“Where are you going, my pretty maid, and why the step ladder?” said Nyoda to Migwan one morning. “Have your beans grown up so high over night that you have to climb a ladder to pick them?”
“Come and see!” said Migwan, mysteriously. Nyoda followed her to the front lawn. Migwan set the ladder up beside a dead tree, from which the branches had been sawn, leaving a slender trunk about seven feet high. On top of this Migwan proceeded to nail a flat board.
“Are you going to live on a pillar, like St. Simeon Stylites?” asked Nyoda, curiously, as Migwan mounted the ladder with a basin of water in her hand.
“O come, Nyoda,” said Migwan, “don’t you know a bird bathtub when you see one?”
“A bathtub, is it?” said Nyoda. “Now I breathe easily again. But why so extremely near the earth?”
Migwan laughed at her chaffing. “You have to put them high up,” she explained, “or else the cats get the birds when they are bathing. Mr. Landsdowne told me how to make it.” The other girls wandered out and inspected the drinking fountain-bathtub. Hinpoha closed one eye and looked critically at the outfit.
“Doesn’t it strike you as being a little inharmonious?” she asked. “Black stump, unfinished wood platform, and blue enamel basin.”
“Paint the platform and basin dark green,” said Sahwah, the practical. “There is some green paint down cellar, I saw it. Let me paint it. I can do that much for the birds, even if I didn’t think of building them a drinking fountain.” She sped after the paint and soon transformed the offending articles so that they blended harmoniously with the surroundings.
“It’s better now,” said Nyoda, thoughtfully, “but it’s still crude and unbeautiful. What is wrong?”
“I know,” said Hinpoha, the artistic one. “It’s too bare. It looks like a hat without any trimming. What it needs is vines around it.”