"I know what we all want," she said; "some apples. Stay here all of you, and I'll run in and get them. I won't be but a minute."
"Mayn't I come too?" asked the inseparable Bessie.
"Yes, do, and you can help me carry 'em. Don't tell any stories while we're gone, girls. Come along, Bess."
Wealthy happened to be in the buttery, skimming cream, so no one spied them as they ran through the kitchen and down the cellar stairs. The cellar was a very large one. In fact, there were half a dozen cellars opening one into the other, like the rooms of a house. Wood and coal were kept in some of them, in others vegetables, and there was a swinging shelf where stood Wealthy's cold meat, and odds and ends of food. All the cellars were dark at this hour of the afternoon, very dark, and Bessie held Eyebright's hand tight, as, with the ease of one who knew the way perfectly, she sped toward the apple-room.
In the blackest corner of all, Eyebright paused, fumbled a little on an almost invisible shelf with a jar which had a lid and clattered, and then handed to her friend a dark something whose smell and taste showed it to be a pickled butternut.
"Wealthy keeps her pickles here," she said, "and she lets me take one now and then, because I helped to prick the butternuts when she made 'em. I got my fingers awfully stained too. It didn't come off for almost a month. Aren't they good?"
"Perfectly splendid!" replied Bessie, as her teeth met in the spicy acid oval. "I do think butternut pickles are just too lovely!"
The apple-room had a small window in it, so it was not so dark as the other cellars. Eyebright went straight to a particular barrel.
"These are the best ones that are left," she said. "They are those spotty russets which you said you liked, Bessie. Now, you take four and I'll take four. That'll make just one apiece for each of us."
"How horrid it would be," said Bessie, as the two went upstairs again with the apples in their aprons,—"how horrid it would be if a hand should suddenly come through the steps and catch hold of our ankles."