"She's talkin' kinder now, Mary. The fresh air and the wind through the trees is beginnin' to tell on her. Give me another cup of tea for her."
CHAPTER X
THE NEW PUPILS
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Has had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar,
Not in entire forgetfulness, not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God—who is our Home.
——Wordsworth.
WHEN school opened after the Easter holiday, the Watson family began to attend. It was two miles to the bare little schoolhouse at the cross-roads. The road lay straight across the prairie, green now with the tender green of spring, and dotted thick with blue anemones. A prairie fire, the fall before, had burned away all the old grass, and so everywhere the country was of the richest dazzling green, varied only in the shades—the tender, soft green of the young wheat, the bluish green of the oat-fields, with here and there splendid groves of poplars, making a scene which, to Pearl's eyes, was of untold beauty.
Away to the south the Tiger Hills were veiled in blue smoke, as if some distant prairie fire was raging through the meadows beyond. Across the long reach of upland pasture—swiftly and almost noiselessly—swept the mixed train of the Canadian Northern, its huge smoke plume standing straight up in the morning air, white and gray like billows of chiffon, suddenly changing to deepest black.
"They're stokin' up for the grade," Jimmy said, as he stood watching it. Jimmy had not stolen rides on freight-cars without learning something.
Danny, although not quite of school age, was with the party because he refused to stay at home. Aunt Kate encouraged him in the idea, and made him a pair of pants and fixed up a striped sweater of Bugsey's for him. So Danny, fully clothed in boy's attire, was very much in evidence.
When they were crossing the fire-guard around the school, Bugsey grew faint-hearted and began to cry. "I'm feart he'll bate me," he whimpered.