Otherwise she might have been asleep,—as innocent. Sunny, who had run with the boys to see the sight, evidently thought she was.
“Mamma, look at the little baa-lamb, the dear little baa-lamb. Won’t it wake up?”
Mamma explained that it was not a baa-lamb, but a deer, and there stopped, considering how to make her child understand that solemn thing, death; which no child can be long kept in ignorance of, and yet which is so difficult to explain. Meantime, Sunny stood looking at the deer, but did not attempt to touch it as she had touched the water-hen. It was so large a creature to lie there so helpless and motionless. At last she looked up, with trouble in her eyes.
“Mamma, it won’t wake up. Make it wake up, please!”
“I can’t, my darling!” And there came a choke in mamma’s throat,—this foolish mamma, who dislikes “sport,”—who looks upon soldiers as man-slayers, “glory” as a great delusion, and war a heinous crime. “My little one, the pretty deer has gone to sleep, and nobody can wake it up again. But it does not suffer. Nothing hurts it now. Come away, and mamma will tell you more about this another day.”
The little fingers contentedly twined themselves in her mamma’s, and Sunshine came away, turning back now and then a slightly regretful look on the poor hind that lay there, the admiration of everybody, and especially of the gentleman who had shot it.
“The first I ever shot,” he repeated, with great pride. “I only wish I could stay and eat her. But the rest of you will.” (Except Sunny’s mamma, who was rather glad to be spared that satisfaction.)
A single day was now all that remained of the visit,—a day which dawned finer than ever, making it so hard to quit the hills, and the loch, and all the charms of this beautiful place. Not a cloud on the sky, not a ripple on the waters, blackberries saying “come gather me,” by hundreds from every bramble, ferns of rare sort growing on dikes, and banks, and roots of trees. This whole morning must be spent on the hillside by Sunny and her mamma, combining business with pleasure, if possible.
So they took a kitchen knife as an extempore spade; a basket, filled with provisions, but meant afterwards to carry roots, and the well-known horn cup, which was familiar with so many burns. Sunny used it for all sorts of purposes besides drinking; filled it with pebbles, blackberries, and lastly with some doubtful vegetables, which she called “ferns,” and dug up, and brought to her mamma to take home “very carefully.”
Ere long she was left to mamma’s charge entirely, for this was the last day, and Lizzie had never climbed a mountain, which she was most anxious to do, having the common delusion that to climb a mountain is the easiest thing in the world,—as it looks, from the bottom.