“She’s perfectly wonderful,” Kit declared that day at lunch. “She knows the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white trillium and bloodroot, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn’t let us pick many either, only a few. She says it’s just as cruel to rob a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it is to rob birds’ nests.”
Here Doris chimed in.
“And she’s going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a book, Mom. We’re going to take some of that monk’s cloth and mount specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed sheepskin.”
“Sally seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities,” said Mrs. Craig amusedly.
“She is just exactly that,” Kit answered earnestly. “I never met a girl with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they’re as poor as churchmice. Sally told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Elmhurst without any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell her how to do it.”
“Sally’s going to peddle our rhubarb for us,” Kit went on. “I think that rhubarb is a most wonderful plant. It seems to spring up everywhere and pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Sally told me it was rhubarb, and we’re going to market it. She says there’s a big cranberry bog on this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking anything at all about it. So we’re going to watch the old wood road that turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mom, from the window over the kitchen sink, and heaven help anybody who takes our cranberries!”
“I wouldn’t start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won’t be along until frost,” laughed Mrs. Craig.
Tommy, with Buzzy’s help, was devoting himself to the hens. Although they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Tommy had several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the “coming offs,” as Buzzy put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff in the brooder from Rebecca’s incubator, and over these Tommy fussed and wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved.
One of “Ma” Parmelee’s pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard, or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.
Jean named her “Hamlet” in fun, because she said she was always looking for “rats in the arras.” But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she didn’t have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that she didn’t even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was appear promptly at mealtime and eat her share.