This extended all the way up the main trunk and all but out through the top. Here and there it pierced through the outer bark, so that slants of pale light served to carry the eye up and up until it became lost in inky blackness. Now and then dust and little showers of dry rot descended softly upon the upturned face; and if you put your ear close to the wood you could hear, as through the receiver of a telephone, things that were going on among the upper branches; as when the breeze puffed up and they sighed and creaked together. I could hear a squirrel scampering and a woodpecker at work—or so I guessed, though it sounded more like a watch ticking. I made several essays to climb up the hollow, but the knotholes and crevices, and odds and ends of support, were too far removed from each other for the length of my limbs, and, furthermore, my efforts seemed to shake the whole tree and bring down whole smarting showers of dust and dry rot and even good-sized fragments. I got up a few feet, lost my hold, and fell into the soft, punky nest at the bottom.
"Can't you climb up?" said Ellen, who had recovered her temper by now. "Because somebody has climbed up and stuck an ol' shoe out of a knothole way up."
I climbed out of the hollow and followed her point. Sure enough—thirty feet or so from the ground the toe of a much-used leather boot stuck out through a knothole.
Mary refused to take an interest in the boot. It was high time we went home. She herself had a headache. Our mother would be angry with her for taking us on the forbidden farm. She was sorry she had done so. No, she wasn't angry. We were good children; she loved us. Wouldn't we come?
"I'll tell you," said she, and her face, which looked sick and pale, colored, "if you'll come now, and hurry, we'll just have time to stop on the bridge and have some races."
And sure enough, when we got to the bridge Mary produced a stained sheet of paper, and tore it quickly into little bits of pieces (we were pressed for time) and launched pair after pair of sea-going racers upon the swirling tide.
When the last pair were gone upon their merry career she drew a long breath, and seemed as one relieved of a weight.
"Perhaps," she said, "you needn't tell your mother where you've been—unless she asks you. Do you think that would be wrong?"
I had never known Mary to suggest deceit of any kind.
"If you think it would get you into trouble," said my sister, aged eight, very stiffly, "why, of course, we won't say anything."