“How is your crow doing?” queried Miss Morrison, as they all sat down on the threshold of their “House in the Woods” to christen it with the first social meal. It had been settled that there was to be a stone hearth laid for coffee-boiling before the next Saturday.
“Fine,” Ethan responded, throwing an apple high in the air, and catching it skilfully as it fell. “He can walk ’most as well as ever, and eats out of my hand. I’m thinking of slitting his tongue and teaching him to talk,” he added.
“Ethan found a young crow with his leg broken, by stone-throwing boys, probably, and set it quite successfully,” the teacher explained to Stella, who glowed visibly, but said nothing.
“Well, Doctor, I promise to send for you next time I fall out of the cherry-tree,” crowed Sin, whose climbing days were by no means over, in spite of Grandma Brown.
“Uncle Si is getting ready to go to bed by this time, and we ought to be going home to supper,” announced Doris, soberly, as the April sun dropped into a bank of haze in the quiet west.
“‘Silas Wolcott is dreadful sot,’ as Grandma Brown says,” chimed in Ethan. “Many’s the time he’s been offered a good price, in hard cash, for this bit of pine, but his answer is always the same. ‘It’s been in the family for quite some time: I guess I won’t sell just yet.’
“You know, don’t you, that he’s never missed being in his bed by seven o’clock in the evening, winter or summer, for forty years? That’s just one of his little ways. He’s got lots of them; one’s drinking buttermilk three times a day, and another is never setting foot inside a church. I forget how that started, but they say he stood just outside an open window at Doris’ mother’s wedding! But for all that he’s a good-hearted old chap as ever lived, and I wish he was my uncle,” the boy ended, honestly enough.
And the stranger, who was already forgetting her strangeness, secretly echoed the wish.