"Why, Rose!" said Hildegarde, laughing. "I didn't suppose you were ever naughty, even when you were a baby."
"Oh, indeed I was!" answered Rose; "just as naughty as any one else, I suppose. Did I ever tell you how I came near making poor Bubble deaf? That wasn't exactly naughty, because I didn't mean to do anything bad; but it was funny. I must have been about five years old, and I used to sit in a sort of little chair-cart that Father made for me. One day Mother was washing, and she set me down beside the baby's cradle (that was Bubble, of course), and told me to watch him, and to call her if he cried. Well, for a while, Mother said, all was quiet. Then she heard Baby fret a little, and then came a queer sort of noise, she could not tell what, and after that quiet again. So she thought what a nice, helpful little girl I was getting to be; and when she came in she said, 'Well, Pinkie, you stopped the baby's fretting, didn't you?'
"'Oh, yes, Mother!' I said, as pleased as possible. 'I roared in his ear!' You may imagine how frightened Mother was; but fortunately it did him no harm."
Here the road dipped down into a gully, and Dr. Abernethy had to pick his way carefully among loose stones. Presently the stone-walls gave place to a most wonderful kind of fence,—a kind that even country-bred Rose had never seen before. When the great trees, the giants of the old forest, had been cut, and the ground cleared for farm-lands and pastures, their stumps had been pulled up by the roots; and these roots, vast, many-branched, twisted into every imaginable shape, were locked together, standing edgewise, and tossing their naked arms in every direction.
"Oh, how wonderful!" cried Hildegarde. "Look, Rose! they are like the bones of some great monster,—a gigantic cuttlefish, perhaps. What huge trees they must have been, to have such roots as these!"
"Dear, beautiful things!" sighed Rose. "If they could only have been left! Isn't it strange to think of people not caring for trees, Hilda?"
"Yes!" said Hilda, meekly, and blushing a little. "It is strange now; but before last year, Rose, I don't believe I ever looked at a tree."
"Oh, before last year!" cried Rose, laughing. "There wasn't any 'before last year.' I had never heard of Shelley before last year. I had never read a ballad, nor a 'Waverley,' nor the 'Newcomes,' nor anything. Let's not talk about the dark ages. You love trees now, I'm sure."
"That I do!" said Hildegarde. "The oak best of all, the elm next; but I love them all."
"The pine is my favorite," said Rose. "The great stately king, with his broad arms; it always seems as if an eagle should be sitting on one of them. What was that line you told me the other day?—'The pine-tree spreads his dark-green layers of shade.' Tennyson, isn't it?"