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"I'm hit, boys, by God, I'm hit this time." The groans changed promptly into a laugh. "Bless my soul! the plagued thing went right into the earth beneath me." "Damn you, it went into my leg," retorted a hoarse voice that fell suddenly silent. With a shiver Dan lay down on the carpet of rotted pine-cones and peered, like a squirrel, through the meshes of the brushwood.
"Pine-Cones" is a pleasant story for young people, telling the adventures of a party of boy and girl cousins making a visit among the great pine woods of Maine. There is plenty of open air in the book, bright talk, and earnest stories told round the fire.
In the sunny windows, opening to the south, flowers were growing; the Dutch clock, with pendulous weights made in the similitude of pine-cones, ticked against the wall merrily; Mädchen, the cat who, being most prolific of kittens, notoriously belied her name sat bunched up in exceeding comfort on a space expressly left for her upon the sunny window-ledge among the plants; steam arose in light clouds from the various pots upon the stove, and in the middle of the little room the table stood ready for the dinner to be served.
She was a queer little thing: we used to find her sometimes dancing alone out on the barren in a circle she had marked out with pine-cones, and once she confided to us that she talked to the trees. "They hear," she said in a whisper: "you should see how knowing they look, and how their leaves listen."
They knew that they must not only provide plenty of food for the winter, but also for the spring months, when they could get little to eat beside the buds and bark of some sort of trees, and the chance seeds that might still remain in the pine-cones. Thus the autumn months passed away very quickly and cheerfully with the squirrels while preparing for the coming winter.
In a cosy little parlour, adorned with fluffy mats and pictures framed in pine-cones, lit by a hanging lamp with glass pendants, sits the mistress of the occasion, calmly triumphant and plying her crochet-needle. There is something mysterious about a woman's fancy-work. It seems to have all the soothing charm of the tobacco-plant, without its inconveniences.
They found abundance of pine-cones strewn on the ground, but, alas for our little squirrels! very few kernels in them; for the crossbills and chiccadees had been at work for many weeks on the trees; and also many families of their poor relations, the chitmunks or ground squirrels, had not been idle, as our little voyagers could easily guess by the chips and empty cones round their holes.
So we marched our seven miles out upon the smooth and shaded road, beneath jasmine clusters, and great pine-cones dropping, and great bunches of misletoe still in bloom among the branches.
She was a woman, and therefore the daughter of pretence even when most real. He caught her by both arms as she shyly but eagerly came to him. "Good girl, good little girl," he said. He looked round him. "Well, I've never seen our lodge look nicer than it does to-night; and the fire, and the pot on the fire, and the smell of the pine-cones, and the cedar-boughs, and the skins, and "
Forty miles away, untouched by cloud or storm, the white shoulder of Donga Pa the Mountain of the Council of the Gods upheld the Evening Star. The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry roosts in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones.
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