At length, when he got pretty near her, he called out for her to stop and see what she had made him do.
"Did I make you do that?" said Malleville, looking at the rent, while Phonny stood with his foot extended, and pointing at it with his finger.
"Yes," said Phonny,—"because you hurried me."
"Well, I'm sorry;" said Malleville, looking very much concerned.
Phonny was put quite to a nonplus by this unexpected answer. He had expected to hear Malleville deny that it was her fault that he had torn his clothes, and was prepared to insist strenuously that it was; but this unlooked-for gentleness seemed to leave him not a word to say. So he walked along by the side of Malleville in silence.
"Was it a pretty bird's-nest?" said Malleville in a conciliatory tone, after a moment's pause.
"No," said Phonny. "It was not any bird's nest at all."
When the children reached the farm as they called it, Mary Erskine seated Phonny on the bed, and then drawing up her chair near to him, she took his foot in her lap and mended the rent so neatly that there was afterwards no sign of it to be seen.
Little Albert was at this time about three years old, and Bella was seven. Phonny, while Mary Erskine was mending his clothes, asked where the children were. Mary Erskine said that they had gone out into the fields with Thomas, to make hay. So Phonny and Malleville, after getting proper directions in respect to the way that they were to go, set off in pursuit of them.
They went out at a back-door which led to a beautiful walk under a long trellis, which was covered with honey-suckles and roses. Malleville stopped to get a rose, and Phonny to admire two humming-birds that were playing about the honey-suckles. He wished very much that he could catch one of them, but he could not even get near them. From the end of the trellis's walk the children entered a garden, and at the back side of the garden they went through a narrow place between two posts into a field. They walked along the side of this field, by a very pleasant path with high green grass and flowers on one side, and a wall with a great many raspberry bushes growing by it, and now and then little thickets of trees, on the other. The bushes and trees made the walk that they were going in very cool and shady. There were plenty of raspberries upon the bushes, but they were not yet ripe. Phonny said that when the raspberries were ripe he meant to come out to Mary Erskine's again and get some.