"Oh, dear," sighed Rob. "If only you good people didn't shame others into being good, too! I suppose I ought to take some work—I'll shell the peas!" This was a heroic resolve, for Aunt Azraella, in an unwonted fit of generosity, had sent the Greys half a bushel of peas from her abundance, to be canned for winter use, and the shelling them was a formidable undertaking.
Rob pulled out the big basket of peas, and Basil and Bruce, each seizing a handle, bore it forth. Rob followed with her big pan; Prue, in the glory of her spotless raiment and the importance of sitting for her portrait, could not be expected to carry more than her own weight, so Rob had to hang the basket intended for pods across her shoulders, and walked immediately behind Basil and Bruce, beating wildly on her pan.
Prue, holding up her skirts daintily, walked beside Bartlemy, with his artist's paraphernalia, as Oswyth, with her pretty sweet-grass work-basket, brought up the rear, as calm and fair as always.
Down to the orchard they went, and to Bartlemy, as the one it concerned, was left the selection of place. Finally he placed Prue to his satisfaction—and greatly to her own—in the fork of a picturesquely shaped old appletree, and fell back to regard her in approved artist fashion, head on one side, and with one eye closed.
Then he set up his easel, and the rest disposed of themselves on the grass, regardless of creatures that crawled.
Basil and Bruce—as perhaps she had expected—volunteered to help Rob in her task, and sitting opposite each other, placed the empty basket between their knees, while Rob sat beside them, where she could reach supplies, with the bright pan in her lap, into which the peas were soon hailing under the swift work of thirty fingers.
Oswyth began to darn, sitting a little apart, but almost forgetting her work in the interest of watching Bartlemy sketch in the outline of the appletree and Prue's slender figure, with swift, sure strokes. Whatever Bartlemy might prove as a colorist, he unmistakably could draw.
"When the little busy B's
Turn their minds to shelling peas,"
began Rob in a cheerful sing-song, but got no further, for Bruce interrupted her, carrying on her stanza,
"'Neath the leadership of Rob,
What's a half-bushel job?"