocky Fork--but not like this
+lonesome-looking moonlight sifting through Aunt Melissa’s trees. Maybe
+that big white seminary wasn’t half as nice as the log school-house
+when you came to find out. And what master could be kinder or know any
+more than Mr. Pitzer? O Rocky Fork, how this little heart ached for
+you! Maybe father would get hurt again. Oh, this pain of homesickness
+for what you love! If she could just hug the baby one blessed minute,
+or feel Liza’s fostering hand tying up the ends of her auburn braids!
+
+“Why, my dear!” exclaimed Miss Melissa moving back from a closet, “what
+can be the matter? Is it possible I hear you crying?”
+
+She stooped and put her hand under Bluebell’s chin. The child smeared
+her face vigorously with her palms.
+
+“I guess it’s only some water runnin’ out of my eyes,” she said with
+heroism and a hiccup.
+
+Miss Melissa seated herself on a sofa and drew her charge’s head to her
+thin shoulder.
+
+“You feel lonely. But plenty of nice little girls will come to call on
+you; and think! your father and little Roxana will be here soon.”
+
+“Yes’m,” struggled Bluebell, smothering down her sobs. This was no way
+to show Irish pluck.
+
+Miss Melissa trembled slightly.
+
+“This place seems strange to you. But your mother used to play all over
+this house. She sat in this very room and sewed and talked with me many
+an afternoon.”
+
+Bluebell looked about, feeling less repelled. Her mother’s presence had
+touched this and that, and in some sense still lingered there for her.
+
+“I am growing to be an elderly lady, and all my relatives are distant
+or dead. The warmest friendship of my life was formed for your mother,
+and I could not help wanting to bring her children into my house, that
+I might do all I can for them.”
+
+“Yes’m,” responded Bluebell, having conquered her sobs and shut them
+below her throat with a large lump laid on their heads.
+
+“And I did hope you might be happy, that maybe you would want to make
+your old auntie happy--”
+
+“Oh, Aunt Melissa, you ain’t old!”
+
+“Old enough to feel very lonely.”
+
+This touched Bluebell, in her present mood, more deeply than anything
+said before. She put one arm around Aunt Melissa’s narrow waist; the
+lady patted her.
+
+“There, now, well try to be cheerful. I presume you are hungry and
+tired, and the tea-bell has been ringing while we were talking.
+When you have something to eat and are rested you will feel a great
+deal better. Run and bathe your face, and then we will go into the
+dining-room.”
+
+In the dining-room a real fairy feast was set forth. As for the silver
+and china, Bluebell had never imagined its like. The table was round
+and cosy, and though she sat opposite Aunt Melissa, they seemed quite
+near together. The neatest and plumpest of women came in to wait on
+them. This was Maria, who had been with Miss Calder a dozen years.
+Maria looked pleased and rosy as she exchanged greetings with the lady
+of the house.
+
+“I hope you found everything right when you came in, ma’am. I had some
+cake in that I daren’t leave a minute.”
+
+“Everything seems in excellent order, Maria. Were there any letters?”
+
+“A good many papers. I put them on the libr’y table.”
+
+“That was right.”
+
+Maria went out, and Bluebell went on carefully with her supper. Eating
+and drinking were made beautiful. It was a joy to sip her milk--with a
+little hot tea poured into it as a tonic for her spirits, which Miss
+Calder approved of--from a cup so transparent that it seemed too strong
+a breath must blow it away; to watch the tall, shining urn and chased
+tray, and even the carved wooden clock on the wall, from which, while
+Bluebell watched it, there suddenly dipped out a little bird, calling,
+“Cuckoo!” eight distinct times.
+
+Before his last note quite ceased, a sharp pat of slipper-heels came
+flying through the hall, and a small person appeared at the dining-room
+door.
+
+“Oh, that’s you, is it, Libbie? I was just hoping you would come in.”
+
+“When did you get home?” cried Libbie in a clear, high voice.
+
+“About a half-hour ago. Is your grandmamma well?”
+
+“She is very well, I thank you.”
+
+Libbie was taking an inventory of the little girl opposite Miss Calder.
+
+“Melissa,” said Miss Calder, in the formal manner which she considered
+it requisite to use even towards children, “let me present Miss Libbie
+Biggar. Miss Libbie, my namesake, Melissa Garde.”
+
+Miss Libbie stepped back, placing the toe of her right foot across the
+heel of her left, and made a graceful bow. She did it evidently without
+thought. Her manner was perfectly easy. Bluebell struggled to get up,
+and dropped a poor little half-curtsy.
+
+“I hope you are well,” said Miss Biggar.
+
+Bluebell replied that she was _tolerably_ well. This young lady, no
+older than herself, confused and humbled her. She admired Miss Libbie’s
+air and composure, her low-necked and short-sleeved white dress, her
+small slippers, the ribbon around her waist, and the tiny ring on
+her hand. But her head--it was the most wonderful head Bluebell had
+ever seen. Its heavy dark hair was shingled close, “like a boy’s,
+only cut shorter!” The effect was fine. Bluebell despised her own
+auburn braids. And Miss Libbie had black eyes, a short nose, and a
+few charming dots of freckles sprinkled over her altogether piquant
+face. She came towards Miss Calder, and took that lady’s hand within
+her dimpled fingers, and on invitation sat down to have a bit of cake.
+Every motion was watched by Doctor Garde’s little girl. How hopeless
+her own bashful awkwardness seemed! Wouldn’t Tildy be s’prised to see a
+little girl act so much like a grown-up lady!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+A DUCK AMONG SWANS
+
+
+After tea was over they went into the back parlor; and here Bluebell
+noticed for the first time a large, shining object standing on carved
+and claw-footed legs. The top was partially covered by an embroidered
+cloth. But Miss Libbie Biggar was perfectly familiar with it. She tried
+to move the front of it, and Miss Melissa finally opened a folding lid
+for her, disclosing a long row of brilliant black and white ivory keys.
+
+“Do you play on the piano?” inquired Miss Libbie politely, turning to
+her new acquaintance.
+
+“Melissa is going to take lessons at once,” replied Miss Calder for her.
+
+This, then, was a py-anna! Oh, wonderful instrument! While yet
+voiceless, it threw its glamour over Doctor Garde’s little girl. She
+at once resolved to master its harmonies. Some stray poetic instinct,
+of which she was half-ashamed, made her love the irregular tinkle
+of a cow-bell among the hills, the echoing ring of a blacksmith’s
+hammer; and she had often followed a bird, called at the Rocky Fork a
+“medder-lark,” with her head upturned and her breast thrilling, till
+her unguided feet perhaps betrayed her to the run or some mud-hole.
+
+Miss Libbie climbed upon the music-stool, ready without invitation to
+make a display of what she had superficially learned. But from the
+instant her fingers touched the key-board, one listener sat rapt almost
+beyond expression. The richness of the instrument was wonderful to
+Bluebell. Its harmonies, which the young performer could not even hint
+at, yet suggested themselves to the silent child. Miss Libbie’s hands,
+and the dimple each finger showed at its root when lifted to strike a
+note, seemed most admirable. Oh, to be so accomplished! The performer
+played some little march, and such various exercises as she could
+remember. While she played, Bluebell was struggling with a dumb sense
+of having been defrauded thus far in her life. She ought not to be so
+behind that little girl. What had gone wrong? Was it her own fault? How
+could she learn music at the Rocky Fork? Still, she was conscious of
+grief and shame, and many other unreasonable sensations.
+
+“What pieces do you like best?” inquired Miss Libbie in a general way,
+wishing to be agreeable to this queer little girl.
+
+“Oh, I like them all so much!” exclaimed Bluebell. Then a sob followed
+her voice. She ran to Miss Melissa, and was folded to that lady’s
+shoulder. This spontaneous action helped the sore little heart, and she
+was able to stop her crying before it became a freshet.
+
+“O dear!” said Libbie, turning around on the music-stool, “what’s the
+matter? Have _I_ done anything?”
+
+“Everything is strange to her,” murmured Miss Melissa; “she has never
+been away from her father before. She must go right to bed, and she
+will feel better in the morning.”
+
+Bluebell tried to smile over her shoulder at the caller.
+
+“I think it’s the music makes me cry!”
+
+[Illustration: THE PERFORMER PLAYED SOME LITTLE MARCH.--_Page 253._]
+
+Libbie descended from the music-stool, evidently not flattered.
+
+“Because I like it so much!” stammered Doctor Gardens little girl,
+ashamed of the confession thus wrung from her.
+
+Miss Melissa patted the auburn head.
+
+“Indeed! Well, you shall have all the music you want, my dear, and
+before you get through you may cry in another key over some difficult
+exercise.”
+
+Bluebell was marched up-stairs, overstrung and humiliated by her
+_début_ into her new home. Libbie chose to follow, though her
+grandmother’s domestic had been sent in to call her home.
+
+Miss Calder perhaps had a little speech ready as she opened the door
+of the room Bluebell was to occupy. But she merely said with a tremor,
+“Your mother often occupied this room, Melissa.”
+
+And again the child felt that invisible presence which seemed to open
+such great vistas to her. The room itself was so sumptuous she dreaded
+damaging it.
+
+Libbie gravely perched herself upon a chair, and watched while Miss
+Melissa laid out a nightgown from Bluebell’s trunk which stood near the
+closet door waiting unpacking.
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl undressed herself with tremulous hands and
+crept humbly into the unadorned cotton gown Liza had made. Then she
+said her prayers, and Aunt Melissa tucked her under the cover, and
+reached up to turn off the gas.
+
+“Are you coming down now, Libbie? Your grandmamma wants you.”
+
+“Yes’m, in a minute.”
+
+The little girl in bed thought, “She doesn’t mind very well, anyhow;”
+and this was the first debit she found for Miss Libbie Biggar.
+
+“Well, don’t keep Melissa awake long to-night,” said Miss Calder. She
+left the gas burning and hastened down-stairs, for the knocker made a
+mighty clang on the front door, and she knew some neighbor had come to
+welcome her back.
+
+Miss Biggar sat up and looked at Doctor Garde’s little girl, evidently
+interested in her. Bluebell turned her bashful face down on the pillow.
+
+“Are you going to cry again?” inquired Miss Biggar. “Do you cry all the
+time?”
+
+“I ain’t crying,” responded Bluebell, showing her face with some
+asperity.
+
+“Your nose looks all swelled on the end. Why don’t you have your hair
+shingled?”
+
+“I don’t know how,” replied Bluebell, bewildered.
+
+“Why, just go to a barber, and he’ll shingle it. Grandma let me have
+mine done if I’d have my tooth pulled out so another could grow in. How
+old are you?”
+
+“Goin’ on nine.”
+
+Miss Libbie considered.
+
+“What makes you say ‘goin’ on’?”
+
+Bluebell might have replied that it was the custom of the country where
+she came from. But she could not explain her provincialisms.
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+“_Is_ your name Melissa?” inquired Libbie, with a compassionate
+emphasis.
+
+“Yes, it’s Melissa Garde; but they always call me Bluebell.”
+
+“_Well._ That’s a _great_ deal better than Melissa. I wouldn’t be
+called Melissa!”
+
+“What’s your name?”
+
+“Elizabeth Biggar. I live with my grandma. My papa and mamma are both
+dead.”
+
+“My mother’s dead.”
+
+“Have you got all her rings and jewelry?”
+
+“No-o,” replied Bluebell. “I don’t believe she had any.”
+
+Libbie gave the speaker a long, compassionate stare. Then she turned to
+contemplating her own case.
+
+“_Oh!_ I have the _loveliest_ things, and a gold watch in a satin case,
+and diamond ear-rings; but I have to wait till I’m eighteen years
+old before I can wear them, grandma says. Once we had a children’s
+party and I wore my blue silk dress, and grandma let me put on the
+_handsomest_ locket! I wish I would hurry and be eighteen.”
+
+“That’s very old, isn’t it?” said Bluebell.
+
+“Yes. I’ll be a young lady then.”
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl cast her eyes on the wall, and wondered if
+she would ever be a young lady. Teeny Banks was only a young woman. She
+could discern the difference, but her convictions were very strong that
+she could never become such an ornamental being as Miss Libbie Biggar.
+So, leaving this perplexity, she turned back for information.
+
+“What do they do at a party?”
+
+Miss Libbie stared again.
+
+“Who?”
+
+“Why, the children.”
+
+“Why, don’t you know?”
+
+Bluebell shook her head. She had “stayed all night” at Tildy’s,
+marched, and spoken pieces at school, but her experience never
+comprehended a party.
+
+“Well, didn’t you ever go to a party?”
+
+Doctor Garde’s blushing little girl acknowledged her shortcoming.
+
+“O my! Why, where did you use to live?”
+
+“At the Rocky Fork.”
+
+“And didn’t the children have birthday or Christmas parties there?”
+
+Another shake of the auburn head.
+
+“Well, that is the queerest thing!”
+
+“But what do the children do at a party?”
+
+“Why, they do just like grown people at their parties,” replied Miss
+Biggar satisfactorily; and Bluebell sat up in bed and thought it over.
+
+“Only,” explained the young lady, “they go in the afternoon instead of
+evening. When my cousin came from Newark”--thrice happy Miss Libbie to
+have a cousin who lived in a city!--“to visit me, I had a lovely party,
+about twenty girls and ’most as many boys, and we had ice-cream at
+supper.”
+
+“What’s that?”
+
+Libbie rose from her chair, walked to the bedside, and seriously looked
+over her interlocutor.
+
+“Vanilla ice-cream. Didn’t you ever eat any?”
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl felt that she was about to be routed with
+great slaughter. She had alighted upon a new world where the customs
+of the people were all strange to her, and it behooved her, she had at
+last the tact to perceive, to be more circumspect than to betray her
+ignorance so openly.
+
+She changed the subject, and also her companion’s attitude from the
+offensive to the defensive.
+
+“Do you go to school?”
+
+“Yes, I go to the seminary.”
+
+“I’m going there too. What do you study?”
+
+“Music and Mental ’Rithmetic; and we print, and I’m going to take
+drawing lessons.”
+
+“And what do you read in?”
+
+“The First Reader.”
+
+“Ho!” ejaculated Bluebell; and a shade of uneasiness came over Miss
+Libbie’s face.
+
+“What do _you_ read in?” she inquired.
+
+“I can read in ’most anything,” replied Doctor Garde’s little girl.
+“I’m in the _Second_ Reader, pretty near to the Third. How far have you
+got in spelling?”
+
+Libbie looked mystified.
+
+“Can you spell in-com-pre-hen-si-bil-i-ty?”
+
+“I don’t want to.”
+
+“I can spell all the big words in the spelling-book.”
+
+This educated creature began to assume a formidable aspect in the eyes
+of Miss Biggar.
+
+A rap on the door heralded Maria’s head.
+
+“Miss Libbie,” said she, “your grandma says for you to come right home
+this minute. She’s got something nice for you, and it won’t keep.”
+
+“I’m coming now. I know what it is. It’s ice-cream. You say I’m coming,
+Maria.”
+
+Maria withdrew her head.
+
+“I live in the very next house,” continued Libbie to Bluebell. “You
+must come and see me.”
+
+“I will,” promised Bluebell.
+
+“I’ll bring some of the girls to call on you.”
+
+Bluebell did not know what to reply to this formidable proposal, so she
+said nothing.
+
+Libbie’s hand was on the door-knob; she had said good-night and
+received a response, but came running back with a most charming,
+childish impulse. She climbed on the bed and dabbed a quick soft kiss
+on Bluebell’s lips. The door banged after her, and her slipper-heels
+clattered like a goat’s feet on the padded stairway.
+
+“She’s a nice little girl, and she just reads in the First Reader,
+after all,” thought Bluebell, dozing off, and not comprehending that
+this was a beginning in her life of finding wonderful images and
+proving them to be human.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+MISS MELISSA DROPS A FEW HINTS
+
+
+When Bluebell waked in the morning she heard the cherry-tree whispering
+in her ear, and saw Liza’s dresses hanging on the opposite wall. But
+the windows were misplaced, and everything swam after she got her eyes
+open, until the change in her habitation occurred to her. Then the
+Rocky Fork receded and this new home came forward with half-painful
+reality.
+
+Before the child was dressed a tap at the door announced Aunt Melissa.
+Aunt Melissa came in, looking delicate in a white trailing wrapper, and
+kissed her namesake good-morning. Then she unpacked the trunk, putting
+everything in its place, and pushed the small inconvenient thing
+outside the door for Archibald to carry up garret.
+
+She left out Bluebell’s best calico dress, and the little girl put
+it on, feeling that a perpetual but very serious holiday had come.
+That dress was good enough to wear to Sunday-school at the Rocky Fork.
+Tildy and Teeny’s best dotted robes did not look any better. She liked
+it much better than her white. That white was such an unlucky dress.
+When she had it on she felt so extremely dressed that it distracted
+her attention from all the pleasant things in life. The first time she
+wore it she felt her importance expanding to the horizon all around;
+Tildy and Teeny in their dotted calicoes were mere maids of honor on
+her royal progress to church. But a man came along the deep-rutted road
+in his farm-wagon, and as Bluebell stepped out of his way, the wheel
+sank with a chug into a hole filled with mud preserved especially for
+bespattering the proud. Bluebell was splashed from head to foot; even
+her open-work stockings shared the eruption. The saddest part of such a
+humiliation is, that nobody in the least shares the heartbreak of it.
+
+Teeny said she was sorry, but there was no time to stop to scrape the
+mud off. It would dry as they went along. Her manner plainly implied
+that in the case of very little girls like Bluebell, it made no
+difference at all if they looked like frights at church.
+
+“You better run back home,” said Tildy, holding her parasol-handle
+across her shoulder, much as a woodman carries an axe, though the sun
+was making her wrinkle her freckled nose frightfully. Tildy considered
+that she knew the proper poise for parasols, and if the sun did not
+accommodate himself to that, it was his fault and not hers. Bluebell
+stood crying.
+
+“You better run back home,” said Tildy again, patronizingly.
+
+“Won’t you go back with me?” begged the victim.
+
+But Tildy remembered her stiff-necked and conscious demeanor at the
+outset. Besides, _she_ was not spattered, and she wanted to go to
+meeting. She declined going back. Doctor Garde’s little girl was
+smitten with consternation that her own familiar friend refused to
+share her affliction. She went crying alone through the pine lane. And
+though the white dress came immediately to the wash-tub, still that
+recollection clung to it like a stain, and she liked the blue calico
+much better. It “dressed her up,” but raised no wall of separation
+between her and her fellow-mortals. It simply relieved her of all
+anxiety about the appearance of Bluebell Garde, and left her the free
+use of her muscles. The blue dress had a broad belt and a very short
+skirt, a low neck and short puffed sleeves. Miss Melissa made it more
+ornamental by a fine mull ruffle around the neck.
+
+“Shall I put on my black-silk apron too?” inquired Bluebell, as she
+stood to be hooked up, full of desire to bring herself up to her
+surroundings.
+
+“I don’t think I should,” said Miss Melissa gently. Her hands were very
+soft and cool. She unfastened the pig-tails of auburn hair. “I have
+some pieces of old blue silk which I think we can turn into a very
+pretty bodice that you will like to wear better than an apron. Libbie
+Biggar has a pink silk bodice which is very becoming. I notice there is
+very good velvet on the apron. With some lace I have, it will make you
+lovely bretelles.”
+
+Bluebell’s head swam. If she could be spoiled by clothes, Miss Melissa
+was in a fair way to spoil her. A seamstress was to come that very
+day to fit the child out, and Miss Melissa looked forward with gentle
+excitement to this dressing of a living doll. Blue silk bodices and
+bretelles! But with that ready acceptance of beautiful things as a
+right which characterizes all children, and grown people too, until
+their fairy-faith is broken by accumulated loads of care, this little
+girl was able in a few moments to contemplate her prospects with
+serenity.
+
+“But what are bretelles, Auntie?”
+
+“Ornamental straps or ladders which little girls wear over light
+dresses.”
+
+With a happy sigh. Bluebell gave up the black-silk apron; it occurred
+to her to regret she had not worn it more. We do not realize that
+our good things in this world are all transitory, and to be enjoyed
+promptly, each in its season.
+
+They went down-stairs to breakfast. The table was laid as exquisitely
+as the night before; in fact, the best things about the house seemed to
+be used every day, without any reference to company.
+
+“I am going to give you”--here Aunt Melissa paused in pouring coffee to
+adjust something about the service, and Bluebell waited with a bit of
+buttered roll poised half-way to her mouth--“a little party, in a few
+days, to introduce you to your little associates.”
+
+“Me?” said Bluebell, stretching up her thin neck and opening her eyes
+quite wide.
+
+“Yes, my dear.”
+
+“I never had a party! The little girl that came in last evening, Miss
+Libbie Biggar, said she’d had lots of ’em. I don’t know any more about
+havin’ parties than about playin’ music.”
+
+“You may begin your music soon. The seminary vacation lasts some weeks
+yet. I noticed they had the seminary lighted up last evening for
+trustees’ reception. But you need not wait until school opens, Melissa,
+my dear.”
+
+Miss Calder lifted a bit of steak very delicately with her fork: the
+forks were sterling silver, and very different from those to which this
+little girl had been accustomed.
+
+“You are forgetting to eat with your fork, my dear.”
+
+Bluebell crimsoned. “Why, Liza always told me to eat with my knife!”
+
+“But that is not the custom in good--here. I mention it,” said Miss
+Melissa delicately, “because your little associates would probably
+notice it; and besides, you want to form your manners, don’t you, my
+dear?”
+
+Bluebell was so anxious to form her manners that she longed for a fairy
+wand to change herself into just what she ought to be. With native
+diffidence, however, she concealed this intense desire for perfection,
+and merely nodded her blushing face, saying, “Yes, ma’am.”
+
+“I notice that you are very observing. If you watch others and do
+as they do, your manners may be formed easily. And Melissa, my
+dear,”--again Auntie paused, and altered the arrangement of something
+on the table with her sensitive hands--“when little boys or girls are
+introduced to you--”
+
+“O my! do they introduce little boys in Sharon?”
+
+“Why, certainly; little gentlemen and ladies should be presented to
+each other as such. I was suggesting, when you are introduced to any
+one in fact, it has become the fashion to bow instead of to curtsy.”
+
+Bluebell wondered if she could do anything so boyish. But remembering
+Miss Libbie Biggar’s model bow, her mind was fired with emulation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+EVENTS
+
+
+Sunday came.
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl was richer by one music lesson, which
+Miss Melissa herself gave her; and by a blue shirred silk bonnet and
+muslin-gingham dress, as well as long black mitts, the like of which
+she had never seen before. Sunday was an important day in Sharon. This
+old Massachusetts colony retained many Puritan customs. All day the
+various church bells rang--for Sunday-school, for forenoon, afternoon
+and evening services. Miss Melissa and Bluebell moved on crowded
+sidewalks on their way to church. The little girl was astonished by the
+architecture which she saw around her. The church they entered seemed a
+sublime pile. They ascended a flight of broad steps, and passed through
+a matted vestibule into the vastest and whitest place Doctor Garde’s
+little girl had ever seen. The aisles were carpeted, many of the seats
+were cushioned, the pulpit was a sumptuous small parlor by itself, and
+music, so full and mighty that it made the air shudder with delight,
+came from some invisible place. She followed Miss Melissa’s rustling
+clothes up the central aisle, and was placed beside her in one of the
+most comfortably padded pews, with footstools under foot, and books in
+the racks. The tremendous congregation spread on every hand. There were
+no men’s side and women’s side! Families sat in their own seats. The
+bald head of a father might be seen beside the dancing, bonneted head
+of his daughter. Everybody seemed solemn but exceedingly comfortable;
+and when the music ceased nothing but a whisper of fans could be heard.
+Through a door at one side of the pulpit came a saint-faced man, who
+ascended and opened the Bible. He looked very nice, and not a bit like
+that Mr. Joel Clark at the Rocky Fork who cruelly mortified her one
+Sunday when she ventured to peep between the leaves of her book while
+he was preaching in very loud and long-sounding words. Her eye had
+just caught an old English wood-cut--possibly one of Bewick’s--when it
+seemed the world was tumbling about her ears! She could not believe
+her senses. Mr. Clark was pointing his finger at _her_, and sinking her
+in seas of shame.
+
+“That little girl,” said he, “who is reading there, had better close
+her book and listen to the sermon.”
+
+Then the whole congregation looked at her as if they had always known
+she was a wretch. Perintha Pancost and Minerva Ridenour, who were just
+going to look into their books, sat up and appeared virtuously wrapped
+in the discourse, while Mr. Clark went on as if it were just right to
+crush a shrinking child by the way. And may be it _was_ right. How did
+Bluebell know? He was a grown-up, good man, and a preacher, and she a
+little girl, of no account except in her relationship to Doctor Garde.
+She held the tears back with heroic struggles, but her face burned with
+hot blood; a mark was set upon her; and whenever Mr. Clark came around
+on the circuit, she could not bear to pass under his eye; and if he
+made an address to the Sunday-school, she cowered down behind the tall
+seats. This preacher in the Sharon church did not look as if he would
+point out little girls: therefore Bluebell liked him. The congregation
+stood up and turned around to sing, and then she saw the source of the
+music: two or three key-boards like a treble piano, on which a young
+man played, and a great row of pipes in a mass of woodwork which she
+did not understand. There were some people who stood in a class holding
+singing-books, and this singing-school was up in a high place like a
+slice of a second story, and this second story extended also around the
+sides of the church.
+
+Miss Libbie Biggar sat in a pew the other side of a partition, in the
+most beautiful cherry silk bonnet, tied under her chin with ribbon. It
+was made like Bluebell’s, with a slight flare. What else Miss Libbie
+wore, was concealed by the high partition. Beside her sat an old lady
+as fair as a lily, in mourning clothes. But that her hair was as white
+as dandelion-down. Bluebell must have believed her young; for nowhere
+in the church could be found a smoother, more delicate face. An old
+woman, according to Bluebell’s observation, was a bent, brown person,
+wrinkled like a withered apple, like Granny Ridenour.
+
+The two little girls exchanged glances; then the people stood up;
+they sang out of books instead of having their hymns lined two lines
+at a time by the minister, which Bluebell thought a great improvement
+herself.
+
+Libbie took advantage of this new position to lean over the partition
+and whisper:
+
+“I’m going to call on you to-morrow. We went to Newark, so I couldn’t
+come before. Orpha and Orrell are coming too.”
+
+“Yes,” nodded Bluebell in trepidation, making signs, for the minister
+seemed looking over people’s heads at them. She wanted to ask what made
+him lay a pile of writing on the pulpit beside the Bible. The people
+suddenly kneeled, and Bluebell hurried to drop to her footstool as she
+saw Aunt Melissa do. It was all beautiful, and made her feel good; but
+Libbie Biggar reached over the partition to whisper again:
+
+“You’ve got a pretty bonnet.”
+
+Her grandmother pulled her dress as she subsided, and Bluebell could
+hear her industriously turning over hymn-book leaves. Then everybody
+resumed his seat; and the music which had so pleased her glad ear at
+first, began again triumphantly, and the people in the class up-stairs
+sang a very beautiful piece, which never afterwards quite left
+Bluebell’s mind. She learned in time to know it as the Te Deum.
+
+“There’s Orrell,” whispered Libbie again, indicating a flossy-haired
+child at the side of the church.
+
+“Oh, don’t!” begged Bluebell; “he mightn’t like it.” She cast her eye
+at the pulpit.
+
+“Our minister don’t care. I like him. He takes tea at our house. His
+boy whispers and squirms all the time. Look at him up there.”
+
+Bluebell looked at the boy in a front pew, and felt thankful to see him
+twisting very restlessly. He was a handsome little fellow; but, as Mr.
+Cook would say, not in harmony with his environments.
+
+The sermon began, and Libbie’s grandmother moved nearer to her.
+
+“I don’t have to come at evening, do you?” said Libbie to Bluebell,
+when service was over.
+
+“I don’t know,” said Bluebell.
+
+They moved out in different streams of people, and did not see each
+other again.
+
+After dinner. Aunt Melissa brought out her good books and instructed
+her namesake. They read some poems; and, before the gas was lighted,
+had a long talk, sitting with their arms around each other, in which
+the duties of guardian and charge were discussed.
+
+On Monday morning Bluebell practised her music lesson while Aunt
+Melissa was shopping. After dinner she put on the muslin-gingham, for
+in this town people frequently wore their Sunday clothes on common
+days!--and sat down by her auntie to learn herring-bone stitch.
+The French clock on the mantel ticked: it was black marble, with a
+shepherd leaning across the top; the piano stood open; when Bluebell
+had stitched a strip or two, she might practise again. Afternoon
+checker-work moved on the porch, and shadows chased each other up and
+down the pillars. Bluebell felt like some grand little girl in a story,
+who had a fairy godmother. How pleased father would be to see her
+learning to be such a lady! Probably at that moment the scholars in the
+log school-house were just mopping their faces after recess. What fun
+they had had!--but how different the log school-house was from Aunt
+Melissa’s drawing-room! Bluebell’s polish at this period began to have
+a vulgar, varnishy odor. She wondered if it was the proper thing to
+have gone to school in a log school-house. Libbie Biggar had evidently
+never done such a thing, and that pretty, fluff-haired girl at church
+could not understand how the benches had a queer, foreign smell, and
+Mr. Pitzer let them have such good times. Doctor Garde’s little girl
+was noting the differences in externals, and the refining influence
+of beautiful surroundings; and in her anxiety to improve, she was in
+danger of forgetting what she owed to the country hills.
+
+The knocker was lifted and came down with a boom, ushering in the
+prettiest and most laughable bit of comedy. Miss Libbie Biggar
+introduced her friends Misses Orrell Pratt and Orpha Rose, and the
+three diminutive ladies sat down in large chairs, and acted grown-up.
+They had on all their ornaments, and their white dresses were distended
+with the hoops which at that time were coming into vogue. Sweet and
+kissable in their ribbons and bright bonnets, they were a charming
+study as to manners. Orrell held her little sunshade in her crossed
+hands, and drooped her eyelids prettily, as she inquired about Miss
+Melissa’s health, and delivered her mamma’s compliments. Bluebell, at
+a signal from Miss Calder, had put her work out of hands, and she too
+sat up, trying to reflect as faithfully as a mirror these pinks and
+patterns of juvenile society.
+
+Miss Orpha had difficulty with the small wire frame-work, known as a
+skeleton, which surrounded her person, but she managed it with a great
+deal of tact.
+
+“How do you like Sharon?” inquired Miss Biggar, as if she had never
+done so rude a thing as to talk across partitions in church.
+
+“Oh, I think it’s beautiful!” exclaimed Bluebell, with immediate
+consciousness that enthusiasm was out of place in the presence of such
+well-balanced ladies.
+
+“Where did you live before you came here?” inquired Miss Orpha.
+
+Bluebell blushed! When she was older she blushed to remember that she
+blushed. But these girls seemed so finished, and she was so little in
+accord with their past, that her beginnings looked raw and humble.
+
+“It was a very hilly place called the Rocky Fork.”
+
+“There are a great many hills here,” remarked Miss Orrell.
+
+“Yes; they are very pretty.”
+
+Bluebell’s nerves twitched, she was on such a strain of propriety.
+
+If the conversation flagged, the young ladies sat looking at each
+other and their young hostess, or Miss Calder, with calm, unchildlike
+nonchalance, which threw Doctor Garde’s little girl almost into
+despair. Her former standard of being agreeable was to talk much and
+fluently; a pause was a breach of politeness, and put pins and needles
+into her flesh. How then could she ever hope to attain to such silent
+self-possession? Afterwards, at school, she discovered that Orrell
+was naturally dull, and Orpha not half as charming and amiable as
+first acquaintance seemed to warrant. She asked them about their dolls
+without arousing much maternal enthusiasm. As they went away, however,
+their voices could be heard in quick chatter along the street. Timidity
+had not ruled them in the least. They had simply been making a proper,
+dressed-up call, like their mammas did.
+
+Then followed, in due course, that great day of the party. Bluebell was
+nearly worn out with anticipation before afternoon came. She had a new
+fluffy dress of a material called tarletan, spread over innumerable
+skirts and a skeleton. Aunt Melissa became her maid, and filled the
+office with the greatest care. The little girl’s hair was braided
+loosely and tied in two ropes with long satin ribbon. Miss Melissa was
+guilty of shoeing her in white satin slippers, but they were heelless.
+This vision of little girl paraded up and down before the long glass
+in the parlor, overlooking her thin arms, and delighted with her fairy
+disguise. Promptly at four o’clock, some ladies and gentlemen began
+to arrive, some under the chaperonage of mothers or elder sisters, but
+the majority in twos, or covies like partridges. Bluebell, previously
+instructed, and much awed by the good company, did not run to meet her
+future playmates and ask them to go to the play-house, or up-stairs to
+the garret for a play; even the luxury of a chicken funeral was far
+from her mind. She stood by Aunt Melissa, and each little girl and
+boy, on emerging from the dressing-room and entering the parlor, was
+presented to her. There was a dressing-room up-stairs for the boys;
+the girls took off their hats and laid down their parasols in Aunt
+Melissa’s room. And they had doting elders who stood by and retwisted
+their curls or adjusted the “set” of their hoops.
+
+When everybody had arrived, the parlors swam with sweet faces, white
+full-blown tarletan flowers, white pants and black jackets. The boys
+had not the ease of the girls: it drew Bluebell’s heart to them to see
+their awkward postures and attempts at behaving. The boys intended to
+come out strong at tea-time.
+
+The older people who came along started games; the children played
+“Hunt the Slipper,” and this created some real noise and scrambling.
+Then they played “Forfeits” and “Consequences;” and just before supper
+a grown young lady in enormous crinoline sat down at the piano and
+cried, “Partners for a French Four.”
+
+Immediately certain little couples took their places on the floor, and
+Johnny Pratt, evidently prodded by his sister, stepped up to Bluebell.
+
+“Come on,” said Johnny.
+
+“What they going to play?”
+
+“Goin’ to dance a French Four.”
+
+But Doctor Grarde’s little girl hung back, full of dismay.
+
+“Come on!” exclaimed Libbie Biggar, “it’s your party and you have to
+lead off. Isn’t that the way, Miss Ann?”
+
+The young lady at the piano turned half-way around and said she
+believed it was. She looked at Doctor Garde’s disconcerted little girl
+with a kind smile.
+
+“What’s the trouble?”
+
+Oh, it was dreadful to have the room full of children and several
+irreproachable grown-up folks looking at her as if she were some
+peculiar savage.
+
+“Why don’t you come on?” cried Libbie with an impatient stamp.
+
+“But I don’t know how. I sha’n’t mind if somebody else plays in my
+place.”
+
+Somebody else would not do, in the eyes of a few sticklers; so Bluebell
+was pushed and huddled through the figures, and merrily laughed at.
+And it seemed the most dreadful performance she had ever heard of, and
+mortified her sadly. She was consumed with a desire to step and act
+gracefully; the motion was exhilarating; but how could she put her toe
+out just so, and remember which hand to give every time! The others
+made precise steps with which she was unacquainted, and to imitate them
+in her timid way was to make a caricature of herself.
+
+Aunt Melissa came in from the dining-room like a friendly sail to a
+half-wrecked sailor, and made a few smiling excuses for her little
+friend. Then she marshalled the children out, and their guardians
+looked in at the dining-room door to see what a charming company they
+made. Admiring mothers assisted Aunt Melissa in serving refreshments,
+and from the first biscuit to the last dish of pink ice-cream there
+were exclamations of delight over the table.
+
+After supper they played in the grounds until sunset; other games in
+the parlors followed; and by eight o’clock the last little girl was
+going home saying she had had a lovely time.
+
+And all these things made a deep impression on Doctor Garde’s little
+girl. She felt elated notwithstanding the French Four, and kissed Aunt
+Melissa with quite the air of Libbie Biggar. Miss Calder was delighted
+with the pleasure she had given. Her own individuality was very slight:
+to be amiable and appear as well as the best Sharon people was her
+standard of manners, and she was glad to see her charge conforming to
+them.
+
+Still, the sap of the woods is strong, and will rise in veins which it
+has nurtured. After all this civilized excitement, Bluebell fell asleep
+late, and dreamed a wordless and rhymeless dream which had no beginning
+or end, but chimed along, bringing the smell of ferns and oak-leaves,
+sweet-brier and sassafras, and the very breath of trees, all around
+her. Nobody sings the full expression of dreams: if this dream had been
+sung, perhaps it would have sounded--
+
+  Oh, there was a very funny little pink-eyed man;
+  His hair stood out as only silk of dandelion can;
+  He whistled up the morning, and down the afternoon,
+  And slept inside a hollow tree all covered up with moon;
+  His dress was made of moss-hair that greener branches studs.
+  And fringed around with catkins of palest willow-buds;
+  He drove a sled of oak-leaf with katydids a span--
+  Oho! this world is rosy to a pink-eyed man!
+
+  His feet he bathed in violets; he tapped the big paw-paw,
+  And sucked, astride May-apple forks, each apple that he saw;
+  Peppermint and pennyroyal, sheep’s-sorrel had he,
+  Spicewood and sassafras, and nuts from nutty tree;
+  His pockets sagged with dewdrops so bright they shone like sparks,
+  And he teetered on a grass-blade and threw the cores at marks.
+  He made a spider spin him a gray hammock on her plan,--
+  Sing, oh, this world is rosy to a pink-eyed man!
+
+  He made a brook-stone chimney within his little garth,
+  And piled a heap of fireflies to sparkle on his hearth;
+  All overhead were carvings of ancient wormy sort;
+  He tied up ants in couples and made them hunt for sport;
+  He had a little long-bow of throstle-quill; for string
+  He tore a strip of bat-leather out of a gray bat’s wing;
+  And when he shot one June-bug, why, twenty others ran,--
+  Aha! this world is rosy to a pink-eyed man!
+
+  His boat was half a butternut all scooped and polished clear;
+  He had a crew of water-skates, and he need only steer;
+  He always wore an acorn-cap for fear his hair might burn;
+  And he sat upon a toadstool and fanned him with a fern;
+  Or in an empty bird’s nest he piped whole afternoons;
+  The gnats would dance by thousands to hear such merry tunes;
+  The long sweet time in honey-drops of amber clearness ran,--
+  And oh, this world is rosy to a pink-eyed man!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+MISS BIGGAR’S POSSESSIONS
+
+
+Every afternoon the knocker clanged on Miss Calder’s door, calls for
+her _protégée_ being plentifully sprinkled among the visits of older
+ladies to her. Doctor Garde’s little girl enjoyed driving out to make
+calls with Aunt Melissa. In a town the size of Sharon, in those days,
+calling on your intimate neighbor with state and ceremony was a moral
+duty. The afternoons dreamed. Slow embroidering and careful hand-sewing
+were enlivened by rapid talk. It was delightful to be roused from a
+drowsy state by a pageant of friends in great bravery whose manners
+accorded with their clothes. The people of southern cities will have
+their _Mardi gras_ mummery in spite of fever and famine: so, at that
+period, the ladies of large villages found their principal diversion in
+careful toilets and stately calling.
+
+But the best thing after all at Aunt Melissa’s was the library.
+Bluebell was overwhelmed by her riches in that. Her own _Cat Book_
+paled by the side of _One Thousand Fairy Tales_ and the _Arabian
+Nights_. There were books of travels, and piles of _Graham’s Magazine_,
+_Sandford and Merton_, Abbott’s _Rollo Books_, _Robinson Crusoe_, whole
+shelves of poets, immense cyclopædia volumes, and even a few gilt
+annuals, books of beauty, etc. Walter Scott and Irving inhabited one
+long shelf with Cooper. O world of books, what a great world thou art,
+and how large a part of many people’s lives is projected into thee!
+
+Miss Melissa herself was a gentle student. She felt her early relish
+revived by the fervor with which this child seized on the library. She
+directed Bluebell occasionally, but let her forage at will.
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl calculated that this feast of books would
+last until she was quite old--almost twelve, in fact.
+
+One pictured tome, called Shakspeare, hard to lift from the shelf, and
+very queer and hard to understand in some parts, had yet a fascination.
+She was delighted to find this the source from which came some of the
+best _Fourth Reader_ pieces: Shylock at the trial; Prince Arthur and
+Hubert. She toiled carefully through both plays, and would not for
+anything have confessed to a grown person that she felt real sorry
+for poor old Shylock, though he was bad. It seemed so naughty of his
+daughter to carry off the ring he prized,--the one he had from his wife
+Leah,--and so dreadful for him to lose all his prop:--prop, Bluebell
+considered, must be short for property. But Portia and the caskets were
+great fun, and Antonio a man almost as lovely as her own father. She
+devoutly wished Hubert had taken Arthur away off into the country,--to
+some place like the Rocky Fork,--and had never told the king he still
+lived. Wasn’t it nice the old bad king got so scared at those moons! He
+was as bad as the uncle in _Babes of the Wood_.
+
+But the very loveliest of everything was Midsummer Night’s Dream. What
+could be cuter than Puck, or more delicate than Titania! With a natural
+instinct for pronouncing, the little girl got nearly all the names
+right, though she branded Theseus as The-ze-us, unconscious of the
+Greek diphthong’s shortness, and never in her life could she alter the
+charmed sound.
+
+_Plutarch’s Lives_ was delicious in spots, but rather tough.
+Shakspeare, on the other hand, was never, never tough. She missed old
+and deep meanings intended for adult senses. Titania’s infatuation with
+the weaver was so funny that she chuckled heartily. But the finer aroma
+of the plays was never missed once.
+
+There were some copies of Dickens on the shelves too; but she happened
+on them late, for Dickens did not appear an attractive name.
+
+Libbie Biggar came flying in and found Bluebell with her head supported
+by her hands and a fat volume propped open on the table.
+
+“Come on!” exclaimed the shingled young lady; “Miss Calder said you
+might go to my house and stay the afternoon.”
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl looked up, absent and half distressed.
+
+“Sit down and take off your hat,” she murmured, with a glimmer of
+polite solicitude.
+
+“I sha’n’t stop a minute. What are you reading?”
+
+“Oh, it is the nicest story! Oh, his mother was so sweet, and Mr.
+Murdstone was so mean, and so was Miss Murdstone. But I could hug
+Peggotty: she’s as good as Liza was. And I almost wish Davy would go
+away off and visit his funny old aunt that flattened her nose against
+the window.”
+
+“Well, come on. I don’t care anything about that. You’re always
+reading. Orpha Rose says you went and huddled down in a corner with a
+book when she had you to her house to tea.”
+
+“It was Undine,” pleaded Doctor Garde’s little girl, turning red. “I
+did want to know so badly what became of her.”
+
+“I don’t think it’s nice to be reading all the time.”
+
+That settled it. Libbie Biggar, who had been carefully brought up
+from birth, ought to know what was nice. Still, Doctor Garde’s little
+girl felt her individuality too strong for her in spots. She inwardly
+decided that it was nice, too!
+
+“But I don’t read all the time. I began Davy last week, and I’ve only
+read a little piece, about little Em’ly and the boat-house and all,
+and where Mr. Murdstone whipped him, and Davy bit him--oh, good!”
+
+“Well, if you’re coming to my house to play little dinner, come on. I
+don’t see any fun in just reading and reading and reading.”
+
+Miss Biggar spoke with a tang of injury; and with a similar tang on her
+part, Bluebell marked her place in Davy and hid the book lest somebody
+else might appropriate it. To be hauled by the ears all the way from
+a distant country called England, to play even such a fine play, was
+sudden. But there was no appeal. Doctor Garde’s little girl must
+always be under the dictation of some companion. She followed Libbie
+as obediently as if the latter were Tildy, and the stage of action the
+Rocky Fork. How far she would bear dictation the dictator never knew
+until he experimented and her swift and complete rebellion apprised
+him. But, after all, what little girl would not for the time prefer
+Libbie Biggar’s playroom to all the libraries collected since and
+including that of Ptolemy Philadelphus?
+
+It looked like a toy-shop. There were animals standing on wheels to be
+drawn by a string; animals which nodded their heads quite like life;
+cats that mewed, dogs that barked; rabbits and squirrels sitting up in
+plaster-of-Paris immobility; a whole Noah’s Ark with a cargo of wooden
+survivors--Mrs. Noah, Mrs. Ham, and Mesdames Shem and Japhet in red or
+blue or yellow or green dresses of bright paint, and Noah to the life,
+looking so like the rest of his family that you could only distinguish
+him by his broader hat. As for dolls, Georgiana, who had come in
+Bluebell’s arms, sat down in despair and felt nobody at all! There was
+a baby doll in a cradle, with real bald head and fat hands, wearing a
+long dress and baby cap. A very much dressed mother-doll sat by it in
+one chair of a satin and mahogany parlor-set. A negro doll dressed in
+bright calico leaned against the head of the cradle to signify that
+she was the most faithful of nurses. Various insignificant dolls with
+mashed _papier-maché_ faces lounged about in faded finery, or sprawled
+staring at the ceiling as if counting flies. A wax lady as large as
+Libbie could handle--so immense in fact that she wore a little girl’s
+shoes, and sat in an arm-chair.
+
+Oh, Georgiana! when thy doting relative felt that mighty doll’s floss
+and saw her walk across the floor, and heard her cry “mamma!” instead
+of the inarticulate noise which was all thou couldst make in thy chest,
+didst thou not slide down and roll up thine eyes and decide that life
+was not, after all, worth living!
+
+But what were the dolls beside the cooking furniture of that magic
+room! In those days every little girl had not a complete toy household
+at her command. Conveniences for cooking dolls’ meals were rare, and
+many a doll sat down to a cracker on triangles of broken dishes, and
+thought herself well served.
+
+But under the black mantel on the brick hearth of Libbie Biggar’s
+playroom stood the completest little iron stove, with Liliputian lids,
+pots, pans, skillets, oven, tea-kettle. It was not to be looked at, but
+cooked with. In the left-hand corner by the fireplace was a cupboard,
+bearing a tea-set, and not the kind which will barely fit your finger
+with thimbles of cups, but large enough to eat with. And a round table
+was drawn cosily near it; a table just large enough to spread above
+little girls’ laps when they sat up to it on low chairs.
+
+What a kingdom to come into! They set about kindling a fire in the
+stove with sticks prepared for that purpose, and very soon the little
+monster was roaring away, the pipe sending up small clouds to the
+chimney, the tea-kettle blowing out steam, and coals of actual fire
+grinning between the steel bars!
+
+Mrs. Biggar, the floss-haired grandmamma, came in, smiled indulgently
+at their zest, and exhorted them not to set themselves on fire. She
+was going out, and if they wanted anything they might get it from the
+kitchen. After she was gone, the domestic, probably set to watch the
+fire, looked in once or twice, and left some goody each time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+DINNER IN DOLL-LAND
+
+
+Libbie brought up dabs of dough made for her special baking, and rolled
+them out for biscuits, with a rolling-pin the size of her middle
+finger, cut them, and baked them in a pan on the bottom of the oven.
+Bluebell cut a potato into bits and boiled it in a pot. They made tea
+and laid the table. The cook donated preserves, cake, rice-balls and
+cold meat: these were mere side-dishes, not to be compared with what
+they cooked themselves.
+
+Georgiana and the imported wax lady were placed at the table opposite
+each other, where they half-rolled up their eyes, and refused to be a
+bit sociable. The other dolls were laid in a hungry circle with their
+feet to the table, as if to draw in sustenance through the soles.
+
+The biscuits were burnt; but, eaten with butter and preserves, they
+tasted better than any grown-up biscuit was ever known to do; and
+though the potatoes came up saltless and without any dressing, they
+were too mealy for anything. And the feasters drained the teapot dry.
+
+The wax ladies were generously helped, and ate in an invisible way,
+though what was before them frequently slid toward the head and foot of
+the table, guided by a plump white hand or a short brown one.
+
+Outside, the cicada’s summer song kept the air full of a pleasant
+monotone. Scarcely a breeze stirred. The afternoon was so slumbrous one
+could pretend or make-believe almost anything. Occasionally a passer’s
+foot sounded on the brick pavement. Doctor Garde’s little girl, who sat
+in range of the street, often turned from the interest in hand to look,
+with the expectation that Someone was coming from Somewhere to her. Not
+exactly a nabob, or an elephant, or a fairy in gauze wings; but some
+herald from the wonderful future into which she seemed to be entering.
+
+Miss Libbie Biggar’s fancy reared itself only on substantial
+foundations.
+
+“Mrs. Garde,” she observed, leaning forward to fix her bead-black eyes
+on the shrinking Georgiana, “your daughter looks as if she had the
+mumps on one side of her face. I had the mumps once, and made grandma
+give me some pickle, and it hurt--oh, you can’t think how it hurt me!
+Mrs. Garde, if your daughter has the mumps, you shouldn’t brought her
+into my large family.”
+
+“Oh, Mrs. Biggar, it isn’t mumps at all. She got too near the fire once
+when she was crying very hard, and her cheek began to run down with the
+tears, and forgot to run back. Mrs. Biggar, does your daughter take
+music-lessons?”
+
+“O dear, yes! She can play the _Battle of Prague_ clear through without
+looking at her notes.”
+
+“I s’pose you send her to the seminary to school?”
+
+“Yes; but her health will not allow her to be confined too much.” Mrs.
+Biggar was quoting from her seniors.
+
+“I am going to send my daughter to the seminary. She loves to go to
+school. Her health is very stout. I will have to hold her back instead
+of pushing her ahead.” Mrs. Garde also was quoting from her seniors.
+
+“Won’t you have something more, Mrs. Garde?”
+
+“No, thank you, Mrs. Biggar.”
+
+“Children will any of you be helped to something more?”
+
+The prostrate dolls, who camped with their heels to the repast, and
+were supposed to be seated in a rosy circle around the general table,
+all responded in different tones that they didn’t want any more, thank
+you. So the ladies ceremoniously rose.
+
+Mrs. Biggar led the way to the parlor-set. All the dolls, except the
+wax ones and the blackamoor, were sent outdoors to play in a corner,
+but told they could not go on the sidewalk. The colored doll was
+directed to clear the dinner away, which she industriously did by
+leaning on her stomach across the table. The fire had gone down to
+white ashes in the stove.
+
+Mrs. Biggar invited Mrs. Garde to take a seat upon the sofa. But as
+the sofa was only a little too large for Mrs. Garde to put in her
+pocket, that lady only pretended she sat upon it, while her real and
+substantial support was the ingrain carpet.
+
+“My daughter will play on the piano for you,” observed the hostess.
+“You ought to say you’d be delighted.”
+
+“I’d be delighted, Mrs. Biggar.”
+
+“This is the piano.”
+
+Mrs. Garde could see no key-board. And it stood square and boxlike
+without legs: a small dark polished case. Even when the tall wax doll
+was prevailed upon to favor them, she did not open the instrument. Her
+mamma applied a key to it; but a vast amount of coaxing was necessary
+to overcome the young lady’s reluctance.
+
+“Come, my dear, give us some music,” said Mrs. Biggar briskly.
+
+“Mamma,” replied a voice much thinner, but in other respects strangely
+like the maternal tones, “Don’t ask me. You know I don’t play.”
+
+“You urge her,” suggested Mrs. Biggar to the guest.
+
+“What’ll I say?”
+
+“Why, you say, ‘Oh do,’ and ‘Now don’t disappoint us,’ and ‘You play
+_so_ well,’ just as big folks do when a young lady acts that way.”
+
+“Oh, do play. Miss Biggar,” pressed Mrs. Garde, “now don’t disappoint
+us; you do play so well!”
+
+“Mrs. Garde,” responded the thin voice, though that wax doll sat gazing
+serenely forward, and never so much as wagged a curl, “please excuse
+me: I can’t play a bit, and my throat is so sore I don’t know what to
+do!”
+
+“Now you know you can play ever so many pieces right straight along
+without stopping,” said Mrs. Biggar reproachfully.
+
+“Oh, do!” chimed Mrs. Garde. Her mind flashed back to the time when
+pianos were an unseen mystery to her and she wanted to play on one so
+badly that a piece of sheet-iron binding sticking from a box became
+a make-believe piano, upon which she thumped with rapture. But these
+retrospections were not imparted to the Biggar family, and Miss Biggar
+suddenly yielded to pressure, seated herself before, and suffered her
+hands to be laid upon the polished box.
+
+“Ah!” cried Mrs. Garde when the music started without visible
+assistance, “a----h! How _can_ she do it? What kind of a piano is that!”
+
+“That’s a music-box, goosie,” replied Libbie, descending from
+make-believe for an instant. “My grandma brought it to me when she went
+over the ocean. Didn’t you ever see one?”
+
+“No, I didn’t.”
+
+It played _Home, Sweet Home_, caught its breath, played _Old Uncle
+Ned_, caught its breath again, gave a Tyrolese melody, again clicked,
+played _Hail Columbia_ and stopped.
+
+“That’s all,” said Libbie. “Four tunes.”
+
+“Play your pieces over, Miss Biggar.”
+
+The music-box was put through its performance again.
+
+“Now that’s enough,” said Libbie decidedly; “le’s play something else.
+Dolls is so old.”
+
+“We might go out and run.”
+
+“No, I don’t want to do that.”
+
+“There’s somebody knocked at the door.”
+
+“It’s just our cook.--What you want?”
+
+“Miss Calder’s sent for the little girl that’s playing with you.”
+
+“For me?” Bluebell ran and opened the door.
+
+“Yes; Archie’s down-stairs and says she wants you.”
+
+“I’ve got to go, Libbie.”
+
+“That’s mean!”
+
+“He says,” added the messenger, “that somebody’s come to your house.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+SOMEBODY ARRIVES
+
+
+Archie was standing at the foot of the stairs. Bluebell thought him a
+most agreeable man. He always treated her with deferential indulgence.
+
+“Did Aunt Melissa send for me?” cried Bluebell, running down-stairs
+with Georgiana on her shoulder.
+
+“Yes, ma’am, she did.”
+
+“And who’s come, Archie? Oh, is it father and the baby?”
+
+“It is a very fine gentleman, and a little girl considerable smaller
+than you.”
+
+“Good-by, Libbie. My father’s come!”
+
+Doctor Garde’s little girl made rapid progress to the gate which united
+Mrs. Biggar’s and Miss Calder’s grounds. Archie kept at her heels.
+
+“Did they just get there, Archie?”
+
+“Just a minute ago. And besides the gentleman and little girl there
+was”--
+
+“Oh, it’s Liza! Liza’s come too! It was Liza’s house where we used to
+live, you know.”
+
+“No, there wasn’t any lady.”
+
+“Then it’s somebody else; and maybe it isn’t my father and the baby,
+either?”
+
+She paused in disappointment.
+
+“Oh, the gentleman’s your father. I heard Miss Calder call him. Mr.
+Doctor Garde is the gentleman’s name,” said Archie, punctiliously.
+
+Bluebell plunged up the side veranda. But here her new manners seized
+on her. What would father say if she ran in and grabbed him around the
+neck? And there was Rocco. She had learned enough to be a great pattern
+and example to Rocco.
+
+The doctor was sunk in a haircloth chair in the dim parlor. Roxana sat
+on Miss Melissa’s knee, half afraid of her in this new place which
+imaged its wonders in her swelling black eyes.
+
+Through the open folding-doors came a correct figure in cool
+muslin-gingham; the bare brown arms and collar-bones looked natural,
+but the face had a new expression.
+
+“Is this Bluebell?” said father, extending his hand.
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+The young lady took his hand and kissed him. She did give the silent
+Rocco an extra squeeze, but her back was towards father and the fervor
+was hid from him. She drew her chair quite close to him, too, but in
+every other respect preserved the strictest propriety.
+
+“And you rode all the way on horseback with the baby,” said Miss Calder
+in a pleased flutter. “That must have been charming at this season of
+the year.”
+
+“Yes,” said father. “I boxed the movables and had them sent by railway.”
+
+“I am so glad you are here, Maurice.” Miss Melissa reached for her
+handkerchief. “You have no idea how much brighter the house has been
+since I brought Melissa home with me.”
+
+The doctor looked pleased. He also looked faintly disturbed.
+
+“And I am sure you will not regret the change in--as to--I mean from a
+financial point of view, for all our friends are prepossessed in your
+favor already.”
+
+“As to that,” said the young man, “I’ll have to prove myself able to do
+something, as I did at the Rocky Fork.”
+
+“Yes; and I am sure you will indeed.”
+
+“Papa, how is Liza?”
+
+The doctor started, and looked queerly at his little girl.
+
+He said, however, “She’s quite well.”
+
+“I am learning to play the piano.”
+
+His little girl made this announcement with the exact accent and
+expression of Miss Libbie Biggar.
+
+“Are you?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+He rubbed a finger across his forehead and looked at Miss Melissa. The
+delicate lady smiled.
+
+“Don’t you think she has improved very much?”
+
+“Ye-es,” said the doctor, “certainly.”
+
+He looked at his little girl.
+
+“You may entertain your father awhile if he will excuse me, Melissa,”
+said Miss Calder, putting Rocco down. “I want to have a few changes
+made about tea. And if you want to go to your room, Maurice, Melissa
+knows where it is.”
+
+So Aunt Melissa went out, and Bluebell longed so much to tangle and
+squeeze Roxana that she was fain at least to draw her seat beside Miss
+Calder’s vacant arm-chair, into which the baby had mounted on all-fours
+and wiggled about into a sitting posture.
+
+“Are you glad to see B’uebell, Rocco?”
+
+“Uh--uuh,” responded Roxana, still trying to take her bearings in these
+strange waters.
+
+“You mustn’t say that--it isn’t polite,” said Bluebell, shaking her
+head.
+
+Father’s square, serious face set itself to study her. His clothes
+looked plain compared to the clothes she had seen gentlemen wear in
+Sharon. They really had a woodsman look. But who could see father’s
+resolute chin over his black neckcloth and not instinctively love
+him? His little girl did not state the matter in these words. Her
+impressions were instantaneous and languageless. The baby did look so
+funny, too. Bluebell wished one of her new dresses was small enough for
+the little sister. It was only that she did not want them to be behind
+herself in advantages.
+
+“Have you been real well, papa?”
+
+“That isn’t polite,” said father slowly.
+
+His little girl turned red. She was beginning to think his steady look
+meant disapproval, after all, when she had tried _so_ hard to learn
+deportment.
+
+“What! To ask if you have been well?”
+
+“To call me ‘papa’ when you know I want to be called ‘father.’”
+
+Bluebell’s face and ears tingled.
+
+“Libbie Biggar always says papa and mamma when she talks about her
+father and mother. They’re dead.”
+
+“Who’s Libbie Biggar?”
+
+“Oh, she is such a nice little girl! She lives next door, and has the
+most toys you ever saw. A little stove and dolls and dishes, and a
+music-box that plays four tunes.”
+
+“Do you like her better than you do Tildy?”
+
+“I don’t believe I do. But she has such _pretty_ manners, and she is
+_so_ ladylike!”
+
+Father smiled.
+
+“Her grandma is very good to her. And there are lots of other little
+girls. I had a party.”
+
+“I’m afraid Miss Melissa has been spoiling you.”
+
+“Oh, no! She wanted me to get acquainted. Some of them wore _beautiful_
+dresses. We had ice-cream. Do you know what ice-cream is, father?”
+
+“I have tasted it.”
+
+“Well, we had ice-cream. And Libbie Biggar just stamped her foot
+because I didn’t want to dance a French Four. I didn’t know how.”
+
+“She must have pretty manners,” said father.
+
+Bluebell colored again.
+
+“Oh, she has. She knows how to do so much better than I do.”
+
+“Come here,” said father, extending his hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+DOCTOR GARDE’S LITTLE GIRL
+
+
+Bluebell approached father’s knee with her heart swelling.
+
+“Where’s my little girl?” said he.
+
+His long light locks and serious face seemed to hang on the outer
+surface of her tears. The tears were filling her eyes so fast; she
+struggled to hold them still, but a splash came down on one of the
+hands with which he was holding her waist.
+
+“Why, I’m here!”
+
+“I don’t seem to find you.”
+
+“Why, father, I don’t know what you mean!”
+
+The cry was under full headway now. Her figure quaked. She groped
+piteously for her handkerchief, her eyes held in a charmed gaze by his.
+He drew her upon his knee. At that Roxana descended from her position
+and claimed a right on the other knee.
+
+Sitting opposite her afflicted sister, she stroked the muslin-gingham
+dress.
+
+“Don’t t’y, Bluebell. _I’ve_ tum to your house.”
+
+“I would like to have my little girl stay a little girl,” said father,
+“until Nature turns her into a woman. I don’t say I am altogether
+right.”
+
+He paused, conscious that a child will accept its elder’s dictum
+without question, and believe a thing to be unalterably good or evil,
+according to the decision of the adult who happens to be over it in
+authority. “But I don’t like young ladies in short clothes.”
+
+“I thought you’d be pleased to see me learning fine manners,” wailed
+Bluebell.
+
+“_Don’t_ t’y,” begged Rocco, puckering in sympathy.
+
+“Fine manners are very nice,” said the doctor. “But you seem to be
+imitating somebody else. I can’t think it is a good thing to form
+yourself after other people. I may be wrong; but I like to see
+everybody live out his own nature.”
+
+“Don’t you want me to learn to be a little lady?”
+
+Father looked perplexed.
+
+“I want you to learn everything which goes to make up a finished woman.
+Yes, I want you to be a lady, but”--with a pathetic tone in his voice
+which had vibrated only once or twice in her lifetime--“I wouldn’t give
+my honest, simple-hearted little girl for all the fine airs and graces
+in the world.”
+
+Bluebell hugged him around the neck.
+
+“That’s all I mean. Perhaps there’s a better way to bring up girls.”
+
+“Father, I just want to be your way. And I tried to do like the
+rest, for fear you’d be ’shamed of me ’side of Libbie and Orrell.”
+The water-flow began to subside. Doctor Garde wiped its straggling
+droppings away with the hand which had supported his little girl. Then
+she leaned on his shoulder, nearer than she had ever been, and the arm
+was replaced.
+
+“They always lived in Sharon, and I thought they knew better’n I did
+how to behave. Their hoops never stick out, and mine just act so mean!”
+
+The doctor smiled again.
+
+“Must you wear hoops?”
+
+“Oh, yes, indeed, father! I _have_ to wear them. Folks would laugh at
+you on the street if you didn’t.”
+
+“Don’t think,” continued father carefully, “that I am finding fault
+with Miss Calder’s kindness, or your trying to improve.”
+
+“I thought you’d think it was nice for me to sit up and talk like grown
+folks. But, father, I won’t do it any more. Did anybody come with you,
+father?” added his little girl in the next breath.
+
+“Nobody came but Rocco and me.”
+
+“On Ballie?”
+
+“On Ballie.”
+
+“Are Tildy and Teeny well?”
+
+She was asking with bright interest now, without aping anybody’s
+manners.
+
+“Very well. Tildy sent you a letter.”
+
+“Oh, father! Where is it?”
+
+“I think Liza packed it in my trunk. That’s probably at Newark with
+the other baggage.”
+
+Bluebell resigned herself to waiting with a deep sigh.
+
+“Did they all go to g’ogr’phy school?”
+
+“I believe so. The geography school is out.”
+
+“Father, are you glad you came here?”
+
+He looked deeply at the two on his knees.
+
+“I shall always be glad if it proves a great benefit to my children.”
+
+“I have read ever so much. Libbie Biggar don’t like reading.” She put
+her head on one side and blushed. “Would you mind--?”
+
+“Mind what?”
+
+“Would you mind if I gave you an awful hard hug, little father? because
+I’ve missed you so, and couldn’t get along just right without you.”
+
+It was some time after tea that Archie was favored by visitors at the
+stable,--Bluebell, Rocco and Georgiana.
+
+“I want to see her,” said Doctor Garde’s little girl. “Which is her
+stall, Archie?”
+
+“Your father’s mare, ma’am?”
+
+“Yes. And you said somebody else came with them. There was nobody but
+father and Rocco.”
+
+“There was this very elegant creature, ma’am. Here she is in this
+stall. If you stand on the barn floor you can see her across the
+manger.”
+
+Bluebell took that position with the little sister, and then climbed
+into the manger among Ballie’s oats to pat her tremulous nostril.
+
+“Do you know me?”
+
+The Arabian’s soft whinny answered her.
+
+“Oh, Archie, I do think so much of her! She fell off the Narrows all
+but her fore feet, and jumped up again and kept father and me from
+being killed.”
+
+Archie was duly astonished. He polished her satin surface, and declared
+she was the finest piece of horse-flesh that ever came into the stables.
+
+“Charley and Coaly are fine animals, but they are too fat and too lazy.
+Now this here mare is all life; and look at them ears!”
+
+“Oh, Archie, I’m so glad you like her! She’s so kind.”
+
+“She’s most genteel,” said Archie.
+
+Bluebell did not like the word, though it was then commonly current.
+She had heard Aunt Melissa use it. She had tried herself to be very
+genteel.
+
+“I wouldn’t say she was genteel, Archie. I would just say she was
+Doctor Garde’s own horse; and that’s enough.”
+
+“Your father’s a very fine gentleman,” declared Archie, smiling in his
+excessive amiability. “And your little sister, she’s quite a little
+lady.”
+
+“Rocco,” said Bluebell to the baby when she got her between house and
+barn among the shrubbery, “I like you _real_ well, and better’n anybody
+in the world except father. Old honey-dew!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+TWO LETTERS
+
+
+I.--THE ROCKY FORK TO SHARON
+
+  Respected frend,
+
+  i take my pen in hand to let you know i am well and hope These few
+  lines Will find you enjoyIng the same blessing....
+
+  Christine is Writen this for me. the (Elders) is all ripe do you mind
+  when we plade and Teny married them | the goggerfy school is out mr
+  runNels brot his Wife which made the big girls feel Bad but Teeny
+  sais that aint so....
+
+  Printhy pancost she got the most Headmarks so she got the prize Teeny
+  got the prize in Spelin in the big class | We marched the last day
+  and i spoke mary had a little Lamb there was 6 dialogues.
+
+    +------------------------------+
+    | If you Love me as i love     |
+    | you no nife can cut our love |
+    |            into.             |
+    +------------------------------+
+
+  jo hall is Well and sends his reSpecks.... When are you coming back
+  Eliza is Lonesome.... i am learning to write but cant make no out
+  yet.... mr pitzer give a treat the last Day we got three sticks of
+  Candy apiece The big boys did not threaten to Lock him out he done
+  it of his own accord i am going to send you some
+
+    +--------------+
+    | Mountain Tea |
+    +--------------+
+
+  Mother is well uncle Abram is well John Tiggard said his long piece
+  the Death of the flowErs Amandy Willey sent her Respecks
+
+  excuse Mistakes Mother has got her weavin Most all done.... the Run
+  has not been up since So no more at present Goodbye
+
+    Matilda Banks.
+
+  Teeny would not wright Half I wanted her to. Mother puts this on. I
+  got Ferns pressin in the memoiry of Florence Kidder, write and Tell
+  us how you get on, our sweetins is getting Ripe. don’t you wish you
+  was here.
+
+    remember frends as you pass by
+    as you are now so once was i
+    as I am now So you must be
+    Prepare For deth and follow me.
+
+  i thought I would end with some Poetry.
+
+
+II.--SHARON TO THE ROCKY FORK
+
+                                                       SHARON THE 21
+                                                               SEPTEMBER
+
+  DEAR TILDY
+
+  I HAD TO WAIT TILL I LEARNED TO PRINT. ALL OF THEM LEARN TO PRINT
+  AT THE SEMNARY PREPARATORY DEPARTMENT. THERE IS A LETTER BOOK BUT
+  THE LETTERS AINT TO YOU. I THOUT YOUR LETTER WAS VERY NICE; THE
+  MOUNTAIN TEA WAS SO GOOD. ALL THE GIRLS WANTED SOME. THERE WAS
+  ELIZABETH BIGGAR AND ORRELL PRATT AND ORPA ROSE AND OTHERS TOO
+  NUMEROUS TO MENTION. I STUDDY THE 2ND READER SPELLING GEOGRAPHY AND
+  MENTAL ARITHMETIC AND PRINTING. I LEARNED HOW TO PUT MARKS IN YOUR
+  WRITING. THEY PUT THEM IN BOOKS. TILDY, DID YOU KNOW SHYLOCK IS IN
+  SHAKESPEARE? AND GINEVRA IS A MAN NAMED MISTER ROGERS.
+
+  AUNT MELISSA IS VERY NICE, SHE MAKES SO MUCH OF US, BUT I LOVE LIZA
+  TOO. GIVE MY LOVE TO LIZA. ROXANA SENDS HER LOVE. SO DOES ALL THE
+  FAMILY. THANK YOU FOR THE MOUNTAIN TEA. BALLIE IS WELL. FATHER RIDES
+  HER TO SEE SICK FOLKS. WE RIDE IN THE CARRIDGE. ROCKKO HAS A NEW
+  WHITE AND A NEW PINK AND SOME GINGHAMB DRESSES. O TILDY, DONT YOU
+  REMEMBER GOING FOR WATER AND BLACKMAN AND THE SPELLING AND GETING
+  FERNS AND ALL THE GOOD TIMES? AND THE TIME YOU AND ME CHURNED PRINTHY
+  PANCOST! GIVE MY LOVE TO PRINTHY AND MANDY WILLEY AND JO HALL AND
+  JOHN TEGARDEN AND NERVY RIDEANHOUR AND TEENY AND ALL THE BIG BOYS AND
+  GIRLS. GIVE MY LOVE TO MR. PITZER. MY TEACHER IS A LADY. TELL HIM I
+  CAN MOST READ THE BEAUTIFUL LETTER HE GAVE ME. TILDY, YOU MUST COME
+  AND SEE US. LIZA MUST COME. SO MUST YOUR MOTHER AND TEENY. I HAVE
+  GOOD TIMES, BUT I DONT FORGET THE ELDER DOLLS AND ALL.
+
+  MY HAND IS GETTING TIRED. GIVE MY LOVE TO YOUR MOTHER. I LOVE ALL
+  YOU FOLKES AT THE ROCKY FORK. TILDY, I AM COMING TO SEE YOU WHEN THEY
+  BRING ME. I SPOSE POOR MISS EMILY MANDEVILLE IS WITHERD TO DUST. I
+  WISHT YOUD GOT THE PRIZE.
+
+  I WAITED TILL MY HAND GOT RESTED. MY ROOM IS PRETTY. IT HAS PICTURES
+  AND A BLUE CARPET. I WISHED YOU WAS TO MY PARTY. DONT YOU REMEMBER
+  THE BIG STORM, TILDY, WHEN FATHER FETCHED ME HOME? DO THE NARROWS
+  LOOK JUST THE SAME? THEY DONT HAVE SUNDAY SCHOOL BOOKS LIKE WE DID.
+  THESE HAVE NICE STORIES. FLORENCE KIDDER WAS NOT A BIT GOOD EXCEPT
+  THE PICTURE. I AM GOING TO PUT IN MY PICTURE THAT AUNT MELISSA HAD
+  TAKEN. IT IS ON PAPER. IT IS NOT LIKE MY MOTHERS DAGARTYPE. THIS KIND
+  IS A NEW KIND. THEY CALL IT PHOTGRAPH. I HAVE ONE FOR LIZA TOO. AUNT
+  M WILL SEND IT. ROCCO WOULD NOT HOLD STILL. THEY WILL TAKE HERS NEXT
+  TIME. MY HAND IS REAL TIRED. GOODBYE.
+                                                      BLUEBELL GARDE.
+                                                 DR. GARDES LITTLE GIRL.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
+
+
+  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
+
+  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76984 ***