"Not this year, you forget your new teacher, Budd. She boards around, and it's the Mountain's year, so she is at Lemuel's now."
"Oh, good!" cried Budd enthusiastically. "She 's a daisy. I know you 'll like her, Hazel. All the fellows are awfully soft on her, though--bring her butternut candy, an' sharpen her pencils, an' black the stove, an' wash off the black-board; an' I saw Billy Nye sneak out the other day and wipe the mud off her rubbers with his paper lunch-bag! Catch me doing it, though," he added, his chest swelling rather pompously as he straightened himself and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his knickerbockers.
"Why not?" his mother asked with an amused smile.
"Oh, coz," was Budd's rather sheepish reply, and thereupon he followed Chi out to the barn, whistling "Dixie" with might and main.
XIV
THE LOST NATION
The four families on Mount Hunger were known to the towns about as The Lost Nation. Two of them, the Blossoms and the Spillkinses, were, in reality, lumber-dealers rather than farmers. The third, Lemuel Wood, had a sheep farm, and Aunt Tryphosa Little with her granddaughter, Maria-Ann, was the fourth. The two women owned a spruce wood-lot and let it out to men who cut the bark. They cultivated a small garden-patch of corn, beans, and squash, kept a cow and a few hens, and eked out their scanty income with a day's work here and there in fine weather.
Every two weeks they did the washing and ironing for the Blossom family, as Mrs. Blossom's cares were too heavy for her, and she felt that not only could she afford it this year, but that in putting it out she was giving a little help to her poorer neighbors.
Chi or March took the huge basket of linen over on the wagon or sledge, and always left with it a neighborly gift--a peck of fine russets or greenings, a bunch of celery, a pound or two of salt pork, a bunch of delicious parsnips, or a dozen eggs when the old dame's hens were moulting. Aunt Tryphosa and Maria-Ann were not to be outdone in neighborly kindnesses, and, regularly, the willow basket, full to overflowing with snow-white clothes, was returned with something tucked away under the square covering of oil-cloth--a tiny bunch of sage or summer savory, an ironing-holder made of bits of bright calico or woollen rags, a little paper-bag of spruce gum, a pair of woollen wristers for Mr. Blossom or Chi, a new recipe for spring bitters with a sample of the herbs--sassafras, dockroot, thoroughwort, wintergreen, and dandelion--gathered by Aunt Tryphosa herself.
They had one cow which they regarded as the third member of their family. She had been named Dorcas, after Aunt Tryphosa's mother, and proved a model animal of her kind. She gave a more than ordinary amount of creamy milk; presented her mistress with a sturdy calf each year; never hooked or kicked; never, during the bitter winter weather, grew restless in her small shed which adjoined the woodshed, and never broke from pasture in the sweet-smelling summer-time.