"I'm nature's thing," Dorothy laughed; "father said so to-day. He said I was made out of nature and poetry."
"It's he who puts the poetry in you; some day I'll send those poetry books adrift, and then you will both find something practical in your finger ends."
The child looked at the chubby ends of her brown fingers. Her nine-year-old hands, under her mother's sharp teaching, had learned to do many practical things. The only "practical thing" she loathed—and that was her own name for it—was mending Cousin Jack's pea-jacket.
One room in the lighthouse was packed with boxes containing her father's books. The "poetry box" was the only one that had been opened since their stay on the island.
"It was one of your father's beautiful things to strand us on this desert island. I told him I wouldn't come."
"But you did," said the child.
"It's the last time he will have his own way," remarked the woman, with the heavy frown that marred her handsome face.
"Oh, don't say that!" cried Dorothy distressed. "I never like your way."
"You have got to like my way some day, miss, or it will be the worse for one of us. Don't hang any longer around your father; poetry enough has oozed out of him to spoil you already; go and pick those beans over, and put them in soak for to-morrow—a quart, mind you, and pick them over clean."