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She hesitated and, seeing that her decision was hanging in the balance, he recklessly tried his hand at tipping the scales in his favor. "I'm no end of a good forager, and I've rooted out lots of things in tins and jars. You must be awfully hungry; remember, it's hours since our magical breakfast with the lady's-slippers." Patsy's fist banged the railing with a startling thud.
When she thought he was large enough, and strong and swift enough, she let him travel with her; and then he became acquainted with several new kinds of forest with the dark hemlock groves, and the dense cedar swamps; with the open tamarack, where the trees stand wide apart, and between them the great purple-and-white lady's-slippers bloom; with the cranberry marshes, where pitcher-plants live, and white-plumed grasses nod in the breeze; with sandy ridges where the pine-trees purr with pleasure when the wind strokes them; with the broad, beautiful Glimmerglass, laughing and shimmering in the sunshine, and with all the sights and the sounds of that wonderful world where he was to spend the years of his deerhood.
"Good!" He was not a bit put out. "Let me help you." He took the pail across the path and poured a little into the snow at the base of a half-dozen fence posts. "There!" he said, coming back triumphant. "The roses are done. Now let's have a go at the pansies and the lady's-slippers and the the begonias. I say" he stopped suddenly on his way in "sulphur water on a begonia what would it make?
The horse's hoofs sucked in the wet sod as we got farther out into the marsh, and then the ground rose a little and we went up over a headland that juts out into the marsh; then we went down into the slew again, and finally stopped in a miry place where there was a flowing spring with tall yellow lady's-slippers and catkined willows growing around it.
"There were the lady's-slippers; you said as how you cared about findin' 'em; and they're not near so pretty an' bright if they're left standin' too long after the dew dries." Patsy pulled a wry little smile. "Is that so? And ye've been after making me trade a feather-bed and a good breakfast for for the best color of lady's-slippers.
"And, what's more, this time I'll be getting an answer to every one of them or I'm no relation of Dan's. First, I'll know the fate of the brown dress; he hadn't a rag of it about him that's certain. Next, there's that breakfast with the lady's-slippers. How did he come by it?
"It's next best to heaven. Just s'posing the whole world was made up of these great, high, dirty houses, without any woods or flowers or trees anywhere. Wouldn't it be dreadful?" The dismal picture she painted was singularly effective, and other purchasers gathered around, clamoring for her wares. "I will give you a dime for one of those pink lady's-slippers," said a bent, old man.
They were no longer sitting in the midst of sunlight; the lady's-slippers had lost their golden radiance; the brook sounded plaintive and melancholy, and from the woods fringing the open came the call of the bob-white. "He's singin' for rain. Won't hurt a mite if we make toward some shelter." The tinker pulled Patsy to her feet and gathered up the basket and left-overs.
If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket latch loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartsease, and lady's-slippers, and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunting among the beds for cucumbers and love-apples no one called out to me from any opened window; no dog sprang forward to bark an alarm.
We children cultivated sweet-scented geraniums in pots, but a flower in a pot was to me like a bird in a cage, and the fragrant geraniums gave me no more pleasure than did the scentless many-hued lady's-slippers that we planted in tiny borders, and the purple flowering beans and white blossoms of the madeira vines that grew on a tall trellis by the cistern's grassy mound.
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