The day was hot and sultry. Hanging over Egerton in the southwest were great black, wicked looking clouds that portended thunder storms. We had so far escaped without one, although we had several times heard distant thunder and had seen a storm following the course of the river in the west.
“Shall we take umbrellas?” said Ethel.
“What’s the use?” said I. “If it rains we’ll probably get wet anyway, and in such hot weather as this a wetting won’t hurt.”
So we went unhampered by umbrellas, and after a walk through a tree-embowered road, whose beauty we were told had been marked for destruction by the brass mill, but of which destruction the happy trees were all ignorant, we reached the wintergreen lot, and Ethel, spreading a shawl, seated herself on the mossy ground, while I perched on a rock until it got too hard, when I changed to another rock.
“Minerva, do you see that little red berry in the grass?” said Ethel.
“Yas’m.”
“Well, pick it and I’ll tell you something about it.”
I sniffed. Ethel’s love of outdoor life is very real, but she is not a botanist. “She knows what she likes” in nature, but she can’t tell why.
She heard the sniff and her lips came together to form a noiseless word that she bestows upon me when she thinks I need it.
Then she smiled at me and took from a little bag she had brought with her Mrs. Dana’s book, “How to Know the Wild Flowers,” which she had evidently found among the Wheelock’s possessions.