“Why, my child, you’ll soon be a Crœsus at that rate,” laughed the good Doctor.
“I really need the money for a new dress,” pursued Stella, who was thoroughly in earnest. “Miss Frost, the dressmaker, would like to have me help her in my spare time; I can make good buttonholes, and she’ll pay me thirty cents a dozen. But I would so much rather do something out-of-doors. You see, I am indoors nearly all the time, with my books and the housework, and I’m starving for some fresh air.”
“Ahem!” The Doctor cleared his throat and took the matter under consideration. He would have dearly liked to put his big, generous hand in his pocket and buy the new dress, but he was half afraid the child wouldn’t take it—or, even if she would, how about that dawning sense of personal independence? No, no! let her earn the dress, especially since she was wisely choosing the open-air tasks that should soon restore its color and roundness to the eager, appealing young face.
“Sensible girl!” he approved. “Do you know, Stella, those dandelion roots you are digging have medicinal value? The wholesale drug-stores will pay you a few cents a pound for them, when they’re properly washed and dried. There’s burdock, too, and tansy, and—let me see—wild mustard and boneset, beside several more. You must gather the seed-pods of the mustard, and the leaves and tops of boneset and tansy. They’re all worth money; and all as common as dirt hereabouts. The farmers ought to pay you, too, for helping to get rid of them; almost every one I’ve named is a troublesome pest.”
“Oh, Doctor Brown! How perfectly splendid!” Stella clasped her long, brown hands eagerly, still kneeling on the soft turf, and once more the dull glow crept up in her quiet cheek. “I know them all now except the tansy, and you’ll show me that, won’t you? And tell me just where to take them. It will be exactly what my own mother and her mother must have done many a time—digging roots and herbs for medicine. There’s nothing else in the whole world I should like so much.”
“Yes, it was I set her up in business, and a fair sort of business it’s turning out,” chuckled the Doctor some three months later, from the depths of his shabby easy chair. “Not a fortune in it, of course; but she makes seventy-five cents or a dollar many days, with Cynthia’s help. Why aren’t you out with them, Doris? Afraid of a freckle or two my girl? Well, health is beauty, and their long days in the sun and air, close to the life-giving earth, will be worth more than a fortune to them.”
Doris tossed her pretty head, from her favorite perch in the broad window-seat, where she was putting careful stitches in the daintiest of shirt waists.
“The hot sun and the stooping over give me a headache,” she complained. She loved Jibby as much as ever, of course, but the sacrifice of that apple-blossom complexion to the Sun-God was too much to expect.
“When I was a girl,” her mother observed, “I used to be told that it made a young girl coarse and blowsy to expose her skin to the wind and sun. Why, I never thought of going out in summer without shade-hat, gloves and a veil; and nowadays the girls won’t wear any one of them.”