Bessie was the only child of a poor widow. The mother and daughter lived alone together in a small house, about half a mile from Nelly's home.
Bessie's father died when she was quite young, so young that she did not remember him. There was a portrait of him, which her mother kept in her top bureau drawer in her own room. Occasionally the little girl was allowed to look at it. It made her feel very sad to do so, and the tears rose in her eyes whenever she thought of what her mother must have suffered in so great a loss. In the hard task which fell to that mother of supporting herself and her child, she did not murmur. Before her husband's death, she had lived in very comfortable circumstances, but this did not unfit her to work for her living afterwards.
She gathered and sent fruit to market from her little place, she made butter and sold it to whomever cared to buy, she knit stockings for her neighbors' children, and, every winter, quilted to order at least one dozen patchwork counterpanes, with wonderful yellow calico suns in their centre. By these means she contrived to keep out of debt, and amass a little sum besides. At the commencement of our story, however, a severe fit of illness had so wasted her strength and devoured her little means, that the poor widow felt very much discouraged. The approach of winter filled her with dread, for she knew that it would be to her a time of great suffering.
Still, feeble as she was, she managed to continue, but very irregularly, Bessie's reading and writing lessons. Bessie was not a promising scholar; she liked to do any thing in the world but study. She would look longingly out of the window a dozen times in the course of a single lesson, and when her mother reproved her by rapping her rather smartly on the head with her thimble, Bessie would only laugh, and say she guessed her skull must be thick, for the lesson would not get through, and the thimble did not hurt a bit!
Bessie, and Nellie Brooks, of whom my readers have heard in the former stories of this series, were very much attached to each other. Bessie was younger than Nellie, but that did not stand in the way of their affection. Nellie, imperfect as she was herself, used to try sometimes to teach Bessie how to improve her wild ways. Bessie would listen and listen, as grave as a cat watching a rat hole, but her little eyes would twinkle in the midst of the reproof, and she would burst into a merry shout, and say, "I do declare, Nell, it isn't any use at all to talk to me about being any better. I'm like the little birds; they're born to fly and sing, and I'm born to be horrid and naughty, and dance, and cry, and laugh, just when I shouldn't,—there! I can't be good, anyway. Sometimes I try, and mother looks as pleased as can be, and all at once, before I know it, I flounder straight into mischief again."
One beautiful autumn day, Nellie and Bessie went nutting in the woods. Each of the little girls had a basket on her arm, and Bessie had a bag besides; for they had great hopes of coming home heavily loaded. It was early in October. The leaves of the trees had begun to fall, but those that remained were bright with many colors, the crimson of the maple trees particularly, making the whole woods look gay. A soft, golden mist, such as we only see at this season of the year, hung over every thing, and veiled even the glitter of a little river which flowed past the village and coursed onward to the ocean.
At first the children met with very little success. The first few nut-trees they encountered had evidently been visited by some one before. The marks of trampling feet were visible on the damp ground beneath, and the branches had been stripped in such rude haste as to take away both the leaves and the fruit.
"We'll meet better luck further back in the woods," said Nell; "this is too near home. The village people can come here too easily for us to expect to find any thing."
They walked further on in very good spirits, climbing over rocks when they came to them, and swinging their empty baskets in time to snatches of songs which they sang together. They had gone in this way about a mile, when suddenly Bessie stopped, and fixed her eyes searchingly on something near them in the grass.