joyment; but by-and-by the woods took on such tempting looks that she
turned off from the highway she had been following, with the intention
of taking a stroll, which she meant should not lead her out of sight of
the road.

The first view which stopped her was that of a large vine of wild
grapes.

Some of them were green, some turning, while others were a dark purple,
showing they were fully ripe: the last, as a matter of course, were at
the top.

These wild grapes were small and tart, inferior to those which grew in
the yard of Nellie at home; but they seemed to be trying to hide in the
woods, and they were hard to get, therefore they were more to be desired
than the choicest Catawba, Isabella, or Concord.

The main vine, where it started from the ground, was as thick as a man's
wrist, and it twisted and wound about an oak sapling as if it were a
great African constrictor seeking to strangle the young tree. Other
vines branched out from the sides until not only was the particular
sapling enfolded and smothered, but the greedy vine reached out and
grasped others growing near it.

Nellie felt like the fox who found the grapes more tempting the longer
he looked at them.

"I'm going to have some of them," she said, and straightway proceeded to
help herself.

She climbed as readily as Nick himself could have done, and never
stopped until she was so high that the sapling bent far over with her
weight. Then she reached out her chubby hand and plucked a cluster of
the wild fruit. They were about the size of buckshot, and when her sound
teeth shut down on them, the juice was so sour that she shut both eyes
and felt a twinge at the crown of her head as though she had taken a
sniff of the spirits of ammonia.

But the grapes were none the less delicious for all that; the fact that
there seemed to be something forbidden about them added a flavor that
nothing else could give.

Nellie had managed to crush a handful of the vinegar-like globules, when
she caught sight of another vine deeper in the woods. It was much larger
and climbed fully a dozen yards from the ground, winding in and out
among the limbs of a ridgy beech, which seemed to be forever struggling
upward to get away from the smothering embrace of the vegetable python.

Five minutes later, Nellie was clambering upward like a monkey, never
pausing until the bending tree-top warned her that if she went any
higher it would yield to her weight.

Nellie disposed o