Shaking the earth from her cloak of humming-bird feathers, and picking a handful of checkerberries, Minnie looked about for a stone to sit upon while she ate her supper.
She soon found one, smooth as any pebble in the brook. Here she could eat at her leisure, while a band of crickets and katydids played to her, and all the beautiful stars twinkled over her head, and all the grass about her was strung with glistening drops of dew.
"After all," she thought, "this is more to my taste than being shut up in my curtained bed at home. What's the use in stars and dew, if we never look at them? What use is there in the evening breeze, if we shut it out with our windows? It's a good thing to have our own way, and I may yet be glad that I left my father's house."
CHAPTER XXI.
TROUBLE FOR MINNIE.
As Minnie sat meditating, suddenly the grass about her seemed to move. The long blades bent this way and that, and shook their dew-drops over her.
What could this mean? Had the grass feet? Could it draw its roots up out of the ground and walk?
Why, she was moving! The grass behind lay bowed together in her pathway, and here she was, seated close under an evening primrose, which opened its yellow blossoms so far from the mouse-nest that she had only felt their fragrance when the wind blew.