"You're no good at all at hiding," Ben told her. "Anybody could have found you with half an eye."
"Oh, I don't care," replied Edna; "I'll have just as much fun finding out some one else," and she it was who made straight for Uncle Wilbur's wood-pile to which he had returned with the fond belief of its serving as good a turn a second time.
It was not so very long before the older persons declared that they had had enough of it. The men returned to the house to have a smoke and the ladies to chat around the fire. As for the children, it was quite too much to expect them to go in while there was a twinkle of daylight left, and, as Amanda expressed it, "They took the place." The girls did not roam far from the house but the boys wandered much further afield, bringing caps and pockets full of nuts, and clothes full of burs and stick-tights, even Ben brought back a hoard of persimmons touched by the frost and as sweet as honey.
He poured these out on a flat stone near which Edna was standing. "Come here, Edna," he said, "let's divvy up. I'll give you half; you can take what you don't eat to your mother and I'll take what I don't eat to my mother."
Edna squatted down by the stone and began delicately to nibble at the fruit which still bore its soft purple bloom. "I don't believe I shall eat very many," she said, "for my dinner is still lasting, and there will be supper before I am ready for it. We are not going to have a real, regular set-the-table supper, because grandma thinks Amanda and Reliance should have some holiday, too, but we are going to have sandwiches and cakes and nuts and apples and cider and a whole lot of things; something like a party you know. Aren't you going to eat any of your persimmons, Ben?"
"No, that coming supper party sounds too seductive; I'll wait so that I can do it justice."
"What did you see out in the woods?" asked Edna.
"Foxy grape-vines and bare trees," he answered promptly.
"Do you mean b-e-a-r trees or b-a-r-e trees?"
"Which ever you like; I've no doubt there were both kinds."