The back yard was full of interest to her—when she could forget the weeds. Twenty times a day her mother came to the kitchen door to look up at her, and tell her how the work was going on; she knew what was cooking by the odors that came up to her and what all the noises meant, from the click of the egg-beater to the thud of the churn-dasher, and she saw old Mrs. Finch when she came to borrow baking powder, and the pedlars, and book-agents, and apple-tree men; but best of all she liked to watch for her father to come in to dinner and supper.
In blue flannel shirt and big straw hat, tired and dusty and warm, he never failed to look up and call: “Why, hello, you there, daughter?” just as if she were well, and had only run up stairs for a moment. And her weak, “I’m here, father,” made the sadness and the happiness of his life.
Nettie moved her head slightly, and gained a view of the pasture where three cows were feeding; she could not see the brook, but she knew that it ran through the pasture, and she knew there were blue lilies all along the brook, some of them growing in the water.
How she longed to see those lilies growing in the water!
She was only ten years old the last time she saw those lilies: she was driving home the cows at night, in her pink calico dress and stout leather shoes, with her father’s old straw hat on the back of her head, “a picture of a happy, healthy, country lassie,” her father thought as he watched her standing by the clump of lilies while she waited for the cows to drink. She was thinking she would gather a big bunch of the lilies as soon as they were opened the next morning—but the pet calf came behind her and butted her down, and her father carried home in his arms a helpless little daughter. And there were tiger lilies in bloom; she could not see the place where they were growing, but it was only a quarter of a mile away in a fence corner, such a patch of them! Oh, how she longed to see those tiger lilies growing! The last time she saw the tiger lilies was the Sunday before she said good-bye to the blue lilies—she was walking home alone from Sunday-school in white dress and blue ribbons, and brown kid shoes, and when she came to the fence corner with the great clump of tiger lilies, she thought of picking a large bunch of them, but just then she heard a noise behind her, and turning, saw a neighbor’s three little black and white pigs; they had followed her all the way from the corner, and it was so funny to think how she had walked along unconsciously, with those pigs in single file behind her, that she just stood and laughed, and then she clapped her hands at them and chased them back, and forgot all about the tiger lilies.
“Oh, blue lilies, oh, tiger lilies, I’ll never see you growing any more,” she sighed.
“Why, hello, daughter, you up there?” called the voice below her.
Nettie did not answer; she felt too discouraged to speak, but she looked down and tried to smile at her father.
Her father looked just as usual, only he had a scythe over his shoulder.
“I came in a little earlier to cut down your weeds,” he called cheerily.