"Oh, I guess he ain't hungry," she said, putting a morsel against the brown muzzle thrust from the shawl. "Everythin' was locked up last night, an' there warn't enough lunch for him an' me—see, he ain't for it. He knows when hunger stops an' greed begins. That's poetry they taught us."
"Tell us about that place you've been raised. No, stop—you're kind of peaked-looking. Settle down an' rest yourself till we pull up for dinner. I'll gabble on a bit if you'll give me a starter."
"I guess you favour birds an' things, don't you?" she observed, shrewdly.
"Yaw—do you?"
"Sometimes I think I'm a bird," she said, vehemently, "or a worm or somethin'. If I could 'a' caught one o' them crows this mornin' I'd 'a' hugged it an' kissed it. Ain't they lovely?"
"Well, I don' know about lovely," said the young man, in a judicial manner, "but the crow, as I take him, is a kind of long-suffering orphan among birds. From the minute the farmers turn up these furrows under the snow, the crow works like fury. Grubs just fly down his red throat, and grasshoppers ain't nowhere, but because he now and then lifts a hill o' petetters, and pulls a mite o' corn when it gets toothsome, and makes way once in so often with a fat chicken that's a heap better out o' the world than in it, the farmers is down on him, the Legislature won't protect him, and the crow—man's good friend—gets shot by everybody and everything!"
"I wish I was a queen," said the little girl, passionately.
"Well, sissy, if you ever get to be one, just unmake a few laws that are passed to please the men who have a pull. Here in Maine you might take the bounty off bob-cats, an' let 'em have their few sheep, an' you might stand between the mink and the spawning trout, and if you want to put a check on the robins who make war on the cherries an' strawberries, I guess it would be more sensible than chasing up the crows."
"I'm remarkin' that you don't beat your horse," said his companion, abruptly.