Rose began to work early, but her work, like her playing, was not that of other girls. As she never played with dolls, caring more for hobby-horses, so she early learned to do work in the barn. From taking care of make-believe stick horses she came easily to take care of real horses.
When a toddling babe she had moved about under the huge plow-horses in their stalls, and put straw about them, and patted their columnar limbs with her little pads of palms, talking to them in soft indefinite gurgle of love and command.
She knew how much hay and oats they needed, and she learned early to curry them, though they resented her first trials with the comb. She cared less for the cows and pigs, but before she was ten she could milk the "easy" cows. She liked the chickens, and it was part of her daily duty to feed the hens and gather the eggs.
She could use a fork in the barn deftly as a boy by the time she was twelve, and in stacking times she handed bundles across the stack to her father. It was the variety of work, perhaps, which prevented her from acquiring that pathetic and lamentable stoop (or crook) in the shoulders and back which many country girls have in varying degree.
All things tended to make her powerful, lithe and erect. The naked facts of nature were hers to command. She touched undisguised and unrefined nature at all points. Her feet met not merely soil, but mud. Her hands smelled of the barn yard as well as of the flowers of the wild places of wood and meadow.
Meanwhile her comradeship was sweet to John Dutcher. He hardly knew his loss of a son so completely was he companioned by Rose. He had put far away the time when she should wear shoes and long dresses and become a "young lady."
"Let her be, as long as you can," he said to his sister. "She's a mighty comfort to me now, and she's happy; don't disturb her; time to wear long dresses and corsets'll come soon enough without hurryin' things."
CHAPTER IV
AN OPENING CLOVER-BLOOM
There are times in a child's life when it leaps suddenly into larger growth as the imprisoned bud blooms larger than its promise, when the green fist of its straining calyx loosens in the warm glow of a May morning. Knowledge comes to the child, especially all the subtler knowledge of time, of space, of love, in a vague, indefinite, unconscious way, developing out of the child's organic self precisely as the flower blooms.
This knowledge comes to definite knowledge for an instant only and then returns to the subconscious, waiting the next day of warm sun, shining water and smell of spring. Each time it stays longer, till at last the child can contemplate its own thought and finally express it. These times form our real life epochs.
One day in June, a party of the school children, with flashing tin pails and willow baskets, went up into the woods after the wild-wood strawberries. It was late June and the strawberries of the meadows and uplands were nearly gone. The roads were dusty, the pastures close-clipped.
Merry, bare-footed little creatures! They started forth in the early morning while the dew still flamed on the clover-leaves, and around each corn-hill the ground was still moist. The girls romped and picked wild flowers, the boys threw stones at the chipmunks on the fence, and tossed their tin pails in the air, performing feats of deftness in imitation of the circus-men, whom they had lately seen on the green at Tyre.
They entered the forest and kept on up the wood-road until it seemed as if they were explorers. They had the delicious, tremulous feeling of having penetrated into the primeval, where nothing but the birds and animals lived. On past cool deeps of poplar, where the mandrake grew, and the sweet fern spread its magnificent leaves. On until the strawberries appeared, growing in clumps on long swaying stems, pale scarlet globes of delicious tartness.
They fell to work mostly in pairs. Curly-haired Carl kept with Rose, and his sharp eyes and knowledge of the patch enabled them to fill their pails first; then they went about helping the others, whose voices babbled on like streams.
Everywhere the pink sun-bonnets and ragged straw hats bobbed up and down. Everywhere fresh voices. The sunlight fell in vivid yellow patches through the cool odorous gloom. Everywhere the faint odor of ferns and mandrakes and berries, and the faint rustle of leaves, as if the shadows of the clouds trampled the tree-tops.
There was something sweet and wild and primeval in the scene, and the children were carried out of their usual selves. Rose herself danced and romped, her eyes flashing with delight. Under her direction they all came together on a little slope, where the trees were less thick, and near a brook which gurgled through moss-covered stones.
"O, let's have our picnic here!"
"All right, let's!"
They made short work of the lunch they had. Their buttered biscuits were spread with berries and mixed with water from the brook, which the girls drank like the boys, that is, by lying down on their breasts and drinking as the hunter drinks. Their hunger eased they fell to games. Games centuries old. Games which the Skandinavians played in the edges of their pine forests. Games the English lads and lassies played in the oak-openings of middle-age England.
The little ones were ruled out after awhile and the five or six elder children (the oldest only fourteen), went on with their games, which told of love. They joined hands and circled about Carl, they sang:
"King William was King James' son,
And from the royal race he run,
Upon his breast he wore a star,
Which points away to a conquest far.
Go choose you east, go choose you west,
Go choose the one that you love best."
Carl selected Rose, as they all knew he would. They stood together now, holding hands.
"Down on this carpet you must kneel,"
(they knelt)
"As sure as the grass grows in the field.
Salute your bride with a kiss so sweet,"
(Carl kissed her gravely)
"Now you rise upon your feet."
Again they circled, and again a little bride and bridegroom knelt. The fresh young voices rang under the spaces of the trees, silencing the joy of the thrush. The flecking sunlight fell on their towsled hair and their flushed faces. They had forgotten home and kindred, and were living a strange new-old life, old as history, wild and free once more, and in their hearts something bloomed like a flower, something sweet shook them all, something unutterable and nameless, something magnificent to attain and sorrowful to lose.
When they tired of "King William," they all flung themselves down on the grass and grew quiet. Some of the girls made wreaths of flowers strung on grass stems, while the boys studied the insects under the chips and stumps, or came slyly behind the girls and stuck spears of fox-tail down their necks. Some of them rolled down the bank. Carl, when he was tired of this, came and lay down by Rose, and put his head in her lap. Other bridegrooms did the same with their brides. Some of the boys matched violets, by seeing which would hook the other's head off.
Silence fell on them. Some passion thrilled Rose as she looked down into Carl's sunny blue eyes. She brushed his hair as he looked up at the clouds sailing above the trees like wonderful mountains of snow.
She was thirteen years of age, but prophecy of womanhood, of change, of sorrow, was in her voice as she said slowly, a look not childish upon her face:
"I'd like to live here forever, wouldn't you, Carl?"
"I guess we'd have to build a house," said Carl, the practical one.
She felt a terrible hunger, a desire to take his head in her arms and kiss it. Her muscles ached and quivered with something she could not fathom. As she resisted she grew calm, but mysteriously sad, as if something were passing from