bed wearily upon his back. As
she rode across the meadow toward home, she shook her head solemnly at
the mounds in the timothy.

"I s'pose," she said, "you've _got_ to have something to lay up for
winter; but I think you might 'a' gone down to mother's veg'table patch,
'cause, when the corn comes up, I'll catch it!"

The corn-stalks were nodding in their first untasseled sturdiness before
the little girl's big brothers paid the field a visit to see when the
crowding suckers should be pulled and the first loosening given to the
dirt about the hills. They went down one morning, their muskets over
their shoulders, and the little girl went with them, hoping that so much
time had passed since the planting that they would not punish her even
if they found fault with her work on the last eighty rows.

Summer had come in on a carpet of spring green strewn with wild clover,
asters, and blazing-star. And as they went along, the verdant prairie
rolled away before them for miles in the warm sunlight, unbroken save
where their eyes passed to the richer emerald of wheat sprinkled with
gay mustard, new flax on freshly turned sod, or a sea of waving maize.
Overhead, the geese no longer streaked the sky in changing lines, but
swarms of blackbirds filled the air with crisp calls at their approach,
and rose from the ground in black clouds. Down along the slough where
the wild-plum boughs waved their blossoms they could see the calves
frolicking together; and up on the carnelian bluff, the young
prairie-chickens scurried through the grass before a watchful mother.

The little girl trailed, barefooted, behind her big brothers, and was in
no humor to enjoy any of the beauties of earth or sky. With anxious
face she followed them as they penetrated the lusty stand of corn, going
from south to north on the western side of the field. Then she tagged
less willingly as they turned east toward the strip she had planted. As
they neared it they remarked a scarcity of stalks ahead; and when they
at last stood on the first of the eighty rows, they gazed with
astonishment at the narrow belt that showed bravely green at the upper
end by the carnelian bluff, but dark and bare over the three fourths of
its length that sloped down to the timothy meadow.

"I guess _this_ won't need no thinning," said the biggest brother,
ironically.

They set to work to examine the hills, that only here and there sent up
a lonely shoot, the little girl standing by and