“If you lived here,” sniffed Babe, “you’d have to learn on sugar-cane. You wouldn’t get a chance at eggs till you could carry sticks of sugar-cane without ever dropping one of them. Isn’t that so, Martha?”
“I guess ’tis,” said Martha, shuffling off, grinning at the strange doings of “them gals.”
But “The Merry Hearts” didn’t discover Martha until long after their first visit to Grant’s Town. What interested them most on that trip were the gardens and the pickaninnies. The latter, quickly perceiving that the party was well supplied with pennies, appeared in hordes as if by magic, and followed the white folks all through the colored town, not begging except with their great eyes, which looked so wistful that the girls invented all sorts of excuses for bestowing half-pennies.
“It is prettier up here than down where we are,” said Mrs. Wales before they had gone far. “The soil must be richer away from the sea. Look at those palms! And see the roses around that little tumbled-down cabin! Do you suppose I could buy some?”
Just as she spoke a pretty mulatto woman appeared around the corner of the house, and, saying that she was willing to sell her flowers, picked Mrs. Wales a lovely bunch.
“How much?” asked Mrs. Wales, hoping that she had not been too extravagant.
The woman looked critically at the roses. “’Bout threepence,” she said at last.
The girls fairly gasped. To think of buying a dozen roses and quantities of buds for threepence—which is the same as six American pennies. Then they began to order roses.
“I’ve never had as many roses as I wanted in my whole life,” said Roberta, “and now I’m going to. I shall come up here every day.”