came to the refrain:--

"But we'll meet no more at Bingen, dear Bingen on the Rhine."

It always sounded beautiful in her ears, as she sent her tearful little
treble into the clear morning air.

Another early favorite (for we must remember that Rebecca's only
knowledge of the great world of poetry consisted of the selections in
vogue in the old school Readers) was:--

"Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now."

When Emma Jane Perkins walked through the "short cut" with her, the two
children used to render this with appropriate dramatic action. Emma
Jane always chose to be the woodman because she had nothing to do but
raise on high an imaginary axe. On the one occasion when she essayed
the part of the tree's romantic protector, she represented herself as
feeling "so awful foolish" that she refused to undertake it again, much
to the secret delight of Rebecca, who found the woodman's role much too
tame for her vaulting ambition. She reveled in the impassioned appeal
of the poet, and implored the ruthless woodman to be as brutal as
possible with the axe, so that she might properly put greater spirit
into her lines. One morning, feeling more frisky than usual, she fell
upon her knees and wept in the woodman's petticoat. Curiously enough,
her sense of proportion rejected this as soon as it was done.

"That wasn't right, it was silly, Emma Jane; but I'll tell you where it
might come in--in 'Give me Three Grains of Corn.' You be the mother,
and I'll be the famishing Irish child. For pity's sake put the axe
down; you are not the woodman any longer!"

"What'll I do with my hands, then?" asked Emma Jane.

"Whatever you like," Rebecca answered wearily; "you're just a
mother--that's all. What does your mother do with her hands? Nowhere
goes!

"'Give me three grains of corn, mother,
Only three grains of corn,
It will keep the little life I have
Till the coming of the morn.'"

This sort of thing made Emma Jane nervous and fidgety, but she was
Rebecca's slave and obeyed her lightest commands. At the last pair of
bars the two girls were sometimes met by a detachment of the Simpson
children, who lived in a black house with a red door and a red barn
behind, on the Blueberry Plains road. Rebecca felt an interest in the
Simpsons from the first, because there were so many of them and they
were so patched and darned, just like her own brood at the ho