Chapter III
The Exiles from the Settlement
Late that afternoon Kirstie Craig arrived. Her coming was a migration.
The first announcement of her approach was the dull tank, tank, a-tonk, tank of cow-bells down the trail, at sound of which Old Dave threw aside his axe and slouched away to meet her. There was heard a boy’s voice shouting with young authority, “Gee! Gee, Bright! Gee, Star!” and the head of the procession came into view in the solemn green archway of the woods.
The head of the procession was Kirstie Craig herself, a tall, erect, strong-stepping, long-limbed woman in blue-grey home-spuns, with a vivid scarlet kerchief tied over her head. She was leading, by a rope about its horns, a meekly tolerant black-and-white cow. To her left hand clung a skipping little figure in a pink calico frock, a broad-brimmed hat of coarse straw flung back from her hair and hanging by ribbons from her neck. This was the five-year-old Miranda, Kirstie Craig’s daughter. She had ridden most of the journey, and now was full of excited interest over the approach to her new home. Following close behind came the yoke of long-horned, mild-eyed steers, – Bright, a light sorrel, and Star, a curious red-and-black brindle with a radiating splash of white in the middle of his forehead. These, lurching heavily on the yoke, were hauling a rude “drag,” on which was lashed the meagre pile of Kirstie’s belongings and supplies. Close at Star’s heaving flank walked a lank and tow-haired boy from the Settlement, his long ox-goad in hand, and an expression of resigned dissatisfaction on his grey-eyed, ruddy young face. Liking, and thoroughly believing in, Kirstie Craig, he had impulsively yielded to her request, and let himself be hired to assist her flight into exile. But in so doing he had gone roughly counter to public opinion; for the Settlement, though stupidly inhospitable to Kirstie Craig, none the less resented her decision to leave it. Her scheme of occupying the deserted cabin, farming the deserted clearing, and living altogether aloof from her unloved and unloving fellows, was scouted on every hand as the freak of a madwoman; and Young Dave, just coming to the age when public opinion begins to seem important, felt uneasy at being identified with a matter of public ridicule. He saw himself already, in imagination, a theme for the fine wit of the Settlement. Nevertheless, he was glad to be helping Kirstie, for he was sound and fearless at heart, and he counted her a true friend if she did seem to him a bit queer. He was faithful, but disapproving. It was Old Dave alone, his father, who backed the woman’s venture without criticism or demur. He had known Kirstie from small girlhood, and known her for a brave, loyal, silent, strongly-enduring soul; and in his eyes she did well to leave the Settlement, where a shallow spite, sharpened by her proud reticence and supplied with arrows of injury by her misfortunes, made life an undesisting and immitigable hurt to her.
As she emerged from the twilight and came out upon the sunny bleakness of the clearing, the unspeakable loneliness of it struck a sudden pallor into her grave dark face. For a moment, even the humanity that was hostile to her seemed less cruel than this voiceless solitude. Then her resolution came back. The noble but somewhat immobile lines of her large features relaxed into a half smile at her own weakness. She took possession, as it were, by a sweeping gesture of her head; then silently gave her hand in greeting to Old Dave, who had ranged up beside her and swung the dancing Miranda to his shoulder. Nothing was said for several moments, as the party moved slowly up the slope; for they were folk of few words, these people, not praters like so many of their fellows in the Settlement.
At last the pink frock began to wriggle on the lumberman’s shoulder, and Miranda cried out: —
“Let me down, Uncle Dave, I want to pick those pretty flowers for my mother.”
The crimson glories of the fireweed had filled her eyes with delight; and in a few minutes she was struggling after the procession with her small arms full of the long-stalked blooms.
In front of the cabin door the procession stopped. Dave turned, and said seriously: —
“I’ve done the best I could by ye, Kirstie; an’ I reckon it ain’t so bad a site for ye, after all. But ye’ll be powerful lonesome.”
“Thank you kindly, Dave. But we ain’t going to be lonesome, Miranda and me.”
“But there’s painters ’round. You’d ought to hev a gun, Kirstie. I’ll be sackin’ out some stuff fur ye nex’ week, Davey an’ me, an’ I reckon as how I’d better fetch ye a gun.”
“We’ll be right hungry for a sight of your faces by that time, Dave,” said Kirstie, sweeping a look of tenderness over the boy’s face, where he stood leaning on Star’s brindled shoulder. “But I ain’t scared of panthers. Don’t you mind about the gun, now, for I don’t want it, and I won’t use it!”
“She ain’t skeered o’ nothin’ that walks,” muttered Young Dave, with admiration.
The strong face darkened.
“Yes, I am, Davey,” she answered; “I’m afeard of evil tongues.”
“Well, my girl, here ye’re well quit of ’em,” said the old lumberman, a slow anger burning on his rough-hewn face as he thought of certain busy backbiters in the Settlement.
Just then Miranda’s small voice chimed in.
“Oh, Davey,” she cried, catching gleefully at the boy’s leg, “look at the nice, great big dog!” And her little brown finger pointed to a cluster of stumps, of all shapes and sizes, far over on the limits of the clearing. Her wide, brown eyes danced elvishly. The others followed her gaze, all staring intently; but they saw no excuse for her excitement.
“It might be a b’ar she sees,” said Old Dave; “but I can’t spot it.”
“They’re plenty hereabouts, I suppose,” said Kirstie, rather indifferently, letting her eyes wander to other portions of her domain.
“Ain’t no bear there,” asserted Young Dave, with all the confidence of his years. “It’s a stump!”
“Nice big dog! I want it, mother,” piped Miranda, suddenly darting away. But her mother’s firm hand fell upon her shoulder.
“There’s no big dog out here, child,” she said quietly. And Old Dave, after puckering his keen eyes and knitting his shaggy brows in vain, exclaimed: —
“Oh, quit yer foolin’, Mirandy, ye little witch. ’Tain’t nothin’ but stumps, I tell ye.”
It was the child’s eyes, however, that had the keener vision, the subtler knowledge; and, though now she let herself seem to be persuaded, and obediently carried her armful of fireweed into the cabin, she knew it was no stump she had been looking at. And as for Kroof, the she-bear, though she had indeed sat moveless as a stump among the stumps, she knew that the child had detected her. She saw that Miranda had the eyes that see everything and cannot be deceived.
For two days the man and the boy stayed at the clearing to help Kirstie get settled. The fields rang pleasantly with the tank, tank, a-tonk, tank of the cow-bells, as the cattle fed over the new pasturage. The edges of the clearing resounded with axe strokes, and busy voices echoed on the autumn air. There was much rough fencing to be built, – zig-zag arrangements of brush and saplings, – in order that Kirstie’s “critters” might be shut in till the sense of home should so grow upon them as to keep them from straying.
The two days done, Old Dave and Young Dave shouldered their axes and went away. Kirstie forthwith straightened her fine shoulders to the Atlas load of solitude which had threatened at first to overwhelm her; and she and Miranda settled down to a strangely silent routine. This was broken, however, at first, by weekly visits from Old Dave, who came to bring hay, and roots, and other provisions against the winter, together with large “hanks” of coarse homespun yarn, to occupy Kirstie’s fingers during the long winter evenings.
Kirstie was well fitted to the task she had so bravely set herself. She could swing an axe; and the fencing grew steadily through the fall. She could guide the plough; and before the snow came some ten acres of the long fallow sod had been turned up in brown furrows, to be ripened and mellowed by the frosts for next spring’s planting. The black-and-white cow was still in good milk, and could be depended on not to go dry a day more than two months before calving. The steers were thrifty and sleek, and showed no signs of fretting for old pastures. The hoarse but homely music of the cow-bells, sounding all day over the fields, and giving out an occasional soft tonk-a-tonk from the darkness of the stalls at night, came to content her greatly. The lines which she had brought from the Settlement smoothed themselves from about her mouth and eyes, and the large, sufficing beauty of her face was revealed in the peace of her new life.
About seven years before this move to the cabin in the clearing, Kirstie Craig – then Kirstie MacAlister – had gone one evening to the cross-roads grocery which served the Settlement as General Intelligence Office. Here was the post-office as well, in a corner of the store, fitted up with some dozen of lettered and dusty pigeon-holes. Nodding soberly to the loafers who lounged about on the soap boxes and nail kegs, Kirstie stepped up to the counter to buy a quart of molasses. She was just passing over her gaudy blue-and-yellow pitcher to be filled, when a stranger came in who caught her attention. He did far more than catch her attention; for the stately and sombre girl, who had never before taken pains to look twice on any man’s face, now felt herself grow hot and cold as this stranger’s eyes glanced carelessly over her splendid form. She heard him ask the postmaster for lodgings. He spoke in a tired voice, and accents that set him apart from the men of the Settlement. She looked at him twice and yet again, noted with a pang that he seemed ill, and met his eye fairly for just one heart-beat. At once she flushed scarlet under it, snatched up her pitcher, and almost rushed from the store. The loafers were too much occupied with the new arrival to notice her perturbation; but he noticed it, and was pleased. Never before had he seen so splendid a girl as this black-haired, sphinx-faced creature, with the scarlet kerchief about her head. She was a picture that awoke the artist in him, and put him in haste to resume his palette and brushes.
For Frank Craig, dilettante and man of the world, was a good deal of an artist when the mood seized him strongly enough. When another mood seized him, with sufficient vigour to overcome his native indolence, he was something of a musician; and again, more rarely, something of a poet. The temperament was his; but the steadiness of purpose, the decision of will, the long-enduring patience, these were not. He had just enough money to let him float through his world without work. Health he had not, and the poor semblance of it which mere youth supplied he had squandered childishly. Hearing of new health in the gift of the northern spruce woods, with their high, balsam-sweet airs, he had drifted away from his temptations, and at last sought out this remote backwoods settlement as a place where he might expect to get much for little. He was very good to look upon, – about as tall as Kirstie herself, – slender, active, alert in movement when not wearied, thoroughbred in every line of face and figure. His eyes, of a very deep greyish green under long black lashes, were penetrating in their clearness, but curiously unstable. In their beautiful depths there was waged forever a strange conflict between honesty and inconstancy. His face, pale and sallow, was clothed with a trimly pointed, close, dark beard; and his hair, just a trifle more abundant than the fashion of his world approved, was of a peculiar, tawny dark bronze.
The air of the Settlement was healing and tonic to the lungs, and before he had breathed it a month he felt himself aglow with joyous life. Before he had breathed it a month he had won Kirstie MacAlister, to whom he seemed little less than a god. To him, on her part, she was a splendid mystery. Even her peculiarities of grammar and accent did no more than lend a piquancy to her strangeness. They appealed as a rough, fresh flavour to his wearied senses. Here, safe from the wasting world, he would really paint, would really write, and life would come to mean something. One day he and Kirstie went away on the rattling old mail-waggon, which visited the Settlement twice a week. Ten days later they came back as man and wife, whereat the Settlement showed no surprise whatever.
For a whole year after the birth of his child, the great-eyed and fairy-like Miranda, Frank Craig stayed at the Settlement, seemingly content. He was loving, admiring, tactful, proud of his dark impressive wife, and the quickness with which she caught his purity of speech. Then one day he seemed restless. He talked of business in the city – of a month’s absence that could not be avoided. With a kind of terror at her heart Kirstie heard him, but offered no hint of opposition to so reasonable a purpose. And by the next trip of the rattling mail-waggon he went, leaving the Settlement dark to Kirstie’s eyes.
But – he never came back. The months rolled by, and no word came of him; and Kirstie gnawed her heart out in proud anguish. Inquiry throughout the cities of the coast brought no hint of him. Then, as the months climbed into years, that tender humanity which resents misfortune as a crime started a rumour that Kirstie had been fooled. Perhaps there had been no marriage, went the whisper at first. “Served her right, with her airs, thinkin’ she could ketch a gentleman!” – was the next development of it. Kirstie, with her superior air, had never been popular at best; and after her marriage the sufficiency and exclusiveness of her joy, coupled with the comparative fineness of speech which she adopted, made her the object of jealous criticism through all the country-side. When the temple of her soaring happiness came down about her ears, then was the time for her chastening, and the gossips of the Settlement took a hand in it with right good-will. Nothing else worth talking about happened in that neighbourhood during the next few years, so the little rumour was cherished and nourished. Presently it grew to a great scandal, and the gossips came to persuade themselves that things had not been as they should be. Kirstie, they said, was being very properly punished by Providence, and it was well to show that they, chaste souls, stood on the side of Providence. If Providence threw a stone, it was surely their place to throw three.
At last some one of imagination vivid beyond that of the common run added a new feature. Some one else had heard from some one else of some one having seen Frank Craig in the city. There was at first a difference of opinion as to what city; but that little discrepancy was soon smoothed out. Then a woman was suggested, and forthwith it appeared that he had been seen driving with a handsome woman, behind a spanking pair, with liveried coachman and footman on the box. Thus gradually the myth acquired a colour to endear it to the unoccupied rural imagination. Kirstie’s inquiries soon proved to her the utter baselessness of the scandal; but she was too proud to refute what she knew to be a cherished lie. She endured, for Miranda’s sake, till the dark face grew lined, and the black eyes smouldered dangerously, and she began to fear lest she should do some one a hurt. At last, having heard by chance of that deserted clearing in the forest, she sold out her cottage at a sacrifice and fled from the bitter tongues.
Chapter IV
Miranda and the Furtive Folk
From the very first day of her new life at the clearing, Miranda had found it to her taste. Her mother loved it for its peace, for its healing; but to the elvish child it had an incomparably deeper and more positive appeal. For her the place was not solitary. Her wide eyes saw what Kirstie could not see; and to her the forest edges – which she was not allowed to pass – were full of most satisfying playmates just waiting for her to invite their confidence. Meanwhile, she had the two steers and the black-and-white cow to talk to. Her mother noticed that when she sat down in the grass by the head of one of the animals, and began her low mysterious communication, it would stop its feeding and hearken motionless. The black-and-red brindle, Star, would sometimes follow her about like a dog, as if spelled by the child’s solemn eyes. Then the solemn eyes on a sudden would dance with light; her lips would break into a peal of whimsical mirth, shrill but not loud; and the steer, with a flick of his tail and an offended snort, would turn again to his pasturing.
In a hole in one of the logs, just under the eaves of the cabin, there was a family of red squirrels, the four youngsters about three-fourths grown and almost ready to shift for themselves. No sooner had the old lumberman and his son gone away than the squirrels began to make themselves much at home. They saw in Kirstie a huge and harmless creature, whose presence in the cabin was useful to scare away their enemies. But in Miranda they found a sort of puzzling kinship. The two old squirrels would twitch up and down on the edge of the roof, chattering shrilly to her, flirting their airy tails, and stretching down their heads to scan her searchingly with their keen protruding eyes; while Miranda, just below, would dance excitedly up and down in response, nodding her head, jerking her elbows, and chattering back at them in a quick, shrill voice. It was a very different voice to the soft murmurs in which she talked to the cattle; but to the squirrels it appeared satisfactory. Before she had been a week at the clearing the whole squirrel family seemed to regard her as one of themselves, snatching bread from her tiny brown fingers, and running up her skirt to her shoulder whensoever the freak possessed them. Kirstie, they ignored – the harmless, necessary Kirstie, mother to Miranda.
No sooner were they fairly settled than the child discovered an incongruity in her gay pink calico frocks, and got her mother to bury them out of sight in the deal chest behind the door. She was at ease now only in the dull, blue-grey homespun, which made her feel at one with her quiet surroundings. Nevertheless the vein of contradiction which streaked her baby heart with bright inconsistencies bade her demand always a bit of scarlet ribbon about her neck. This whim Kirstie humoured with a smile, recognizing in it a perpetuation of the scarlet kerchief about her own black hair. As for Miranda’s hair, it was black like her mother’s when seen in shadow; but in the sunshine it showed certain tawny lights, a pledge of her fatherhood to all who had known Frank Craig.
So the autumn slipped by; and the silent folk of the wood, watching her curiously and unwinkingly as she played while her mother built fences, came to know Miranda as a creature in some way not quite alien to themselves. They knew that she often saw them when her mother’s eyes could not. Perceiving that her mother did not quite understand her, at times, when she tried to point out pretty animals among the trees, the child grew a little sensitive and reticent on the subject; and the furtive folk, who had at first inclined to resent her inescapable vision, presently realized her reserves and were appeased. Her grey little sprite of a figure might have darted in among the trees, turned to a statue, and become suddenly as invisible as any lynx, or cat, or hare, or pine-marten amongst them, except, indeed, for that disquieting flame of scarlet at her neck. This was a puzzle to all the folk of the wood, continually reminding them that this quiet-flitting creature did not really belong to the wood at all, but to the great woman with the red about her head, whose axe made so vexing a clamour amid the trees. As for Kroof, the bear, that bit of scarlet so interested her that one day, being curious, she came much nearer than she intended. Miranda saw her, of course, and gazed with wide-eyed longing for the “great big dog” as a playmate. Just then Kirstie saw her, too – very close at hand, and very huge.
For the first time, Kirstie Craig felt something like fear, not for herself, but for the child. Thrusting Miranda roughly behind her, she clutched her axe, and stood motionless, erect and formidable, awaiting attack. Her great black eyes blazed ominously upon the intruder. But Kroof, well filled with late berries, and sweet wild roots, and honeycomb, was in most amiable humour, and just shambled off lazily when she saw herself detected; whereupon Kirstie, with a short laugh of relief, threw down her axe and snatched the child to her breast. Miranda, however, was weeping salt tears of disappointment.
“I want it, mother,” she sobbed; “the nice big dog. You scared it away.”
Kirstie had heard more than enough about the dog.
“Hark now, Miranda,” she said severely, giving her shoulder a slight shake to enforce attention. “You just remember what I say. That ain’t a dog; that’s a bear; a bear, I say! And don’t you ever go near it, or it’ll eat you up. Mind you now, Miranda, or I’ll just whip you well.”
Kirstie was a little fluttered and thrown off her poise at the idea of Miranda encountering the great animal alone, and perhaps attempting to bring it home to play with; so she forgot for a moment the wonted stringency of her logic. As for Miranda, she consented to obey, and held her tongue; but she clung secretly to her own opinion on the subject of the big dog. She knew very well that the fascinating animal did not want to eat her; and her mother’s order seemed to her just one of those bits of maternal perversity which nobody can ever hope to understand.
The incident, however, overshadowed the child’s buoyant spirits for the best part of two whole days. It thrust so very far off the time she hoped for, when she might know and talk to the shy, furtive folk of the wood, with their strange, unwinking eyes. Her mother kept her now ever close to her skirts. She had no one to talk to about the things her mother did not understand, except the steers and the black-and-white cow, and the rather irrepressible squirrels.
The winter, which presently fell white and soundless and sparkling about the lonely cabin, was to Miranda full of events. Before the snow Kirstie had repaired the old lean-to, turning it into a fowl-house; and now they had six prim hens to occupy it, and a splendid, flame-red cock who crowed most loftily. Miranda felt that this proud bird despised her, so she did not get on very well with him; but the hens were amiable, if uninteresting, and it was a perennial joy to search out their eggs in the loft or the corners of the stalls. Then there were the paths to be kept clear after every snow-fall, – the path to the spring, the path to the barn door and hen-house, the path to the woodpile. Uncle Dave had made her a hand-sled, and she had the exhilarating duty of hauling in the wood from the pile as fast as her mother could split it. It was a spirited race, this, in which her mother somehow always managed to keep just about one stick ahead.
And the fishing – this was a great event, coming about once a week, if the weather suited. Both Kirstie and Miranda were semi-vegetarians. Frank Craig had been a decryer of flesh-meat, one who would have chosen to live on fruits and roots and grains and eggs, had not his body cried out against the theory of his brain. But he had so far infected his wife with his prejudice that neither she nor the child now touched meat in any form. The aversion, artificial on Kirstie’s part, was instinctive on Miranda’s. But as for fish – fish seemed to them both quite another matter. Even Miranda of the sympathies and the perceptions had no sense of fellowship for these cold-blooded, clammy, unpleasant things. She had a fierce little delight in catching them; she had a contented joy in eating them when fried to a savory brown in butter and yellow cornmeal. For Miranda was very close to Nature, and Nature laughs at consistency.
The fishing in which Miranda so delighted took place in winter at the lake. When the weather seemed quite settled, Kirstie would set out on her strong snow-shoes, with Miranda, on her fairy facsimiles of them, striding bravely beside her, and follow the long, white trail down to the lake. Even to Miranda’s discerning eyes the trail was lonely now, for most of the forest folk were either asleep, or abroad, or fearful lest their tinted coats should reveal them against the snowy surface. Once in a while she detected the hare squatting under a spruce bush, looking like a figure of snow in his winter coat; and once or twice, too, she saw the weasel, white now, with but a black tip to his tail as a warning to all who had cause to dread his cruelty. Miranda knew nothing about him, but she did not quite like the weasel, which was just as well, seeing that the weasel hated Miranda and all the world besides. As for the lynx and the brown cat, they kept warily aloof in their winter shyness. The wood-mice were asleep, – warm, furry balls buried in their dry nests far from sight; and Kroof, too, was dreaming away the frozen months in a hollow under a pine root, with five or six feet of snow drifted over her door to keep her sleep unjarred.
Arrived at the lake, Kirstie would cut two holes through the ice with her nimble axe, bait two hooks with bits of fat pork, and put a line into Miranda’s little mittened hands. The trout in the lake were numerous and hungry; and somehow Miranda’s hook had ever the more deadly fascination for them, and Miranda’s catch would outnumber Kirstie’s by often three to one. Though her whole small being seemed absorbed in the fierce game, Miranda was all the time vividly aware of the white immensity enfolding her. The lifeless white level of the lake; the encircling shores all white; the higher fringe of trees, black beneath, but deeply garmented with white; the steep mountain-side, at the foot of the lake, all white; and over-brooding, glimmering, opalescent, fathomless, the flat white arch of sky. Across the whiteness of the mountain-side, one day, Miranda saw a dark beast moving, a beast that looked to her like a great cat. She saw it halt, gazing down at them; and even at that distance she could see it stretch wide its formidable jaws. A second more and she heard the cry which came from those formidable jaws, – a high, harsh, screeching wail, which amused her so that she forgot to land a fish. But her mother seemed troubled at the sound. She gazed very steadily for some seconds at the far-off shape, and then said: “Panthers, Miranda! I don’t mind bears; but with panthers we’ve got to keep our eyes open. I reckon we’ll get home before sundown to-day; and mind you keep right close by me every step.”
All this solicitude seemed to Miranda a lamentable mistake. She had no doubt in her own mind that the panther would be nice to play with.
As I have said, the winter was for Miranda full of events. Twice, as she was carrying out the morning dish of hot potatoes and meal to the hens, she saw Ten-Tine, the bull caribou, cross the clearing with measured stately tread, his curious, patchy antlers held high, his muzzle stretched straight ahead of him, his demure cows at his heels. This was before the snow lay deep in the forest. Later on in the winter she would look out with eager interest every morning to see what visitors had been about the cabin during the night. Sometimes there was a fox track, very dainty, cleanly indented, and regular, showing that the animal who made it knew where he was going and had something definite in view. Hare tracks there were sure to be – she soon came to recognize those three-toed, triplicate clusters of impressions, stamped deeply upon the snow by the long, elastic jump. Whenever there was a weasel track, – narrow, finely pointed, treacherously innocent, – it was sure to be closely parallel to that of a leaping hare; and Miranda soon apprehended, by that instinct of hers, that the companionship was not like to be well for the hare. Once, to her horror, she found that a hare track ended suddenly, right under the cabin window, in a blood-stained patch, bestrewn with fur and bones. All about it the snow was swept as if by wings, and two strange footprints told the story. They were long, these two footprints – forked, with deep hooks for toes, and an obscure sort of brush mark behind them. This was where the owl had sat up on the snow for a few minutes after dining, to ponder on the merits of the general order of things, and of a good meal in particular. Miranda’s imagination painted a picture of the big bird sitting there in the moonlight beside the bloody bones, his round, horned head turning slowly from one side to the other, his hooked beak snapping now and again in reminiscence, his sharp eyes wide open and flaming. There was also the track of a fox, which had come up from the direction of the barn, investigated the scene of action, and gone off at a sharp, decisive angle toward the woods. Miranda had no clew to tell her how stealthily that fox had come, or how nearly he had succeeded in catching an owl for his breakfast; but from that morning she bore a grudge against owls, and never could hear without a flash of wrath their hollow two-hoo-hoo-whoo-oo echoing solemnly from the heart of the pinewood.
But the owl was not the only bird that Miranda knew that winter. Well along in January, when the haws were all gone, and most of the withered rowan-berries had been eaten, and famine threatened such of the bird-folk as had not journeyed south, there came to the cabin brisk foraging flocks of the ivory-billed snow-bird. For these Miranda had crumbs ready always, and as word of her bounty went abroad in the forest, her feathered pensioners increased. Even a hungry crow would come now and then, glossy and sideling, watchful and audacious, to share the hospitality of this kind Miranda of the crumbs. She liked the crows, and would hear no ill of them from her mother; but most of all she liked those big, rosy-headed, trustful children, the pine-grosbeaks, who would almost let her take them in her hands. Whenever their wandering flocks came down to her, she held winter carnival for them.