“And now,” I added to the girl at my side, “shall we see if we can build the next arch?”
Again she clapped her hands delightedly, and ran with me around the house for the tools and lumber.
I let her dig the first post-hole, though it was evident that the effort tired her, and then I took the spade away, while she marked off the trellis strips into the proper lengths, and sawed them up, placing each strip across the wheelbarrow and holding it in place first with a hand which looked quite inadequate even for that small task, and, when the hand failed, with her foot.
She laughed as she put her foot on the wheelbarrow, hitching her skirt up where it bound her knee. “The new skirts weren’t made for carpenters,” she said, as she jabbed away with the saw. I darted a glance at the display of trim ankles, and resumed my digging in the post-holes. This was a new and disturbing distraction in agricultural toil!
The post-holes were soon dug, and while I held the posts, she adjusted the level against them, our hands and faces close together, and we both kicked the dirt in with our feet. Then I climbed on the step-ladder and levelled the top piece, which I nailed down. Then, while I was cutting a semicircle out of the wire, for the arch, she nailed the trellis strips across the piers, grasping the hammer halfway up to the head, and frowning earnestly as she tapped with little, short, jablike blows. She was so intent on this task that I laughed aloud.
“What are you laughing at?” said she.
“You,” said I. “You drive a nail as if it were an abstruse problem in differential calculus.”
“It is, for me,” she answered, quite soberly. “I don’t suppose I’ve driven a dozen nails in my life–only tacks in the plaster to hang pictures on. And it’s very important to drive them right, because this is a rose trellis.”
“When I first came here,” said I, “I was pretty clumsy with my hands, too. I’d lost my technique, as you might say. I remember one afternoon when I was trimming the orchard that I didn’t think a single thought beyond the immediate problem each branch presented. And yet it was immensely stimulating. Personally, I believe that the educational value of manual dexterity has only begun to be appreciated.”
Miss Goodwin marked off the place for the next strip, and started nailing. At the last blow she relaxed her frown.