"Well, well, as you like. But I repeat—why can't you read the Bible once in a while, instead of wasting your time playing with a lot of dried peas? Do they come from Tipperary, too?"
"Oh! these are my beads," she replied, taking her Rosary from her pocket; "and it's praying I am, when you see me slipping these little round things through my fingers."
"Praying! Then you must have prayed a heap. Are you in earnest?"
"I am."
"Well, can't your spirit be moved without using them peas, or beads as you call them? It seems to me they must bother you."
"I use 'em, sir, to keep count, or I mightn't say all the Hail Marys and Our Fathers." Here Nat started, and lifting his sandy eyebrows, "Aha!" he exclaimed. "So! Indeed! Then 'twas keeping a tally of your prayers? Well, now, there's something in that. I really didn't believe you were so 'cute. The devil couldn't say that you hadn't been square on your devotions when you'd kept a strict tally."
The girl smiled, then, bowing her head, seemed to be whispering something to the shamrock.
"Different from other gals!" thought Putnam, as he glanced at the pale face and long, raven hair, which without braid or ribbon flowed down until it rested on the bottom of the wagon. "Yes, different from other gals! Can't quite make her out. She ain't a child, yet seems like one. Keeping a tally of her prayers is the first sign of her being 'cute. But that's a beginning anyhow. I'll educate her little by little. Oh! if she'd only take to the Bible." Here he gave the reins a jerk, then asked Mary to read him a chapter from the Book of Proverbs.
"I can't read," she frankly replied.
"Can't read! Can't read! That I won't believe. Why, there's Jemima Hopkins, in Conway, where I come from, that not only reads, but has started on a lecturing tour; and she ain't—let me see; she was born the year of the comet—no she ain't a day over fourteen."