"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."
"Somebody'll have to git 'em pretty soon, or the bugs'll have the 'taters," declared her cousin. "Say! you'd ought to have somethin' besides your fingers ter scratch around them plants."
"Yes, and a pair of old gloves, Marty," agreed Janice, ruefully.
"Huh! Ain't that a girl all over? Allus have ter be waited on. I wisht you'd been a boy cousin—I jest do! Then we'd git these 'taters done 'fore night."
"And how about getting the carrots weeded, Marty?" she returned, laughing at him.
Marty grunted. But when he finished the second row he threw down his hoe and disappeared through the garden gate. Janice wondered if he had deserted her—and the potatoes—for the afternoon; but by and by he returned, bringing a little three-fingered hand-weeder, and tossed on the ground beside her a pair of old kid gloves—evidently his mother's.
"Oh, thank you, Marty!" cried Janice. "I don't mind working, but I hated to tear my fingers all to pieces."