“I am too little to do any good,” answered she, sighing at her own insignificance.
“You can be very still and gentle.”
“But that isn’t doing anything, is it?”
“When you are older,” said the young doctor, “you will find it is harder to keep from doing wrong than to do what is right.”
Helen did not understand the full force of what he said, but the saying remained in her memory.
The next day, and the bloom of early summer was on the plains, and its deep, blue glory on the sky, Helen thought again and again what she should do for her mother. At length she remembered that some one had said that the strawberries were ripe, and that her mother had longed exceedingly for a dish of strawberries and cream. This was something that even Louis had not done for her, and her heart throbbed with joy and exultation in anticipation of the offering she could make.
With a bright tin bucket, that shone like burnished silver in the sunbeams, swinging on her arm, she stole out of the back door, and ran down a narrow lane, till she came to an open field, where the young corn was waving its silken tassels, and potato vines frolicking at its feet. The long, shining leaves of the young corn threw off the sunlight like polished steel, and Helen thought she had never seen anything so beautiful in all her life. She stopped and pulled off the soft, tender, green silken tassels, hanging them over her ears, and twisting some in her hair, as if she were a mermaid, her “sea-green ringlets braiding.” Then springing from hillock to hillock, she reached the end of the field, and jumped over a fence that skirted a meadow, along which a clear, blue stream glided like an azure serpent in glittering coils, under the shade of innumerable hickory trees. Helen became so enchanted with the beauty of the landscape, that she forgot her mother and the strawberries, forgot there were such things as night and darkness in the universe. Taking off her shoes and tying them to the handle of her bucket, she went down to the edge of the stream, and dipping her feet in the cool water, waded along close to the bank, and the little wavelets curled round her ankles as if they loved to play with anything so smooth and white. Then she saw bright specks of mica shining on the sand, and she sprang out of the water to gather them, wondering if pearls and diamonds ever looked half so beautiful.
“How I wish strawberries grew under water,” cried Helen, suddenly recollecting her filial mission. “How I wish they did not grow under the long grass!”
The light faded from her face, and the dimness of fear came over it. She had an unutterable dread of snakes, for they were the heroes of some of Miss Thusa’s awful legends, and she knew they lurked in the long grass, and were said to be especially fond of strawberries. Strange, in her eager desire to do something for her mother, she had forgotten the ambushed foe she most dreaded by day—now she wondered she had dared to think of coming.
“I will go back,” thought she; “I dare not jump over that fence and wade about in grass as high as my head.”