shed, you pause and look at the work of your hands.

"And nimble fay and pranksome elf
Flash vaguely past at every turn,
Or, weird and wee, sits Puck himself,
With legs akimbo, on a fern!"

X

FRANKNESS,--GARDENING AND OTHERWISE

(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)

_July 15._--_Midsummer Night._ Since the month came in, vacation time
has been suspended, insomuch that Bart goes to the office every day,
Saturdays excepted; but we have not returned to our indoor bedroom. Once
it seemed the definition of airy coolness, with its three wide windows,
white matting, and muslin draperies, but now--I fully understand the
relative feelings of a bird in a cage and a bird in the open. The air
blows through the bars and the sun shines through them, but it is still
a cage.

In these warm, still nights we take down the slat screens that hang
between the hand-hewn chestnut beams of the old barn, and with the open
rafters of what was a hay-loft above us, we look out of the door-frame
straight up at the stars and sometimes drag our cots out on the wide
bank that tops the wall, overlooking the Opal Farm, and sleep wholly
under the sky.

These two weeks past we have had the Infant with us at night, clad in a
light woollen monkey-suit nighty with feet, her crib being, however,
under cover. Her open-eyed wonder has been a new phase of the vacation.
Knowing no fear, she has begun to develop a feeling of kinship with all
the small animals, not only of the barn but dwellers on Opal Farm as
well, and when she discovered a nest of small mice in an old tool-box
under the eaves and proposed to take them, in their improvised house, to
her very own room at the opposite end, this "room" being a square marked
around her bed by small flower-pots, set upside down, I protested, as a
matter of course, saying that mice were not things to handle, and
besides they would die without their mother.

The Infant, still clutching the box, looked at me in round-eyed wonder:
"I had Dinah and the kittens to play with in the nursery, didn't I,
mother?"

"Certainly!"

"And when Ann-stasia brought them up in her ap'n, Dinah walked behind,
didn't she?"

"Yes, I think so!"

"Ver-r-y well, the mouse mother will walk behind too, and I love mice
better'n cats, for they have nicer hands; 'sides, mother, don't you know
who mice really and truly are, and why they have to hide away? They are
the horses that fairlies drive, and I'm going t