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Between Aunt Betsy and Bell the most amicable feeling had existed ever since the older lady had told the younger how all the summer long she had been drying fruit, "thimble-berries, blue-berries and huckleberries" for the soldiers, and how she was now drying peaches for Willard Buxton once their hired man.

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was.

One day I had persuaded our aunt to let her accompany me Lily herself was always ready to go for the sake of collecting some baskets of berries. "I promise to come back with as many as I can carry, to fill your jam-pots," said I. There were whortleberries, and thimble-berries, blue-berries, raspberries, and strawberries, and many others which, I reminded her, were now in season.

This is my list: red-stemmed dogwood; bunchberries, in blossom on the higher reaches, in bloom below; service-berries, salmon-berries; skunk-cabbage, beloved by bears, and the roots of which the Indians roast and eat; above four thousand feet, white rhododendrons, and, above four thousand five hundred feet, heather; hellebore also in the high places; thimble-berries and red elderberries, tag-alder, red honeysuckle, long stretches of willows in the creek-bottoms; vining maples, too, and yew trees, the wood of which the Indians use for making bows.

Then the blackberries and thimble-berries will be ripe, and the pink salmon-berry in the redwoods. Perhaps you will look for and dig up the soaproot, that onion-like bulb of one of the lily family with which the Indians make a soapy lather to wash their clothes.

Long, soft August lights lay across the leafy road; the blackberries were in heavy fruit; scarlet thimble-berries, over-ripe, dropped from their pithy cones as we brushed the sprays with our sleeves. Sir George was saying: "No, we have nothing more to fear from McDonald's gang, but a scout came in, three days since, bringing word of McCraw's outlaws who have appeared in the west "

The way was lined with flowers wild lilac, wild roses, poppies, and lupins. Such lupins! giant clumps of them, of every lupin-shade and colour. And it was along the Mendocino roads that Charmian caused many delays by insisting on getting out to pick the wild blackberries, strawberries, and thimble-berries which grew so profusely.

Sometimes it would be a cave appearing in the dense growth of wild grape and blackberry vines; sometimes a woodchuck's hole; a snake sunning himself; a branch of black thimble-berries; a baby calf beside its mother, possibly; or perhaps even a wild rabbit or partridge. Mrs.

The bushes! The bushes! Don't trample my thimble-berries!" But Lanpher, heeding not at all Molly's cries of warning, spurred his sweating horse through the thimble-berry growth, breaking down three shrubs, and splashed cat-a-corneredly across the spring, the brook, and several rows of flowers. The garden looked as if a miniature cyclone had passed that way.