"You know where your father's chopping to-day, don't you, Edie?" asked Mrs. Hazen, with a glance of affectionate pride at the sturdy little figure before her.
"Oh yes, mother," replied Edie, swinging around and pointing with her plump forefinger, stained by the juice of the raspberries she had just been picking, to the top of the hill that sloped upwards from the other side of the road. "Father's over there in the back pasture, near the blackberry patch."
"That's right, pet," said Mrs. Hazen, lifting up the bright face for a hearty kiss. "And now wouldn't you like to take him his dinner?"
"Indeed I would," cried Edie, dancing around and clapping her hands. "And may I stay with him until he comes home?"
"I suppose so—if he wants you," assented Mrs. Hazen. "But in that case you must come in and have your own dinner first."
A half-hour later, with a well-filled basket on her arm, and her mother's parting injunction not to loiter on the way in her ears, Edie set forth full of joy on her mission.
"She's a little thing to send so far," mused the mother, following the retreating figure with eyes full of tender concern. "But she does so love the woods, and seems to make her way through them like an Indian."
With heart as light as any bird chirping by the wayside, Edie hastened through the gate, across the road, between the lower bars of the pasture gate, and then, climbing the hill behind which lay the back pasture, entered the bush, in which her pink calico sun-bonnet soon vanished from view.
Mr. Hazen's farm stood on the very edge of civilization, in the northern part of New Brunswick. The most of his acres he had cleared himself, and he never lost an opportunity of hewing his way further and further into the mighty forest, whose billows of birch, pine, and hemlock rolled away northward, eastward, and westward for uncounted leagues.
This day he was working at a bunch of timber a little beyond the eastern edge of the clearing, called the "back pasture."