The little girl had overheard. Parentless, nameless, she had been sold by one person and bought by another,—for a thousand dollars!
The intuitive horror of her nonentity, of that sale and purchase, never left the little girl,—not even twenty years later in womanhood.
She crouched—a tiny mite in blue gingham—on the cot and failed to answer Miss Howland when the latter went through the house, calling for her angrily.
CHAPTER V
IMPRESSIONS
I
Looking back on those days in Foxboro Center now, Nathan and I think of them as Nuggets of Time from the Golden Mine of Boyhood, unalloyed. I would like to transcribe whole pages from the Memory Book, all of which has contributed to the great mass of experience influencing the most vital parts of our lives. Yet the subject matter is too trivial and the type too fine to ask a busy world to read.
There are no woods now like those Nathan and I explored in those days. There are no valleys so peaceful, no afternoons so long, no twilights so soft, no stars so high.
Thrushes and peewees sang in the leafy silences of those woodlands. Cloistered glades would be suddenly desecrated by the shrill screeches of jays. Brooks babbled unexpectedly across marshy pathways, to be forded on mossy stones. Jack-in-the-Pulpits and Lady’s Slippers grew among the smooth brown needles of hemlock-roofed hillsides. Occasionally, when lying in the forest quiet, we would hear the tread of a lone partridge on last autumn’s brittle leaves as sharp and loud as the tread of a man.
But alas and alack! Nathan’s little sister often “tagged after us,” demanding petulantly to be helped over stone walls, around bramble patches and across ditches, getting her feet wet in bogs and squealing hideously if we traveled too fast or gave the slightest indication of abandoning her to forest terrors.