"Well, you're the curiousest child ever was!" exclaimed Lucinda. "Anybody'd think you got walkin' enough in a week without trampin' off this way."
Nelly did not reply. She felt a little guilty at letting Lucinda think it was only to find a pretty place she had gone; but she was sure it would not be best to tell anybody about the black stones till she had told her father. She had hid them all in a pile near the pine-tree whose branch she had broken down; and she meant to pick them up on her way home the next night. In the morning it looked to Nelly as if it never would be night, she was in such a hurry to see her father.
"Oh, Lucinda," she said, "do give me something to do! I don't want to go off to-day. I want to stay with you." So Lucinda gave her some brown towels to hem, and also let her snap the chalked cord with which she marked off the pattern on her quilt; and, by help of these two occupations, Nelly contrived to get through the day, till four o'clock, when she set out for home. As good luck would have it, when she was within quarter of a mile from home she saw her father at work in a field. She jumped over the fence and ran to him.
"Papa! papa!" she said, breathless: "look here!" And she held up her basket of black stones. "This is the kind of stone that comes where the silver is. There is a mine underneath it always: Mr. Kleesman said so. And I've found a mine: I'll show you where it is."
Mr. March laughed very heartily.
"Why, my dear little girl!" he said, "what ever put such an idea into your head? I don't believe those stones are good for any thing."
Nelly set down her basket, and pulled her pocket-handkerchief out of her pocket: the little piece of black stone she had got from Mr. Kleesman was tied firmly in one corner.
"Look at that, papa," she said, "and see if the stones in the basket are not just like it." Then she told her father all about the man's coming into the assayer's office with a bag of stones like that one, and what Mr. Kleesman said to him.
"Don't you see, papa," she said, vehemently, "that it must be a mine? Why, there are piles of it: it has all slipped down into the bottom of this steep place; there used to be a brook down there. I know it's a mine, papa! And if I found it, it's ours: isn't it?"
Nelly's cheeks were red, and her words came so fast they almost choked her.