Sometimes when alone she slipped off her clothes and ran amid the tall corn-stalks like a wild thing. Her slim little brown body slipped among the leaves like a weasel in the grass. Some secret, strange delight, drawn from ancestral sources, bubbled over from her pounding heart, and she ran and ran until wearied and sore with the rasping corn leaves, then she sadly put on civilized dress once more.
Her feet were brown as toads, but graceful and small, and she washed them (when the dew was heavy enough) by running in the wet grass just before going in to bed, a trick the boys of the neighborhood had taught her. She ran forward to clean the insteps and backward to clean the heels. If the grass was not wet, she omitted the ceremony. Dust was clean anyhow. Her night-gowns were of most sorry pattern till her aunt came; thereafter they were clean, though it mattered little. They were a nuisance anyway.
She wore a pink sun-bonnet, when she could find one; generally there were two or three hanging on the fences at remote places. She sat down in the middle of the road, because she had a lizard's liking for the warm soft dust, and she paddled in every pool and plunged her hand into every puddle after frogs and bugs and worms, with the action of a crane.
She ate everything that boys did. That is to say, she ate sheep sorrel, Indian tobacco, roots of ferns, May apples, rose leaves, rose-buds, raw turnips, choke-cherries, wild crab-apples, slippery elm bark, and the green balls on young oak trees, as well as the bitter acorns. These acorns she chewed into pats, and dried in the sun, to eat at other times, like a savage.
She ate pinks and grass blades, and green watermelons, and ground cherries, and black-haws, and dew-berries, and every other conceivable thing in the woods and fields, not to mention the score of things which she tried and spit out. She became inured to poison ivy like the boys and walked the forest paths without fear of anything but snakes.
Summer was one continuous and busy play-spell for her in those days before her lessons became a serious thing, for as she sat in school she was experimenting in the same way. She chewed paper into balls and snapped them like the boys. She carried slips of elm bark to chew also, and slate pencils she crunched daily. She gnawed the corners of her slate, tasted her ink and munched the cedar of her pencil.
And through it all she grew tall and straight and brown. She could run like a partridge and fight like a wild-cat, at need. Her brown-black eyes shone in her dark warm skin with an eager light, and her calloused little claws of hands reached and took hold of all realities.
The boys respected her as a girl who wasn't afraid of bugs, and who could run, and throw a ball. Above all she was strong and well.