“I feel as well as ever,” declared Esther as the two little girls went to bed that night; “but I do wish your mother thought sweet things would be good for me. At home I have all I want.”
“Mother says that is the reason you are not well,” answered Faith. “Hear the brook, Esther! Doesn’t it sound as if it was saying, ‘Hurry to bed! Hurry to bed!’ And in the morning it is ‘Time to get up! Time to get up!’”
“You are the queerest girl I ever knew. The idea that a brook could say anything,” replied Esther; but her tone was friendly. “I suppose it’s because you live way off here in the woods. Now if you lived in a village——”
“I don’t want to live in a village if it will stop my hearing what the brook says. And I can tell you what the robins say to the young robins; and what little foxes tell their mothers; and I know how the beavers build their homes under water,” declared Faith, with a little laugh at Esther’s puzzled expression.
“Tell me about the beavers,” said Esther, as they snuggled down in the big feather-bed.
“Every house a beaver builds has two doors,” began Faith, “and it has an up-stairs and down-stairs. One of the doors to the beaver’s house opens on the land side, so that they can get out and get their dinners; and the other opens under the water—way down deep, below where ice freezes.”
“How do you know?” questioned Esther, a little doubtfully.
“Father told me. And I have seen their houses over in the mill meadow, where the brook is as wide as this whole clearing.”
Before Faith had finished her story of how beavers could cut down trees with their sharp teeth, and of the dams they built across streams, Esther was fast asleep.
Faith lay awake thinking over all that Esther had said about school; about seeing little girls and boys of her own age, and of games and parties. Then with a little sigh of content she whispered to herself: “I guess I’d be lonesome without father and mother and the brook.”