"Tinkers!" cried Miss Ada. "What a nice lot of them! Oh, and there are some butter-fish, too. They are all cleaned beautifully, and we must have some for breakfast; it will take only a few minutes to cook them. Yon children can run over to Grace with her share."
This the little girls were glad to do, but returned with their platter full explaining that smaller lot had been left at the Whartons'.
But two more conscience offerings were received after this. Four thick braids of sweet grass were found hanging on the door-knob, and, during the day a man delivered a mysterious box slatted across one end. This was found to contain a beautiful kitten of the variety called "Coon." The children were wild over this last gift, the only drawback to their delight being the difficulty of deciding which one should take it home. Their Aunt Ada came to the rescue by telling them not to bother about it till the time came and then to let circumstances settle it. Her own little cat, Cosey, was not inclined to favor the intruder at first, but in a few days she began to mother it and they soon became good friends.
"Are you glad that the boys scared us that night?" asked Polly one day not long after the "day of gifts" as the children called it.
Molly weighed the subject. "When I think of the dear kitten and the salmon and the tinkers."
"Yes, and the sweet grass, then I am, but when I think of how dreadfully frightened we were, I'm not."
"I don't intend to remember the scare," said Polly philosophically.
"Neither do I," added Mary. "I'd be an Arab again for the sake of finding out how really good-hearted those boys are," which showed that Mary had a good heart, too.
The green grass of June had turned to russet; the bay berry bushes began to look dingy, and the waxy cranberries in the bog were turning to a delicate pink. It had been a dry season and the children could safely traverse the bog from end to end without danger of getting their feet wet. Ellis was their pilot to this fascinating spot, and the day of their introduction to it was one long to be remembered.
It was one morning when Ellis came around to the back door to deliver clams that they first heard of the bog. He added to the weekly order a little bag of pinky-white cranberries. "I thought maybe you'd like 'em," he said. "Miss Alice Harvey says they're much better when they're not quite ripe. Ora tried some and they were fine, but they took a lot of sugar."