ree
toads sang on the cool rocks beneath them, chewinks nested under gnarled
roots among them, rose-breasted grosbeaks sang in grape-vines clambering
over the thickets, and Singing Water ran close beside. So the Harvester
left digging these roots until nearly the last, because he so disliked
to disturb the bed. He could not have done it if he had not been forced.
All of the demand for his fern never could be supplied. Of his products
none was more important to the Harvester because this formed the basis
of one of the oldest and most reliable remedies for little children. The
fern had to be gathered with especial care, deteriorated quickly, and no
staple was more subject to adulteration.

So he kept his bed intact, lifted the roots at the proper time,
carefully cleaned without washing, rapidly dried in currents of hot
air, and shipped them in bottles to the trade. He charged and received
fifteen cents a pound, where careless and indifferent workers got ten.

On the banks of Singing Water, at the head of the fern bed, the
Harvester stood under a gray beech tree and looked down the swaying
length of delicate green. He was lean and rapidly bronzing, for he
seldom remembered a head covering because he loved the sweep of the wind
in his hair.

"I hate to touch you," he said. "How I wish she could see you before I
begin. If she did, probably she would say it was a sin, and then I never
could muster courage to do it at all. I'd give a small farm to know
if those violets revived for her. I was crazy to ask Doc if they were
wilted, but I hated to. If they were from the ones I gathered that
morning they should have been all right."

A tree toad dared him to come on; a chipmunk grew saucy as the Harvester
bent to an unloved task. If he stripped the bed as closely as he dared
and not injure it, he could not fill half his orders; so, deftly and
with swift, skilful fingers and an earnest face, he worked. Belshazzar
came down the hill on a rush, nose to earth and began hunting among the
plants. He never could understand why his loved master was so careless
as to go to work before he had pronounced it safe. When the fern bed was
finished, the Harvester took time to make a trip to town, but there
was no word waiting him; so he went to the mullein. It lay on a sunny
hillside beyond the couch grass and joined a few small fields, the only
cleared land of the six hundred acres of Medicine Woods. Over rocks and
little hills and hollows sp