"And wear a cap like gran'mere? And have two little creases in my forehead, so?"
She tried to make them but they were not much of a success, and the smile returned. "Now let us read."
She took her seat on the arm of the chair. Gran'mere came in and busied herself about breakfast. The reading was from one of the minor prophets. Dilly did not understand it very well but she could converse in the language quite fluently. Her mother had taught her to spell and read English. Girls were not expected to have much education in those days; indeed, here they grew up mostly like the flowers of the field. While the little girls to the eastward were working samplers, sewing long overhand seams, hemming, and doing beautiful darning, these little girls ran about, romped, helped to take care of the next younger baby, grew up and married, no one could have told just how.
After breakfast when the sun was warm and bright grandfather started for his walk. He always felt stronger in the morning. Sometimes Barbe went, often only Dilly. He liked the child's prattle. He liked, too, the way the denizens of the woods came to her, and the birds. True she always had some bread to crumble and she talked in her low sunny voice. Now and then a squirrel would run up her shoulder, watch her with beady eyes that almost laughed and whisk his feathery tail about.
"It does seem as if they ought to talk," she often said.
"They do in their language, only we can't understand them; at least we do in part. Doesn't he say in his fashion, 'I'm glad to see you? Have you any crumbs to-day.' And how one of them scolded when another ran off with that piece you dropped."
"That was funny, wasn't it!" and she laughed. They were sitting on a fallen log in the warm sunshine. Bees were out also, buzzing and no doubt grumbling a little because there were not more sweet flowers in bloom. And the birds sang and whistled in great glee.
They returned from their walk presently through the woods, where she gathered some curious wild flowers. Then they came out by the river, foaming and tumbling about as if it longed to overflow its banks. Now and then a rough kind of boat came down laden with stores of some kind, but there was no hurry visible anywhere.
About sixteen years before the Indians had ceded all the lands about Pittsburg to the Colonies. The six nations assembled with their principal chiefs and warriors and gave the strongest assurance of treaty keeping, which after all were not well kept, as usual. But they had retreated to better hunting grounds and for some time had made little trouble, though many friendly Indians remained.
The wanderers came out to the town proper. Streets were being surveyed, straightened, new ones laid out. There were about a hundred houses ranged round the Fort, but they had begun to spread outside. The disputes with the Pitt family, who had held the charter of Pennsylvania, had been mostly settled and grants of land given to many of the returned soldiers in lieu of the money the Colonial government could not pay. Pittsburg now belonged to the State, and a project had been broached to make it the county seat.