have heard my father say she lay awake that night, and when he asked her why she could not sleep he found she was fretting about the pink thorn.
“It looked so pretty to-day, my dear; and thorns are so bad to move!”
My father knew her too well to hope to console her by joking about it. He said gravely: “There’s plenty of time yet, love. The boys are only just in trousers; and we may think of some way to spare it before we come to bricks and mortar.”
“I’ve thought of it every way, my dear, I’m afraid,” said my mother with a sigh. But she had full confidence in my father—a trouble shared with him was half cured, and she soon fell asleep.
She certainly had a vivid imagination, though it never was cultivated to literary ends. Perhaps, after all, I inherited that idle fancy, those unsatisfied yearnings of my restless heart, from her! Mental peculiarities are said to come from one’s mother.
It was Jem who inherited her sweet temper.
Dear old Jem! He and I were the best of good friends always, and that sweet temper of his had no doubt much to do with it. He was very much led by me, though I was the younger, and whatever mischief we got into it was always my fault.
It was I who persuaded him to run away from school, under the, as it proved, insufficient disguise of
walnut-juice on our faces and hands. It was I who began to dig the hole which was to take us through from the kitchen-garden to the other side of the world. (Jem helped me to fill it up again, when the gardener made a fuss about our having chosen the asparagus-bed as the point of departure, which we did because the earth was soft there.) In desert islands or castles, balloons or boats, my hand was first and foremost, and mischief or amusement of every kind, by earth, air, or water, was planned for us by me.
Now and then, however, Jem could crow over me. How he did deride me when I asked our mother the foolish question—“Have bees whiskers?”