“Free transportation and exchange of farms,� said Donald.
“Yes; again, we have a fine crop of grain or corn nearly in ear, when there will come a hot wind and sear the leaves like a fire. We are never quite sure, or able to prognosticate here for the future, whether we will have corn, beans, and potatoes to eat, beans and potatoes, or whether it will be beans alone.�
“And you sometimes have real fires,� said Mrs. Clyne. “I have worried about them ever since the one you wrote me about, which Lissa fought. How did you do it, dear?�
“Really, I don’t know. I was so frightened that I didn’t have time to think. The grass was not so high on this side of the river or I don’t know what might have happened.�
“Lissa aided in turning the fire. I doubt if it would have spared us otherwise,� said Nathan.
“I shall always believe it a real miracle that time,� said Lissa. “It was only a day or two before that that Nathan had brought the calves around to crop the grass before the house. Had it not been for that, it surely would have burned. And who inspired him to bring them just when he did?�
“I think you all learned something that time,� said Alice. “You have since followed Mark’s example and kept the grass cut around the house. But there’s always danger in the fall, when the weeds are high in the outlying fields.�
“When Mr. Elmer’s house was burned it was nearly as terrifying. Nathan was thirty-five miles from home, and men came across the fields and lighted back fires for me. The wind was driving the flames up from the south and burning corn-fields and houses by the way,� Lissa said.
“How dreadful! You sometimes have it very cold here also,� said Mrs. Clyne.
“Yes, but we are used to that, and our houses are warm. Don’t worry about that, mother.�