"Oh, we got a horse-hoe," said Marty, without interest. "But it got broke an' Dad ain't fixed it yet. B'sides, ye couldn't use it 'twixt these rows. They're too crooked. But then—as the feller said—there's more plants in a crooked row."
"What's all that?" demanded Janice, waving a hand toward the other half of the garden.
"Weeds—mostly. Right there's carrots. Marm always will plant carrots ev'ry spring; but they git lost so easy in the weeds."
"I know carrots," cried Janice, brightly. "Let me weed 'em," and she dropped on her knees at the beginning of the rows.
"Help yourself!" returned Marty, plying the hoe. "But it looks to me as though them carrots had just about fainted."
It looked so to Janice, too, when she managed to find the tender little plants which, coming up thickly enough in the row, now looked as livid as though grown in a cellar. The rank weeds were keeping all the sun and air from them.
"I can find them, just the same," she confided to Marty, when he came back up the next row. "And I'd better thin them, too, as I go along, hadn't I?"
"Help yourself," repeated the boy. "But pickin' 'tater bugs wouldn't be as bad as that, to my mind."
"'Every one to his fancy,
And me to my Nancy.'
as the old woman said when she kissed her cow," quoted Janice, laughing. "You can have the bugs, Marty."