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One day we came upon a camp of these berry-pickers by the river-side. Our first notice of their proximity was the sight of a raft with an arm-chair tied in the centre of it, stranded upon the rocks in a long, fierce rapid. Imagine how this looked to us after we had been five days in the wilderness! An arm-chair sitting up sedately in the middle of the rapids! What did it mean?
The mystery was solved when we rounded the next point; for there we found the berry-pickers taking their nooning in a cluster of little slab-shanties.
On the night in question the Squire was giving a supper in honor of the berry-pickers who had helped to gather in the crop the week before. Afterwards, they would sing the sweet, homely songs that all the village loved, and then troop home by moonlight to the accompaniment of their own music. "Well, Mr. Sanderson," said the Squire, "suppose you stay to supper with us.
Nor had she been mistaken this time. He had openly abandoned the greedy band of berry-pickers, and the artistic knot of sketchers, and the noisy body of pleasure-seekers, who were paddling frivolously around the shores of the lake and screaming with causeless laughter, as soon as he found that Gerald did not intend attaching herself to any of them but had struck out the new and independent line of doing absolutely nothing at all.
"I hope you left a few on the bushes," she said rather resentfully, when the berry-pickers had recounted their experiences with an enthusiasm which gave to the expedition through the pasture the glamor of real adventure, "I'd like the fun of picking some real berries myself." "We might go to-morrow," Claire suggested in a careful undertone.
She lifted them with an effort, and Dave found himself staring eagerly in a pair of great, sorrowful brown eyes. The girl came on unsteadily up the walk to where the Squire sat, thumbing his account to the berry-pickers. "Well, girl, who are you?" he said, not as unkindly as the words might imply.
"I wish they'd work more and sing less," said the Squire. "All this singing business is too picturesque for me." "They've about finished, father. I came for the money to pay them off." It was characteristic of Dave to uphold the rights of the berry-pickers.
A man and his wife paddling an old dugout, with half a dozen children packed in amidships a crew of lumbermen, in a sharp-nosed bateau, picking up stray logs along the banks; a couple of boatloads of young people returning merrily from a holiday visit; a party of berry-pickers in a flat-bottomed skiff; all the life of the country-side was in evidence on the river.
It was here annually that we used to come in large picnic parties, to collect this valuable fruit for our winter preserves, in defiance of black-flies, mosquitoes, snakes, and even bears, all which have been encountered by berry-pickers upon this spot, as busy and as active as themselves, gathering an ample repast from Nature's bounteous lap.
Zeke, Sam, Cynthia and Amelia who formed the quartet, had all fine voices and no social function for miles around Wakefield was complete without their music. The Squire said no more about the berry-pickers. Dave handed him a paper on which the time of each berry-picker and the amount of his or her wage was marked opposite.
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