“Stand still, do,” she urged, laying a bank bill on his cart. She, snapped her steel purse shut again, put it in her dress pocket, and indicated the bill with one finger. “I don't lay this here for your kindness to the children, you understand. You've got feelings, and know I'm more than obliged. But here are a lot of us, and you buy your provisions, so if you'll let us pay you for some, we'll eat and be thankful. Take the money and put it away.”
Thus commanded, J. D. returned cautiously to the other side of the cart, took the money and thrust it into his vest pocket without looking at it. He then smiled again at Grandma Padgett, as if the thought of propitiating her was uppermost in his mind.
“Now go on with your chicken-broiling,” she concluded, and he went on with it, keeping at a distance from her while she stood by the cart or when she sat down on a log by the fire.
“Here's your stick, Grandma,” said Robert Day, offering her a limb of paw paw, stripped of all its leaves.
Grandma Padgett took it in her hands, reduced its length and tried its limberness.
“If I had given my family such trouble when I's your age,” she said to Corinne and Robert, “I should have been sprouted as I deserved.”
They listened respectfully.
“Folks didn't allow their children to run wild then. They whipped them and kept them in bounds. I remember once father whipped brother Thomas for telling a falsehood, and made welts on his body.”
Corinne and Robert had heard this tale before, but their countenances, put on a piteous expression.
“You ought to have a sprouting,” concluded their guardian as if she did not know how to compromise with her conscience, “but since you meant to do a good turn instead of a bad one”—