"Yes, they are good children," said Mr. March: "good children; but I don't want them to get possessed with this desire for money." And he looked anxiously up the hill, where he could see Rob and Nelly striking off from the road, and picking their way across the rough ground towards a great pile of gray ore, which had been thrown out of one of the mines.
Long Billy also looked up at them.
"The little sarpents!" he said. "They're a makin' for the Pocahontas mine, straight. Rob, he was askin' me all about the piles o' ore 'n' the engines in the mines, yesterday."
"Is there any danger of their being hurt?" said Mr. March.
"Oh, no! I reckon not. That Nelly, she's jest the same's a grown woman. I allers notice her a holdin' the little feller back. She won't go into any resky places no more'n her ma would. She's got a heap o' sense, that little gal has."
While Mr. March and the children were away, Mrs. March sat at the west window of her room, looking off into the beautiful valley. I wish I could make you see just how it looked from her window; however, no picture can show it, and I suppose no words can tell it; but if you really want to try to imagine how it looked just ask somebody who is with you while you are reading this page, to explain to you how high a thousand feet would seem to you. If you can see the spire of the church, and can know just how high that is, that will help you get an idea of a thousand feet. Then you can imagine that you are looking off between two high hills, right down into a bit of green valley one thousand feet lower down than you are. Then try to imagine that this bit of green valley looked very small; and that, beyond it, there were grand high mountains, half covered with snow. The lower half of the mountains looked blue: on a sunny day, mountains always look blue in the distance; and the upper half was dazzling white. This is the best I can do towards making you see the picture which Mrs. March saw as she sat at her western window. After all, I think Nelly's sentence was worth more than all mine, when she said, "Oh, papa, it looks like a beautiful green bottom to a deep well." The picture was so beautiful that Mrs. March did not want to do anything but sit and look at it, and when her husband returned from his walk in the village, she was really astonished to find that she had sat at the window two whole hours without moving. The children did not come home until noon. Their faces were red and their eyes shone with excitement: they had had a fine time; they had rambled on from one mine to another on the hill; wherever they saw a pile of the gray ore, and a yellow pine building near it, they had gone into the building and looked into the shaft down which the miners went into the ground. They had found kind men everywhere who had answered all their questions; and Rob had both his pockets full of pieces of stone with beautiful colors, like a peacock's neck. Rob had forgotten the name of the stone: so had Nelly.
"It sounded something like prophets," said Nelly, "but it couldn't have been that"; she handed a bit of the stone to Long Billy.
"Oh," said he, glancing at it carelessly, "that's nothing but pyrites; that's no account; they'll give you all you want of that."
"I don't care:" said Rob, "it's splendid. I'm going to make a museum, and I shall have the shelves full of it. But, mamma," he said sadly, "there isn't any use in our looking for a mine. When I told one of the men that we were going to see if we couldn't find a mine, he just laughed, and he said that every inch of the ground all round here belonged to people that thought they'd got mines. All those little bits of piles of stones, with just a stick stuck up by them, every one of those means that a man's been digging there to find silver; and they're just as thick! why, you can't go ten steps without coming on one! They call them 'claims.'"
"That's so," said Long Billy; "and I'll tell ye what I call 'em. I call 'em gravestones, them little sticks stuck up on stone heaps: that's what most on 'em are, graves where some poor feller's buried a lot o' hope and some money."