Rose of Dutcher's Coolly. Garland Hamlin

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СКАЧАТЬ with her hair blown across her cheek and looked away, at the curving valley and its river gleaming here and there through the willows and elders. It was like looking over an unexplored world to the child. Her eyes expanded and her heart filled with the same ache which came into it when she looked down along the curving railway track. She turned suddenly and fell sobbing against her father.

      "Why, Rosie, what's the matter? Poor little girl—she's all tired out, climbin' up here." He sat down and took her on his lap and talked to her of the valley below and where the river went—but she would not look up again.

      "I want to go home," she said with hidden face.

      On the way down, John rolled a big stone down the hill and as it went bounding, crashing into the forest below, a deer drifted out like a gray shadow and swept along the hillside and over the ridge.

      Rose saw it as if in a dream. She did not laugh nor shout. John was troubled by her silence and gravity, but laid it to weariness and took her pick-a-back on the last half mile through the brush.

      That scene came to her mind again and again in the days which followed, but she did not see it again till the following spring. It appealed to her with less power then. Its beauty over-shadowed its oppressive largeness. As she grew older it came to be her favorite playing ground on holidays. She brought down those quaint little bits of limestone and made them her playthings in her house, which was next door to her barn—and secondary to her barn.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

CHILD-LIFE, PAGAN FREE

       Table of Contents

      Rose lived the life of the farm girls in the seven great Middle-West States. In summer she patted away to school, clad only in a gingham dress, white untrimmed cotton pantalets, and a straw hat that was made feminine by a band of gay ribbon. Her body was as untrammeled as a boy's. She went bare-foot and bare-headed at will, and she was part of all the sports.

      She helped the boys snare gophers, on the way to school, and played house with the girls on the shady side of the school-house, and once, while the teacher was absent at noon, Rose proposed that a fire be built to heat the tea for the dolls.

      She it was who constructed the stove out of thin bricks, and set a fire going in it in the corner of the boy's entry-way, and only the passing of a farmer saved the building from disaster.

      She it was who found the ground-bird's nest and proposed to make a house over it, and ended by teaching the bird to walk through a long hallway made of sticks in order to get to its eggs again.

      She despised hats and very seldom wore hers except hanging by the string down her back. Her face was brown and red as leather, and her stout little hands were always covered with warts and good brown earth, which had no terrors for her.

      Bugs and beetles did not scare her any more than they did the boys. She watched the beetles bury a dead gopher without the slightest repugnance; indeed, she turned to, after a long time, to help them, a kindness which they very probably resented, to judge from their scrambling.

      She always urged the other girls to go down to the creek and see the boys go in swimming, and would have joined the fun had not the boys beaten her back with hands full of mud, while they uttered opprobrious cries. She saw no reason why boys should have all the fun.

      When the days were hot they could go down there in the cool, nice creek, strip and have a good time, but girls must primp around and try to keep nice and clean. She looked longingly at the naked little savages running about and splashing in the water. There was something so fine and joyous in it, her childish heart rebelled at sex-distinction as she walked slowly away. She, too, loved the feel of the water and the caress of the wind.

      She was a good student and developed early into a wonderful speller and reader. She always listened to the classes in reading, and long before she reached the pieces herself she knew them by heart, and said them to herself in the silence of the lane or the loneliness of the garret. She recited "The Battle of Waterloo" and "Locheil" long before she understood the words. The roll of the verse excited her, and she thrust her nut of a fist into the air like Miriam the Hebrew singer, feeling vaguely the same passion.

      She went from Primer to First Reader, then to the Second and Third Readers, without effort. She read easily and dramatically. She caught at the larger meanings, and uttered them in such wise that the older pupils stopped their study to listen.

      Scraps and fragments of her reading took curious lodgment in her mind. New conceptions burst into her consciousness with a golden glory upon reading these lines:

      "Field of wheat so full and fair,

       Shining with a sunny air;

       Lightly swaying either way,

       Graceful as the breezes sway."

      They made her see the beauty of the grainfield as never before. It seemed to be lit by some mysterious light.

      "Cleon hath a million acres,

       Ne'er a one have I,"

      seemed to express something immemorial and grand. She seemed to see hills stretching to vast distances, covered with cattle. "The pied frog's orchestra" came to her with sudden conscious meaning as she sat on the door-step one night eating her bowl of bread and milk, and watching the stars come out. These fragments of literature expressed the poetry of certain things about her, and helped her also to perceive others.

      She was a daring swinger, and used to swing furiously out under the maple trees, hoping to some day touch the branches high up there, and, when her companions gathered in little clumps in dismayed consultation, she swung with wild hair floating free, a sort of intoxication of delight in her heart.

      Sometimes when alone she slipped off her clothes and ran amid the tall corn-stalks like a wild thing. Her slim little brown body slipped among the leaves like a weasel in the grass. Some secret, strange delight, drawn from ancestral sources, bubbled over from her pounding heart, and she ran and ran until wearied and sore with the rasping corn leaves, then she sadly put on civilized dress once more.

      Her feet were brown as toads, but graceful and small, and she washed them (when the dew was heavy enough) by running in the wet grass just before going in to bed, a trick the boys of the neighborhood had taught her. She ran forward to clean the insteps and backward to clean the heels. If the grass was not wet, she omitted the ceremony. Dust was clean anyhow. Her night-gowns were of most sorry pattern till her aunt came; thereafter they were clean, though it mattered little. They were a nuisance anyway.

      She wore a pink sun-bonnet, when she could find one; generally there were two or three hanging on the fences at remote places. She sat down in the middle of the road, because she had a lizard's liking for the warm soft dust, and she paddled in every pool and plunged her hand into every puddle after frogs and bugs and worms, with the action of a crane.

      She ate everything that boys did. That is to say, she ate sheep sorrel, Indian tobacco, roots of ferns, May apples, rose leaves, rose-buds, raw turnips, choke-cherries, wild crab-apples, slippery elm bark, and the green balls on young oak trees, as well as the bitter acorns. These acorns she chewed into pats, and dried СКАЧАТЬ