Violet laughed when she remembered that day, and how the brook, full of its mischief, had run away with her treasures, and scattered them any and every where along its banks, setting some upright, as if they were growing again, and wedging some under the stones, and tangling some under the fence, and floating some down the hill and through the sunny field, so fast they seemed chasing the little fish that made their home in the brook.
Even away down by Reuben's house a few had strayed, and reached home so much before Violet that she began to think the waves had, after all, as spry feet as her own.
CHAPTER XVI.
ALONE IN THE WOOD.
Her flowers safe in the water, the little girl seated herself on a stone that seemed made purposely for her, it was cushioned so softly with moss; and overhead the boughs of the great trees bent towards her, and rustled and waved like so many fans, and shut her in so closely from the rest of the wood that you might have passed close by, and never guessed she was there.
The kitten went fast asleep in her lap, and Violet, folding her hands, looked up among the leaves, and across where the boughs parted a little into the wood, and down at her feet, where the grass grew so long and fine, and was sprinkled over with such pretty little leaves—as tiny, some of them, as Violet's finger nails, and yet as beautifully scolloped or pointed, and as perfectly finished, as the stoutest laurel or broadest oak leaf in the wood; and, noticing this, Violet wondered if God, who had taken as much pains in making little leaves as big ones, had not taken as much pains with, and didn't care as much for, little people as big ones.
Who knew but he loved her, in her ragged dress, just as well as Narcissa in all her finery, or even the tall, rich doctor, who tried to mend Toady's leg?
Then she listened, and felt how still it was there alone with the trees; and the sweet, low sounds that came through this stillness were beautiful as music.
Far off she could hear the cool, sparkling brook foaming and hurrying over its stony bed; and then the air came breathing through the trees, as if they sighed for joy; and each leaf trembled, and seemed rising to meet the air and fly away with it, and then, falling back again, nestled closer to its neighbor leaves, and whispered softly, as if it were making love to them.