“Would--would you mind saying that again, Alma?” asked Mrs. Kelsey at last timidly.
Alma turned with a start.
“Saying what, dearie?--oh, that nonsensical verse? Of course not! That’s only another way of saying ‘twinkle, twinkle, little star.’ Means just the same, only uses up a few more letters to make the words. Listen.” And she repeated the two, line for line.
“Oh!” said her mother faintly. “Er--thank you.”
“I--I guess I’ll go to bed,” announced Nathan Kelsey suddenly.
The next morning Alma’s pleadings were in vain. Mrs. Kelsey insisted that Alma should go about her sketching, leaving the housework for her own hands to perform. With a laughing protest and a playful pout, Alma tucked her sketchbook under her arm and left the house to go down by the river. In the field she came upon her father.
“Hard at work, dad?” she called affectionately. “Old Mother Earth won’t yield her increase without just so much labor, will she?”
“That she won’t,” laughed the man. Then he flushed a quick red and set a light foot on a crawling thing of many legs which had emerged from beneath an overturned stone.
“Oh!” cried Alma. “Your foot, father--your’re crushing something!”
The flush grew deeper.