ow I love him dearly. I'll
work all day with him and attend to all his blisters and get everybody
to give him work and help him."

"Well, I don't believe I'd do all that to him, Betty," answered Sam,
with a laugh. Then his eyes glinted past mine for a second. "And say,
Betty, you know my blisters are kind of--kind of old friends to you;
Pete's might not have so many--many landmarks for you to work by," he
added, as he knocked the ashes carefully out of the brier and picked up
his hat. "Let's go for one fox, and then I'll trot on out to my patch."

"I'll get Tolly to run you out in Redwheels while I do my promised
dances, and then I'll be out early in the morning to help plan about
Peter. And--and, Sam, do you want to--to give me that garden?"

"Everything that is is yours, Bettykin," he answered as we went down the
steps out on to the springy greening grass and across to the back gate.

Some friends taste like bread and butter and peach preserves. Sam does
and he's a peach.

When I got back to the Bankheads' everybody was wondering where we had
been, and as Sam and Tolly got right off in the car without answering
any questions, I was left to explain about Sam's foot and Peter. I paid
no attention at all to Billy Robertson when he said his foot was
blistered, too; but I told them how beautiful Peter was, and how
distinguished, and all about the poor young Keats that most of them
hadn't grieved over since their Junior years at school, telling it all
in such an eloquent way that Julia's great blue eyes filled with tears,
and I saw I could depend on her to be nice to our friend.

"I knew most poets were kind of calves, but I didn't know they had to
milk their poetry out of a genuine cow," said Pink, with a vulgar
attempt to be funny, at which nobody laughed, not even Julia, and she is
almost too tall and big to dance with anybody but Pink. She and Edith
and Sue and I forgot to save him the dances we had promised him; and he
had to dance with other girls he didn't like so much, until we all went
home in time to meet the sun coming down over Paradise Ridge with his
dinner-pail.

Then for five days it rained--heavy, determined, soggy drops; but the
next morning introduced one of those wily, flirtatious days that come
along about the last week in April in Tennessee. I awoke to the sound of
sobbing wind and weeping clouds in which I had no confidence, and
succeeded in convincing mother that it would be a beautiful day for