Chapter IV: Part 4

Princess turned into a side drive leading around to a house that stood well back from the road. As Jean said afterwards, the house looked as if it had been outdoors all its life, it was so weather-beaten and gray. "Ma" Parmelee bustled out to meet them, plump and busy as one of her own Plymouth Rocks.

"Twelve pullets and one rooster you want?" she said. "Well, I guess I can fix you up. I heard you folks had moved in down yonder. Thought I'd see you at meeting Sunday but I didn't."

Mrs. Robbins explained that they were Episcopalians and the nearest parish was nine miles away.

"So it is, over at Riverview, but we're all bound for the same place, so you might as well come up and help fill the pews. Land knows they need it." She led the way out to the big barn, followed by the chickens. The great doors were wide open, and the barn floor was covered lightly with wisps of hay. "Ma" scattered a measure of grain over this, and let the hens scratch for it.

"I have to work hard for what I get, and they ought to too," she said pleasantly. "Now, we'll take any that you like and put them into bags. I'm going to sell you my very best rooster. His name's Jim Dandy and he's all of that. He's pure Rhode Island Red, and two years old. You don't have to worry about hawks when he's around."

After the chickens were all safely in the bags and put in back of the wagon seat, "Ma" waved good-bye and told them not to forget the Finnish family that was moving into her house.

"I'm going to live with my married daughter, and these poor things don't know a living soul up here. Do drive over and speak to them as neighbors. There's a man and his widowed sister and her children. All God's folks, you know."

"Finns," murmured Jean speculatively, as they drove away. "There's a new blend to our Gilead sisterhood, Motherie."

Mrs. Robbins laughed at the puzzled expression on her eldest daughter's face.

"We'll let Kit drive over and see them," she promised.

Spring seemed to descend on the land all at once in the next few days, as if she had quite made up her mind to come and sit a while, Cousin Roxy said. One day the earth still looked wind-swept and bare, and the next there seemed to be a green sheen over the land and the woods looked hazy and lacy with the delicate budding leaves.

One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the pigeons' pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the woods, and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. Keenest and sweetest it sounded over where the waters of the lake above the old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses. Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps.

"It's the peep frogs," called Honey, coming up from the barn with Buttercup's creamy contribution to the family commonwealth. "They're just waking up. That means it's spring for sure."

"Isn't it dear of them to try and tell us all about it," Doris cried delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean and Helen come straight out-of-doors and listen too. In the twilight they walked around the terraces below the veranda, two by two. Once Helen stopped below their father's window to call up to him in the long "Coo-ee!" their mother had taught them from her own girlhood days out in California on her grandfather's ranch.

Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Doris herself, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging. The little nurse had left Greenacres the fifteenth of April both because of his gain in health and also to decrease expenses.

"And you needn't worry about anything at all, Mother darling," Kit had assured her. "Just keep right upstairs with Dad and let us girls run the kitchen, and we'll feed you on beautiful surprises."

Mr. Robbins smiled over at them, and quoted teasingly:

"The Chameleon's food I eat;
Look you, the air, promise crammed."

Piney paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls received their first real information about the other girl neighbors around Gilead Center.

Honey was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean, with Piney at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from the orchard, studying a seed catalogue diligently.

"I'd love some elephant ears and castor beans and scarlet lichens in big beds along the terraces," she said. "Think of the splashes of red up against those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies' place back at the Cove. Mrs. Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month."

"You'll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner beans better," Piney declared merrily. "We always lay out money on the food seeds first and then what is left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when you've got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don't need to buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl."

The girls were silent, remembering what Cousin Roxana had told them of the romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Doris's curiosity got the better of her caution, and she coaxed Piney away to hunt for the delicate pale green spear points with their white lilybells hidden away under the hazel bushes.

It was Piney, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray, mossy rocks. And it was Piney who pointed out to them the wintergreen, or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries.

"She's perfectly wonderful," Kit declared that day at the noon dinner. "She knows the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white trilium and blood root, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn't let us pick many either, only a few. She says it's just as cruel to rob a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it is to rob birds' nests."

Here Helen chimed in.

"And she's going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a book, Motherie. We're going to take some of that dull castor-brown burlap that was left from the library and mount specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed sheepskin."

"Piney seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities," said Mrs. Robbins amusedly.

"She is, just exactly that," Kit answered earnestly. "I never met a girl with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they're as poor as Job's turkey, too. Piney told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Gilead Center without any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell her how to do it."

"I wonder what her real name is," Helen pondered. "Maybe it's Peony. Cousin Roxy calls peonies 'pinies."

"It's much nicer than that," Jean said. "I can't think of any other name that would suit her. It's Proserpine. The minute she told me I saw her wandering along the seashore with the winds of the isles of Greece blowing back her funny short curls, and her hands up to her lips calling to the sea maids to come and play with her while her mother was away."

"That's all very pretty and poetical, Sister Mine, but Piney's going to peddle our rhubarb for us," Kit remarked. "I think that rhubarb is one of the most grateful plants we have. It seems to spring up everywhere and pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Piney told me it was rhubarb, and we're going to market it. She says there's a big cranberry bog on this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking anything at all about it. So we're going to watch the old wood road that turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mother dear, from the eyrie outlook, and heaven help any miscreant who takes our cranberries!"

"I wouldn't start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won't be along until frost," laughed Mrs. Robbins.

Doris, with Honey's help, was devoting herself to the hens. Although they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Doris had several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the "coming offs," as Honey put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff in the brooder from Cousin Roxana's incubator, and over these Doris crooned and fussed and wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved.

"But they're motherless. Think of being born motherless and helpless--"

"Don't be ridiculous, Dorrie," Kit said crossly. "You can't be born motherless. You're hatched."

"And if they don't know any better, what's the difference?" added Jean.

"I don't see that at all," Doris insisted plaintively. "Every time I go there and they call to me, I just want to take them in my lap, and cry and cry over them."

One of "Ma" Parmelee's pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard, or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.

Jean named her "Hamlet" in fun, because she said she was always looking for "rats in the arras." But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she didn't have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that she didn't even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was appear promptly at meal time and eat her share.

"There'll be Gypsy a la Reine one of these fine Sundays," Kit prophesied darkly, but Doris begged for her life. In fact, whenever chicken was on the bill-of-fare Doris always begged off any of her flock from execution, and Honey had to go to one of the neighboring farms and purchase a fowl.

"It seems so awful to eat a chicken that you're well acquainted with," Doris explained. "And another thing, Motherie, did you know that the boys set traps around? Not now, but in the fall. At least, I think it's in the fall. I had Honey paint me some signs on shingles and I'm going to put them all over the place."

"What do they say, dear?"

"They say just this," Doris's tone was full of firmness and decision.

"_Any traps set on this-property will be sprung by ME._"

"Do they state who 'Me' is?"

"I signed it with Dad's name, and put underneath 'Per D.'"

Jean wrapped loving arms around the youngest robin.

"Dorrie, you're a sweety," she said. "We don't appreciate you. You adopt everything in sight, but we have to look out for most of your orphans and semi-orphans. Never mind, Dorrie. I'm for you anyway."

"We're such a devoted and loyal family tree, I think," sighed Doris. "Don't you, Motherie? I'm so glad I'm a branch."

"You're not, dear, yet. You're just a twig," Kit teased. "And Mother is the beautiful dryad who lives in her very own family tree. Isn't that interesting, though? One thing about us, girls, is this, and it is very consoling. Scrap as we may, we turn right around and become a mutual admiration society at the slightest excuse. Good-night, everybody. The night is yet young, but I've promised Honey,--or rather, Honey and I have a bet that I couldn't get up at five and help weed the garden. And we bet my three foot rule against Honey's two pet turtles--"

"Are they trained?" asked Doris eagerly.

"They will be if they're not already. Don't anyone call me, because it's got to be fair running. Good-night."

Helen and Doris decided that they were sleepy too, and the three went upstairs together, leaving Jean and her mother to read in the big living-room. Presently Mrs. Robbins glanced up and saw that the book lay idle on Jean's lap, and she was looking down at the wood fire that burned on the old rock fireplace.

"What is it, dear?" she asked. "Tired?"

Jean shook her head, and smiled half-heartedly.

"I'm awfully ashamed of it, Mother, but I do get so lonesome now and then, for everything, don't you know? All the people that we knew and the things that we used to do. Nothing happens up here."

"Well, cheer up," said the Motherbird happily. "I am lonely too sometimes, but there is so much to compensate for what we have lost that I feel we must not dare be unhappy. And Father grows better every day."

Jean dropped on her knees beside her mother's chair, arms folded close around her.

"You dear, precious, most wonderful person that ever was," she cried. "Don't even _think_ of what I said! I'm not a bit lonely, and tomorrow I'm going to see Piney and make calls."

*CHAPTER XII*

*GILEAD'S GIRL NEIGHBORS*

The breakfast hour at Greenacres was supposed to be seven-thirty, but the girls rose at about six and spent the hour before out in the garden. It was so fascinating, Helen said in her rather reserved way, to be out-of-doors in the early morning. Sometimes when the air was warmer than the ground there would be a morning mist out of which rose clumps of tree tops like little islands.

The following day at five-thirty exactly, Jean wakened drowsily to find Kit standing by her bed, booted and spurred for the fray, as one might say.

"I want you to look at this clock and be a witness that I'm up on time," she said briskly, holding up a bland, nickel-plated clock from the kitchen, a relic of the days of Tekla. "It's perfectly gorgeous outside, Jean. I don't see how you girls can lie and sleep with all nature calling."

"Nature didn't call you before, did she, Kathleen Mavourneen? Go away and let me sleep."

"Well, I get the turtles anyway. I've got them named already." She seated herself blithely on the foot of the bed, "Triptolemus and Prometheus. Like them? I'll call them Trip and Pro for short."

Jean sat up in bed and hurled her pillow at the laughing, fleeing form. From the end of the hall came a last challenge.

"I'm the early bird this morning anyway, Sleepyhead."

After breakfast though, when the little dew-spangled cobwebs were gone from the meadow grass, Jean had Honey harness Princess, and declared she was going to drive over and get Piney to accompany her on a round of calls. Kit and Doris were busy out in the kitchen garden, and Helen was helping with the dusting and upstairs work. For some reason Jean wanted to go without them on this first reconnoitering expedition.

She drove down the hill towards Gilead Green, bowed with a little rising flush of color at the group in the front of the blacksmith shop, and stopped in front of the brown and white house where the Hancocks lived. It might have been the veritable witch's house in "Hansel and Gretel," all constructed properly and comfortably out of sugar-loaf and gingercakes. The clapboards were a deep cream color and the trimmings were all of brown, scalloped and perforated with trefoils and hearts. The green stalks of tiger lilies grew in thick clusters along its picket fence, and marigolds and china asters were coming up in the long beds.

"Hello, Jean," called Piney buoyantly, beating some oval braided rugs out on the back line. "Can you stop in?"

Jean leaned forward, the reins lying in her lap.

"I wanted to see if you couldn't go driving with me. Just so I can meet some of the girls. We want to give a lawn social or some sort of a summer affair to get acquainted with our neighbors. It's too warm for a house warming, so we'll have a garden party."

"Why, the idea," Piney exclaimed, dropping her stick and pushing back her hair. "I think that's awfully nice. Wait till I ask Mother if I can go."

Jean waited and presently Mrs. Hancock stepped out on the side porch and down the steps to the carriage. She was rather like Honey and Piney, curly-haired and young appearing, with deep dimples and eyes that still held an abiding happiness in their blue depths. Her face was careworn and there were lines around her mouth that told of repressed pain, but it was the look in the eyes that held you. Luella Trowbridge may have gone through trouble, but she had married the man she loved and had been happy with him. She stretched out both hands to Jean.

"Honey's told us so much about you all up there that it seems as if I know every single one of you," she said, pleasantly. "You're Jean, aren't you? Of course Piney can go along if she wants to. Don't forget the new girl over at the old Parmelee place."

"It's funny, you're speaking of a lawn social," Piney remarked, as they drove away. "We've been wanting to give one up at the church--"

"Which church?" asked Jean. "I can see so many little white spires every time I get to a hilltop. They look like fingers pointing up, don't they?"

"I suppose so." Piney was not much given to sentiment. "Anyway, here in our part of town, we've got two. Mother belongs to the Methodist but Father was a Congregationalist, so Honey and I divide up between them. Then over at Happy Valley, three miles south, there's another Congregational church, and we wanted to give a social--"

"Who wanted to?"

"We girls up here at our Congregational church. But our folks don't get along very well with the folks at the Green church, and they say we're just dead up here, dead and buried because we never get anything up. And Mr. Collins, our minister, isn't on speaking terms with the Green minister because something went wrong when old Mr. Bartlett died. He wasn't a professor, you see--"

"What's that?" Jean's eyes were wide with interest. She was getting local data at the rate of a mile a minute.

"Didn't belong to any of the churches at all, but he was awfully nice, so when he died a year ago, Mr. Collins said he'd bury him, though the Green minister had said he wouldn't; so there you are. Then the other minister is a lady--"

"Forevermore!" gasped Jean.

"She's the best of them all, just the same," Piney said soberly. "Only the two other ministers say it isn't the place for women in the pulpit, and how on earth we're ever going to have any social and invite them all, I don't see."

Jean's eyes suddenly shone with the joy of a new idea.

"I do," she said. "Let's visit all the three parsonages first off."

So they followed the road over to the Green and stopped at the white colonial house where Mr. Lampton lived. He was tall and gray-haired, and welcomed his callers with a twinkle in his eyes. It was not customary for two girls to pay a business call at the parsonage, but Jean launched upon her subject at once. His advice and co-operation were asked, that was all. Greenacre lawn would be given for the social, and the girls would look after the refreshments and the Japanese lanterns to decorate the grounds. Ten cents could be charged for ice cream and cake, and the ladies could donate the cake. The proceeds would go to church needs.

"I didn't tell him how many churches, did I?" said Jean, when they drove away with Mr. Lampton's earnest promise to help. He was invited to attend a committee meeting at Greenacres the following Saturday.

Miss Titheradge of the Happy Valley Church was delighted with the idea. Jean liked her at first sight. She was rather plump, with wide brown eyes that never seemed to blink at all, and rosy cheeks.

"It's just what I've been telling the folks up here in these old granite hills. Get together, warm your hands at the fire of neighborly love and kindness. Have socials and all sorts of good times for your young people and your old people. Bless everybody's hearts, they only need stirring up and turning over, and the old fire burns afresh. Yes, I'll help, children."

"We're sure of Mr. Collins," said Piney, as they drove away this time. "I'll see him myself, and tell him about the committee meeting at your house on Saturday. Now we can find some of the girls."

Jean never forgot that afternoon. They drove miles together, stopping at the different houses and meeting the girls who were, to Jean at least, the new material upon which she had to work.

At the old Ames place they found the two Swedish girls, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, working out in the onion patch with their brothers. Ingeborg was the elder and Astrid the younger, sixteen and fourteen years old. They had moved up from New York two years before, but had both gone to the public schools there and were ready for anything Jean suggested.

"Ingeborg belonged to a basket ball team," Astrid said. "I can swim and row best."

The Chapelles lived in a little gray house close to the road on Huckleberry Hill, two miles below Cousin Roxana's. Etoile was shy-eyed and graceful, smiling but non-committal, and little Tony peered around her mother's skirts at the stranger in the carriage and coquetted mischievously. But they would come, ah, and gladly, Mrs. Chapelle promised.

"They like ver' much to come, you see?" she said eagerly, trying to detach Tony from her skirt. "Ton-ee, I have shame for you, _ma petite_. Why you no come out, make nize bow? Etoile, go bring some lilacs, make quick!"

Etoile sped away to the tall rows of white and purple lilac bushes, and broke off two large bunches to put in the back of the wagon. Then Mrs. Chapelle remembered that she must send over to her new neighbor a pat of her butter. Such beautiful butter never anyone see, never. Jean must drive around through the lane and see the three Jersey cows browsing there in the clover field, Henriette, Desiree, and Susette.

Last of all came the Icelandic farm, and here Jean found only the hired men, two grave-faced, light-haired transplanted vikings, who eyed her curiously and silently. Hedda, the daughter, and her mother had driven over to sell two young pigs at the Finnish place.

"Oh, dear me," laughed Jean, "let's go home. I feel as if I had been riding like Peer Gynt, all over the world, just touching at countries here and there. Let's go right straight home, so I can talk to Mother and get a perspective on it all."

"Better ask the Mill girls over while you're about it," Piney suggested, so they made one last stop at the red saw-mill in the valley below Greenacres. "They're Americans. My chum lives here, Sally Peckham. She's got five sisters and three brothers, but Sally's the whole family herself."

The three brothers worked in the saw-mill after school hours, and Jean only caught a glimpse of them, but Sally sufficed. She came running out of the kitchen with a brown and white checked apron covering her up, and her red hair blowing six ways for Sunday, as Piney said laughingly afterwards. She was short and freckled and not one bit pretty, unless good health and happiness and smiles made up for beauty. But the instant you met Sally you recognized executive ability concentrated in human form.

"Billy, keep out of those lettuce beds," she called to a younger brother, strayed somehow from the mill. "How do you do, Miss Robbins--"

"Oh, call me Jean," Jean said quickly. "We're close neighbors. If we didn't hear your whistle we'd never know what time it is."

"Well, we've been intending to get up the valley to see you, but Mother's rather poorly, and all the girls are younger than me, so I help her round the house. We've got twins in our family, did Piney tell you? Piney and I named them. We thought of everything under the sun, Martha Washington and Betsey Ross, and Ruth and Naomi, and Mercy and Faith, and then we got it all at once. We've had twins in our family before, Josephine and Imogene, that's Mother and Aunt Jo, but we didn't want to repeat. Somehow, it didn't show any--any imagination." She laughed and so did Jean. "So we called ours Elva and Sylvia. We say Elvy and Sylvy for short. Anne and Charlotte are twelve and nine and the twins are only five. They're too cute for anything. Wish you'd all come down and see us Sunday afternoon."

"Sally'd ask the whole world to supper Sunday afternoon," Piney said as they finally turned up the home road. "She's just a dear, and she has to work all the time. She never has a single day to herself, and she doesn't mind it a bit. She does manage to get away to sing in the choir Sunday mornings, but that's all. And even if she isn't pretty, she's got a voice that makes gooseflesh come out all over you, and you shut your eyes and just tingle when it rises and falls. I love her, she's so--oh, so sort of big, you know. Isn't her hair red?"

"It's coppery and it's beautiful," Jean answered decidedly. "I think she's dandy. Why can't the twins and Anne and Charlotte buckle in and help, so that Sally can get away once in a while?"

"Her mother says she can't do without her."

Jean pondered over that and finally tucked it away for the consultation hour with the Motherbird, as being too deep for her to settle.

It had been a very profitable afternoon, and after she had taken Piney home, she drove into the home yard, feeling as if she really had a line on Gilead Center girls. Doris came running down to meet her as she jumped out, while Honey came to take care of Princess. Doris's eyes were shining with excitement.

"Jean Robbins, what do you suppose has happened?"

"Something's sprouted," Jean guessed laughingly. Doris spent most of her time watching to see if any of the seeds had started to sprout.

"No. It isn't that. Gypsy's got little chickens. She marched into the barnyard with ten of them, as proud as anything. And nobody knows where she hatched them at all. Isn't she a darling to attend to it all by herself?"

Jean had to go immediately to see the new brood. Gypsy had cuddled them around her in the barn on a pile of hay and steadfastly refused to be removed. If ever a hen looked nonchalant she did, quite as if she would have said, "I can do it just as well as any of these ridiculous nesters that you're so proud of, and my chicks are twice as perfect as theirs."

"They're wonderful babies, Gypsy," Jean told her. "Be careful of them now. Mothers have to behave themselves, you know. No more gallivanting off to the wildwood."

"She probably will. I'm going to have Honey put them into a little coop tomorrow and her too, and let's change her name, Jeanie. Let's call her something tender and motherly. Call her Cordelia, after the Roman Mother with the jewels, that Mother was telling us about."

So Cordelia she was, and Gypsy seemed to acclimate herself both to maternity and to her new cognomen. It only proved, as Kit remarked, what children would do for a flighty and light-minded person, and she trusted that some day Doris would have twins to occupy her mind.

Jean changed her dress and ran down into the kitchen to help get supper and tell her experiences of the day, which proved so entertaining and comical that Mrs. Robbins finally came out and asked if they were ever to have anything to eat.

"Dad's tray is all ready, Mother mine," Jean replied, sitting up on the tall wood box behind the stove, "I'm just waiting for the scones to bake, and Kit's fixing a beautiful jelly omelette. Mother, dear, you never saw anything so funny as these precious inhabitants, but they're all gold, just the same, and I like them. And we're going to have a lawn party here and invite all the warring factions. Isn't that nice? All the folks that aren't on speaking terms with each other we've asked to serve on the committee, so they'll have to come here for tea and chat sociably and neighborlike with each other."

*CHAPTER XIII*

*COUSIN ROXY TO THE RESCUE*

"We've forgotten to write Mr. McRae and tell him how much we like the house," Helen said a few days later.

"He doesn't know anything about the house, or care either," protested Kit, struggling with some raspberry canes that needed disentangling and tying back against the woodshed boards. "He's never even seen it. Do you suppose he has the least bit of sentiment for it the way we have or Piney has? I wouldn't bother to write to him."

"Oh, I would," Helen answered serenely. She was down on her knees in the clover diligently hunting four-leaved ones. "It isn't his fault that he's never seen the place. Maybe we could coax him back."

"We don't want to coax him back. It must be our one endeavor to keep him right out there in Saskatoon forever. We must tell him the cellar's damp and the roof leaks and the whole place has gone to rack. If we don't he may come East and take it away from us, and we want to save up and buy it and give it back to Piney and her Mother and Honey."

"What's Honey's real name?" asked Doris irrelevantly. "I never thought to ask him. Somehow it does seem to suit him, doesn't it?"

"He wants to study electrical engineering or else be a rancher," Kit said. "I never asked him what his real name is. You're awfully inquisitive, Dorrie."

"What do all boys see in ranches, I wonder. Back at the Cove, Otis Phelps always wanted to be a cowboy and he's got to be a lawyer, his father says."

"Maybe he'll escape West some day and be whatever he likes. I think one of the very worst things in life is to have to be something you don't want to be." Kit surveyed her work admiringly. "Of course, in the ups and downs and uncertainties, as Cousin Roxy would remark, we must be prepared for all things, but if you can dig inside of yourself and find out what you're best fitted for, then you ought to aim everything at that mark. If Honey wants to be an electrical engineer, he ought to get books now, and swallow them whole, and if he wants to be a rancher, he ought to go West--"

A voice came from midair apparently, overhead on the woodshed roof which Honey was patching with waterproof paint and tar. It was a mild and cheerful voice and showed plainly that Honey was personally interested in the conversation.

"I can't go West just now, Mother needs me; but I'm going as soon as I can."

The three girls stared up at him with laughing faces.

"Honey Hancock," exclaimed Doris, "why didn't you sing out to us before?"

"Wanted to hear what you had to say," said Honey simply. "Thought maybe I'd get some good advice. And my first name's Guilford. The whole thing's Guilford Trowbridge Hancock. I'm named for my grandfather. Piney called me Honey when I was a little shaver, so I suppose I'll be that all my life."

"Piney and Honey," repeated Helen musingly, "when you're really Proserpine and Guilford. Nicknames are queer, aren't they? I think that babies should all be called pet names till they're old enough to choose their own. Still Guilford's a good name. It's a name to grow up to, Honey. You ought to be stout and dignified, don't you know, like Mr. Pickwick."

"Guess I don't know him, do I?" asked Honey. "Piney wants to be something too, but girls can't do that. She wants to be a builder and look after land. She wants to go to the State Agricultural College too, and take the forestry course. Do you know what she does? She read some place that the chestnut trees were dying out, so she takes a pocketful of sound chestnuts with her whenever she goes out for a walk in the woods, and every once in a while she sticks her finger in the ground and plants a chestnut. What do you think of that?"

Kit drew in a deep breath.

"I think she's wonderful. We'll do that too. And acorns and walnuts. I don't see why she can't go to the State College if she likes, or why she can't take the forestry course. It isn't whether you're a boy or a girl that matters in such things. It's just whether you can do the work that counts."

"She can shut her eyes and walk through the woods and tell the name of every tree just by feeling its leaves."

Jean appeared on the back porch and called down to them to come up and wash for dinner. This noon-time wash-up was really a function after one had been working and grubbing in the garden all the morning. Honey would bring in a fresh pail of well water first. Some day Kit intended demanding water piped into the house from Mr. McRae, but now they used the well.

Just as Honey came into the summer kitchen with the pail of water, Ella Lou's white nose showed outside the door by the hitching post and Cousin Roxana's voice called to them.

"No, thanks, I can't stop," she called. "I want Betty and Jean."

Mrs. Robbins came downstairs from her husband's room, cool and charming in her black and white lawn, with her hair piled high on her head, and little close curls framing in her face.

"Why, Roxy, come in and have dinner with us," she exclaimed.

"Don't talk to me about things to eat, Betty," answered Cousin Roxana briskly. "Never had such a set-to in my life. Why, I'm so turned over I can hardly talk. The poor thing, all alone up there on that hill with nothing but woods around her. Enough to make anybody lose heart, I declare it is. Get your bonnet right on, Betty. We can't stop for anything. I wouldn't eat dinner with King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba."

"What is it? Please tell us," Jean pleaded, and all three girls crowded around the carriage.

"Don't waste time, Jean. Get your hat on. She may be dead by now. It's that little Finnish woman up on the Parmelee place where you bought your chickens. Her husband's only been dead a little while, took sick on the ship coming over and died at Ellis Island, I heard. And she's pined and pined with four children on her hands, and this morning she just tied-- Oh, my land, I can't talk about it. Do come along. Thank the Lord the water wasn't very deep in the well and they've got her out. And we call ourselves church folks and Christians."

"Had I better take anything with me, Roxy?" asked Mrs. Robbins, hurrying down the porch steps with a motor cloak thrown around her. "Medicine, do you think?"

"No, I've got everything. Always keep emergency things on hand. You never can tell up around here what's going to happen. Bennie Peckham ran a big wooden splinter through his palm the other day, and didn't I have to get it out for him? And Hiram stepped square bang on a piece of glass and cut his foot so he's still going around like old Limpy-go-fetch-it. Have to be prepared for anything when you live out here. This morning Hiram stood his fishing pole up against the side of the house and the line got loose, and one of my best ducks swallowed the bait. I got it out, though. Go long there, Ella Lou, pick up your feet."

Ella Lou started away as if she knew what lay ahead. Jean sat between her mother and Cousin Roxana, listening with wide eyes as the latter's tongue rambled on. It was a beautiful day. The air was heavy with fragrance. Bluebirds preened and fluttered on nearly every fence rail, and robins hopped along the meadows, chirping mate calls. In the roadside thickets the swamp apples were all in radiant pink blossom, whole bouquets of rare color, with overhead the white dogwood flowers and wild crab-apple.

"It seems fearful that anyone should want to die a day like this," said Mrs. Robbins. "How old is she, Roxy?"

"Old enough to know better, to my way of thinking, with all those children dependent on her for love and care and upbringing," said Roxana promptly. "But that's neither here nor there. We mustn't judge another because we don't know how we'd act in their place. There are four children and her brother. The brother's been around peddling vegetables, potatoes and apples, but everybody's got all they need around here, and he didn't have the gumption to drive fourteen miles to town with them. If I'd been his sister, I'd have hitched up and taken them myself. Men folks are all right in a way and I suppose if the proper one had come along, I'd have married the same as the rest of women folks, but from what I can tell of them at a distance, they're fearful trying and uncertain."

The hill dipped into a deep valley mottled with cloud shadows. When they came in sight of the old Parmelee place, there were the four children grouped forlornly around the barn door as if the presence of tragedy at the house had frightened them away from it. Cousin Roxy waved to them and smiled.

"Come here," she called. "Yes, that tallest boy. 'Most twelve, aren't you, son? Old enough to hitch a horse. What's your name?"

"Yahn," answered the boy shyly.

"Yahn? Guess that's Johnnie in plain American, isn't it?" She jumped to the ground as nimbly as any girl, and handed him the hitch rope. "Doctor got over yet?"

Johnnie shook his head sadly, and the youngest girl broke suddenly into frantic, half-stifled sobbing.

"There's your work cut out for you, Jean," Roxana said briskly. "You amuse these children while your Mother and I go into the house."

So Jean took the three youngest for a walk over into the woods, and told them stories until the frightened, blank look left their eyes and they clung around her confidingly. Yahn and Maryanna, Peter and Rika. From Yahn, who could speak a little English, she found out that the family had only been in the wonderful new land a year, that their mother had been sad for weeks, and would never smile.

"She says she don't know nobody and nobody want to know her. Too many woods all around, too."

"Never mind, she's going to know everyone now," Jean promised hopefully.

Over in the house Cousin Roxy was promising about the same thing to the discouraged little Finnish settler. Weak and listless, she lay on the bed in the room. A morning glory vine rambled up the window casing, and framed in a view of the orchard in full bloom. Pink and white petals drifted from their boughs like fairy snow. Mrs. Robbins looked at them wistfully and remorsefully. She had only lost in worldly goods. This woman had lost husband and hope and happiness, and the old well back in the orchard had been her solution of life's problem. If little Yahn had not seen her fall into it, she would have been dead now. When her eyes opened, and Cousin Roxy questioned her, she only shook her head, and whispered: "Too tired."

"Upon my heart, Betty, I think I'll just bundle her up and take her home with me for a while to rest and feed up, and you can take a couple of the children down with you. Maybe Johnnie and the other boy could stay here with the uncle. Anyway, we'll pull her through."

When the old doctor came he agreed it was the very best thing to do. The Finnish brother had stood helplessly around in the kitchen, getting hot water ready when he was told to and eyeing the form on the bed with perplexity.

"She haf plenty to eat," he kept saying, until Cousin Roxana took him by the shoulder and almost shook him.

"Don't be so silly," she exclaimed. "Man can not live by bread alone, and neither can a woman. She needs to be heartened up once in a while. And put a cover on your old well."

Helen, Kit, and Doris were all watching for the return, and when Jean handed them out Maryanna and Rika, the two little Finns, Kit gasped.

"It's our first chance at what Mother's been telling us about," Jean declared, flushed and enthusiastic, as she turned her two charges out to play with Doris. "It doesn't matter whether your neighbor happens to be a Finn or a Feejee. He's your neighbor and it won't do to let him or his sister take tumbles into old wells because they're strangers in a strange land."

*CHAPTER XIV*

*THE LAWN FETE*

For two weeks the little Finns remained at Greenacres, getting rosy and happy. The girls hunted up their old toys; Rika rambled around with a little red express wagon, and Maryanna hugged a big doll to her heart all day long and slept with it at night.

Up at Maple Lawn the tired mother grew steadily better, partly from Dr. Gallup's medicine, partly from Cousin Roxy's persistent infusion of hope, womanly courage, and endurance into her mind. As she grew stronger she began to help Cousin Roxy around the house, and Hiram in caring for the cows. This was odd for a woman, it seemed to Miss Robbins, but Karinya told her it was what she had always done in the homeland when she was a girl, dairy work on a farm, and she liked it best. And out of this grew a plan that Mrs. Robbins helped with. There were three good Holstein cows over at the Finnish home, and when Ella Lou took back the Mother and two kiddies, Cousin Roxana put up a business proposition to the brother and sister. They were to make butter, the very best butter they could, and Mrs. Robbins would get customers for them back at the Cove in Long Island. Homemade butter up here in the hills ranged from ten to twelve cents below the city market price, and was better in every way. So prosperity began to dawn for the little woman who had been too tired to live, and Cousin Roxana kept an eye on the upland farm all summer long, with Jean to help with the children.

After the children went home, the girls turned their attention heart and soul to the lawn party. The first thing to be sure of was a full moon. This came along the last week in June, so they made their arrangements accordingly.

The committee meeting turned out a success in every way. Saturday afternoon Mrs. Robbins and the girls set the dark green willow chairs and table under one of the pines on the lower terrace, and prepared to conquer. The three ministers arrived, each one surprised to find the other two present, but all very gracious and pleasant.

"Why, they were almost cordial before they left," Kit declared after it was over. "I think the prospect of having anyone besides Cousin Roxy make an effort for a good time inspired them. I'm to have charge of a fishpond, and Helen will sell flowers with fortunes attached to them, and Dorrie can help with the ice cream. I know that will suit her."

"I'm to be gypsy fortune teller," Jean announced. "Mother, dear, may I have your Oriental silk mantel scarf, please, and the gold bead fringe off the little boudoir lamp in your room?"

"You may have anything to help the cause along," Mrs. Robbins answered happily. "I've sent down to New York for Chinese lanterns to decorate the grounds with, and Hiram's going to play the violin for us. I'm sure it will be very sociable and just what they need up here."

Honey and Piney took almost as much interest in the affair as the girls themselves. All that day, when it finally did arrive, they worked, putting wires around the trees out on the lawn, and hanging up the many-colored lanterns. Two tents were erected, one for Jean as the gypsy, and the other for lemonade, made in two big new tubs. Helen said she had cut and squeezed lemons until her whole mouth was puckered up, and her finger nails felt pickled. Kit was everywhere at once, it seemed. She inspired the two ministers to join hands in brotherly ardor and erect long plank tables for refreshments. She showed Honey how to twist young birches together and make an inviting arch over the entrance posts at the end of each drive. She beguiled Hiram, who had come down from Maple Lawn to help around a bit, into moving the piano out on the front veranda.

"When you're tired of playing the violin for them, Mother or one of us girls will play the piano. Music sounds ever so nice at night."

It did seem as if all Gilead Center, Gilead Green, and Gilead Proper had turned out to show its neighborly spirit. There were teams hitched along the road, and teams hitched in the barnyard and the front yard and everywhere. The Chinese lanterns made the grounds look wonderfully enticing and Hiram sat up on the veranda in a kitchen chair tipped back against the wall, and played bewitchingly, so Helen said.

"I shouldn't wonder, Miss Robbins, if we had as many as a hundred folks here tonight," said Mr. Lampton.

"More likely two hundred, Mr. Lampton. It only goes to show what really lies back in our hearts and needs digging up--sociability. Bless their hearts, how I do love to see them all enjoying themselves." Cousin Roxana moved her glasses half an inch higher up on her nose and surveyed the scene. Miss Titheradge was helping Mr. Collins pass the ice cream, and the two were chatting happily together.

Up on the veranda Mrs. Robbins hovered between the Morris chair, where Mr. Robbins sat, and her various guests, welcoming each in her own charming way, and blending the different social elements together with tact and understanding.

Helen and Kit followed Jean's lead. First Jean rounded up the girls whom she had met on the drive with Piney and introduced them to the other Greenacre girls. Doris could not be located from one minute to another. She was like a firefly, bobbing around with a big orange colored Chinese lantern on the end of a long mop handle. But Helen and Kit led the other girls over to the refreshment tent and had them all don little white aprons and help serve ice cream and cake. It was much better than standing around, shy and silent, not knowing what to do next. Kit found one girl, Abby Tucker, leaning disconsolately against a pear tree at the side of the drive. Her white dress was too short for her, and her hair was cut short to her neck and tied with a bow on top very tightly. She looked lonely and rather indignant too.

"Don't you want to come over and help us with the ice cream?" asked Kit.

"No, I don't," said Abby flatly. "They always ask me to help pass things to eat at the church suppers. I want to have a good time myself tonight. Though we aren't going to have a good time."

Kit looked at her doubtfully. She thoroughly realized the state of mind that will not let itself be happy, that in fact, finds its happiness in being unhappy, but Abby's moroseness baffled her.

"Don't you like it here?" she asked.

Abby nodded.

"Don't you know anyone?"

"Know most of them. My father's a blacksmith and they all come over to get shod."

"Then what is it?" Kit laid her arm around the stooped shoulders and at the touch of real human sympathy, Abby's reserve melted.

"My new shoes pinch awful," she exploded.

Kit never stayed upon the order of her going. She took her straight up to the house to her own room, and ransacked closets and shoe boxes until she found a pair of low shoes to fit Abby, and the latter came down again smiling and radiant, ready to serve ice cream, or make herself agreeable in any way she could.

Piney came up to the veranda where Mrs. Robbins sat, personally conducting her mother to meet her. She was a tall, fair-haired woman with deep dimples, like the children's, and a happy face. Seated in a willow rocker on the veranda with the roses and honeysuckle shedding a perfume around, she breathed a sigh of relief.

"Seems so nice to sit up here again, Mrs. Robbins," she said. "Piney's told me all about how you've fixed the place up till it seemed as if I couldn't wait to see it. I used to drive over once in a while after Father died, and get some slips of flowering quince and rose bushes to set out. You know I love every blade of grass in the garden and every pine cone on those trees."

"It's too bad you and the children could not have had it."

"Well, I don't know. I never fret much over what has to be. Maybe this boy Ralph is all right. He's my nephew, but I've never seen him. His father was a claim settler out in Oregon first off, when Cousin France married him. We called her that. Her name was Francelia. Good stock, I guess. I wish Honey could know him, he's so set on being a rancher. I suppose settling and ranching's about the same thing?"

"Not quite," Mrs. Robbins told her. Then came a chat about her own father's ranch in California, and when Piney came back after her mother, she found her all animated and interested over Honey's future.

Kit and Etoile were arranging a dancing class for alternate Saturday afternoons, the ones between to be given up to lawn tennis and basket ball. Ingeborg and Astrid and Hedda Hagerstrom stood listening and agreeing with shining eyes and eager faces, but silent shy tongues. Hedda was short and strong looking, with the bluest eyes possible and heavy blond braids. She stared at Kit with wide-eyed wonder, Kit, radiant and joyous in her prettiest summery dress, with sprays of flowering almond around her head like a pink blossomy crown.

"You'll come, won't you, Hedda?" she asked. "And bring any other girls over your way."

"There's only Abby over my way. We live on the same road."

"Then bring Abby, but tell her to wear old shoes. We ought to find enough girls to make up a good team out here."

"Do you like hikes?" asked Sally Peckham. "I think it would be fun to have a hike club, and each week tramp away off somewhere. There's ever so many places I want to see."

"It's a good idea, Sally," Piney exclaimed. "First rate. We could call ourselves the Pere--pere--what's that word that means meandering around, Jean, don't you now?"

"Peregrinating?"

"That's it. Peregrinating Gileadites."

"I think 'Greenacre Hikers' would be better," said Ingeborg. "I'd love to go along, wouldn't you, 'Trid?"

Astrid was sure she would. So while Hiram played "Good-night, Ladies," and the three ministers smiled and shook hands together and with their hostess and host, the girls of Gilead planned their first campaign for summer outings.