The whistling boy walked away, after having cross-questioned first one, and then another, and learned that they knew nothing. He was on his way to the woods for one of his long summer rambles. He felt a trifle lonely, and wished that the boys had asked him to sit down under the trees and have a good time with them.
JERRY ON ONE OF HIS SUMMER RAMBLES.
He would have liked to hear Ted's composition, he said to himself; the boy had a sweet face, and a head that looked as though he might be going to make a smart man, one of these days. What was the matter with those fellows, he wondered, that they were not more cordial?
He thought about it quite awhile, then plunged into the mosses and ferns and gathered some lovely specimens, which he arranged in the box he carried slung over his shoulder, and forgot all about the boys, and poor little Nan Decker. On the way home, in the glow of the setting sun, he thought of her again, and wondered if she had come, and if she would be a sorrowful and homesick little girl. It seemed queer to think of being homesick when one came home! But then, it was only a home in name; he had not lived next door to it for five weeks without discovering that, and the little girl's mother was dead! Poor Nan Decker! A shadow came over his bright face for a moment as he thought of this. His mother was dead. He resolved to speak a kind word to the little girl the very first time that he had a chance. And here in the moonlight was his chance.
He stopped whistling at last and spoke: "If it is anything about which I can help, I shall be very glad to do it." A kind, cheerful voice. Nettie looked up quickly and choked back her tears. She was not one to cry, if there were to be any lookers-on.
"I guess you are homesick," said the boy from, his horse's back; "and that isn't any wonder. I'm homesick myself, nearly every night, especially if it is moonlight. I don't know what there is about the moon that chokes a fellow up so, but I've noticed it often; but then I feel all right in the morning."
"Are you away from your home?"
"I should say I was! Or rather home has gone away from me. I haven't any home in particular, only my father, and he is away out in California. I couldn't go there with him, and since my school closed I am waiting here for him to come back. It is home, you know, wherever he is. He doesn't expect to be back yet for months. So you and I ought to be pretty good friends, we are such near neighbors. I live right next door to you. We ought to be introduced. You are Nannie Decker, I suppose, and I am Jerry Mack at your service. I don't wonder you are homesick; folks always are, the first night."
"My name is Nanette," said Nettie, gently, "but people who like me most always say Nettie: and it isn't being homesick that makes me feel so badly—though I am homesick; but it is being scared, and astonished, and, oh! everything. Nothing is as I thought it would be; and there are things about it that I did not understand at all, or maybe I wouldn't have come; and now I am here, I don't know what to do." She was very near crying again, in spite of a watcher.