But Tom, who was up with her in a moment, gave a whoop of disdain as he scanned the low cluster of bushes. “Those! why, those are blueberries. Don’t you know the difference?”
Kate confessed with some humility that she did not, but the humility vanished when he added loftily: “And just as like as not you never will. There were some Westerners boarding over at Lester’s one summer, and those folks couldn’t tell one from t’other clear up to the end of the season.”
“Well,” said Kate, with a toss of her head, “maybe we can’t tell huckleberries from blueberries, but we can always tell hickory nuts from walnuts, which is more than you folks here can do, and there’s a sight more difference between them than there is between these little things.”
She broke a blueberry bush, and looked at it with an attention which promised that she, at least, would know the species when she met it again, then started on with the remark, “Well, whichever of them I get, I mean to fill my bucket with something before I leave this hill.”
“There you go again,” grumbled Tom, who had been rather set back by the taunt about the nuts. “You always call a pail a bucket.”
“Well, it is a bucket,” cried Kate, beating a tattoo on the bottom of hers with spirit. “You couldn’t prove that I was wrong when you went to the dictionary about it, and anyway it isn’t half as funny to call a pail a bucket as to call a frying-pan a ‘spider’ and a stool a ‘cricket.’”
“I suppose you children are quarrelling about something as usual,” observed Stella, who with Esther had just caught up with the advance guard. “I wonder how you can keep it up so steadily. I should think you’d sometimes get tired.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, sis,” said Tom, with brotherly responsiveness, “you’ll have to keep at the picking a little steadier than you generally do, or it won’t make anybody tired to carry home the berries you’ll get. This is the way she does,” he added, turning to his cousins; “she goes fidgeting round, looking for the place where they’re thickest, and when she finds it she settles down and draws a picture of a tree, or a rock, or something. I’ll bet she’s got her drawing things with her now.”
Stella did not deny the charge. “What irrelevant remarks you do contrive to make, Tom!” she said. “Come, go ahead, if you mean to show us where those berries are.”
They found them, and were all busily picking in a few minutes more. However Stella’s interest in huckleberries might flag later on there was no criticism to be made on her attention at first, and her fingers flew over the bushes at a rate which augured well for the filling of her pail. As for the Northmore girls, they were in ecstasies. Kate settled down to the business at once, though for a while she ate most of the berries she picked, while Esther paused between the handfuls to take long whiffs of the sweet fern which grew everywhere among the bushes, and to fill her eyes with the landscape which looked fairer than ever from the side of this green old hill.