"I have no objection to pick up nuts for mother, not even for Mr. Simlins," said Faith smiling. "And I am not afraid of the boys—I know half of them, you know. Thank you, Mr. Linden!"
"You might, if I could take you up into the tree-top. There is fine reading on those upper shelves."
Her eye shewed instantly that she liked that 'higher' fun best—not the tree-top, verily, but the reading, that she could not get at. Yet for Faith there were charms plenty below the tree-tops, in both kinds; and she looked very happy.
"Well"—Mr. Linden said, "as the successful meeting of one emergency always helps us in the next, and as it is quite impossible to tell what you may meet under those nut trees,—let me give you a little abstract of Catherine Douglass, before you read it and before I go. The said lady wishing to keep the door against sundry lords and gentle men who came with murderous intent against her sovereign; and finding no bar to aid her loyal endeavours,—did boldly thrust her own arm through the stanchions of the door. To be sure—'the brave lady's arm was soon broken,'—but after all, what did that signify?"
And with a laughing gesture of farewell, he once more left the house. With which cessation of murmuring voices, Mrs. Derrick awoke from her after dinner nap in the rocking chair. Faith was standing in the middle of the floor, smiling and looking in a puzzle.
"Mother, will you go over to the nutting again?"
"I'm a great deal more likely to go to sleep again," said Mrs. Derrick rubbing her eyes. "It's the sleepiest place I ever saw in my life—or else it's having nothing to do. I don't doubt you're half asleep too, Faith, only you won't own it."
The decision was, that Mrs. Derrick preferred to sit quiet in the house; she said she would maybe run down by and by and see what they were at. So Faith took her sunbonnet, kissed her mother; and went forth with light step over the meadow and through the orchard.
The nutting party she found a little further on in the same edge of woodland. It seemed that they had pitched upon a great chestnut for her tree; and Faith was half concerned to see what a quantity of work they had given themselves on her account. However, the proverb of 'many hands' was verified here; the ground under the chestnut tree was like a colony of ants, while in the capacious head of the tree their captain, established quite at his ease, was whipping off the burrs with a long pole.
Faith took a general view as she came up, and then fell upon the chestnut burrs like the rest of them; and no boy there worked more readily or joyously. There seemed little justification of Mr. Linden's doubts of the boys or fears for her. Faith was everywhere among them, and making Reuben's prophecy true, that 'they would all enjoy themselves a great deal better' for her being there; throwing nuts into the baskets of the little boys and pleasant words at the heads of the big ones, that hit softly and did gentle execution; giving sly handfuls to Reuben, and then hammering out for some little fellow the burrs that her hands were yet more unfit to deal with than his; and doing it all with a will that the very spirit of enjoyment seemed to have moved. She in any danger of rude treatment from those boys! Nothing further from the truth. And so her happy face informed Mr. Linden, when he at last descended to terra firma out of the stripped chestnut tree.