In plunged the boy and up s-s-cissed a cloud of mosquitoes, humming at the sound of the new-come feast; fresh flesh and blood from the uplands was desirable.
The grass was green, very green—lovely, bright, light green; the July sun shone down untiringly; the tide rushing up from Raritan Bay met the tide rolling over from Newark Bay, and the cool, sweet swash of water snaked along the stout sedge, making it sway and bend as though the wind were sweeping its tops.
When within the queer infolding, boy, cow, and calf had disappeared, Anna called: “I’ll run now and keep watch and tell you when the soldiers are gone.”
“No, you won’t!” shrieked back her brother; “you’ll stay here, and help me, or the skeeters will kill the critters. Bring me the biggest bush you can find, and fetch one for yourself.”
Anna always obeyed Valentine. It was a way she had. He liked it, and, generally speaking, she didn’t greatly dislike it, but her dress was thinner than his coat, and the happy mosquitoes knew she was fairer and sweeter than her Dutch brother, and didn’t mind telling her so in the most insinuating fashion possible. On this occasion, as she had in so many other unlike instances, she acceded to his request; toiling backward up 140 the ascent and fetching thence an armful of the stoutest boughs she could twist from branches.
She neared the marsh on her return. All that she could discern was a straw hat bobbing hither and thither; the horns of a cow tossing to and fro; the tail of a cow lashing the air.
A voice she heard, shouting forth in impatient bursts of sound, “Anna, Anna Kull!”
“Here! I’m coming,” she responded.
“Hurry up! I’m eaten alive. Snow’s crazy and Sleet’s a lunatic,” shouted her brother, jerking the words forth between the vain dives his hand made into the cloud of wings in the air.
“Sakes alive!” said poor Anna, toiling from sedge bog to sedge bog with her burden of “bushes” and striving to hide her face from the mosquitoes as she went.