BY W. O. STODDARD.
Dot Calliper had come out on the mountain-side, with all the rest of them, after blackberries.
She had picked her little pail full industriously, but she was too fat and too small to climb any further among the rocks and stumps and bushes, so they had left her there, in the shade of the great chestnut-tree, to watch the milk-pails.
Not that there was any milk in them just now, for all three of them were more than half full of great, plump, overgrown berries—blackberries, and the best and largest anybody had ever seen among those mountains. Such a season for berries!
There had been a great fire three years before, and it had burned the woods away, and nobody knew where the blackberry bushes had come from, but they had moved right in as if the country belonged to them, and they had climbed all over everything.
Dot sat by her pails and looked around, and she was half sorry all the berries near her had been picked and put into the big pails.
All the rest, even Johnny Coyne and Pen Burke, had little pails or else baskets, except Dot's big brother Bob, and he was now away up the mountain-side with a pail that would hold almost as much as a milk-pail.
Dot knew where the others were picking, for they didn't keep still a minute. Jessie Mack and Betsy were down among the rocks at her right, and Molly Calliper was with the boys up there on the left.
Dot was not in the least afraid at being alone, but she did wish she was hungry enough to eat some more berries.
She thought of it, and she tried to, but it was of no use, for all the while she had been picking she had put one berry in her rosy little mouth every time she had put another in her little tin pail.