hose 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? Now here
goes!

"'Give me three grains of corn, mother,
Only three grains of corn,
'T 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 hugged her chains, no matter how uncomfortable they
made her.

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 home farm.

The little schoolhouse with its flagpole on top and its two doors in
front, one for boys and the other for girls, stood on the crest of a
hill, with rolling fields and meadows on one side, a stretch of pine
woods on the other, and the river glinting and sparkling in the
distance. It boasted no attractions within. All was as bare and ugly
and uncomfortable as it well could be, for the villages along the river
expended so much money in repairing and rebuilding bridges that they
were obliged to be very economical in school privileges. The teacher's
desk and chair stood on a platform in one corn