Cousin Louise assured her that there was still plenty in the bowl and a great plenty more in the milk cellar outside so she could eat all she wanted. But to tell the truth, Mary Jane found that one big bowlful of strawberries and such cream was all she could eat, and she was soon ready for the drive that Cousin Louise proposed.
They drove through the marshes that much to the girls' interest proved to be the place where cranberries are grown.
"See?" said John's father as he slowed up the car so they could see the bushes and could, perhaps, imagine the red cranberries with which the low bushes would be loaded after frost. "Next time you eat your Thanksgiving dinner, you just look hard at the cranberry sauce and see if it didn't come from Marshfield."
Mary Jane giggled at his funmaking and promised to ask each cranberry she met during the coming fall.
Turning from the main road, they drove into the heart of a charming wood where Cousin Louise had them get out to see the wild flowers. There the girls saw, for the first time, the beautiful and very rare wild lady slipper which Alice thought was the loveliest wild flower she had ever seen. They didn't pick a single blossom as the flower is so rare that flower lovers will not take a single bloom from its home in the woods; but they looked at it so admiringly and so carefully that the girls were sure they never, never would forget its beauty.
Back into the car and around a couple of low hills they saw before them—the ocean—golden and blue and rosy as the varying lights of sunset were reflected in it.
"Oh," cried Mary Jane, "are we going swimming?"
"Not this late in the evening, I'm afraid, my dear," said Cousin Louise. "But perhaps mother will let you go in wading. We always carry towels in the back of the car for a good foot rub afterward." Mrs. Merrill approved, so the three children pulled off shoes and stockings and a minute later were dashing down toward the water leaving the grown-ups for a quiet visit near the car.
"Oh, look at the white stones!" exclaimed Mary Jane, as they wandered around on the beach after the first hilarious fun of wading. "I'm going to put some in my pocket. There's one. There's another. See, John, aren't they pretty?"
John agreed and was so diligent in helping to pick them up and so generous in handing over all he could find to Mary Jane, that by the time the children were called to come and dry their feet, Mary Jane's pockets were loaded down and Alice's were full of the overflow.