"So it does; but mamma says I must learn just the same as if there were no machines."
"Well, I'm glad I'm not a girl, to sit pricking my fingers, and jabbing needles in and out all day."
How lovely it was out under the elm! The sweet-scented grass was warm with the afternoon sun, and musical with the chirp and hum of its insect homes. The bees fluttered in and out over mamma's rose garden, and all the air was filled with the delicate fragrance of the roses.
Emily, seated on the great gnarled elm roots, drank in all the sweet scents and sounds, her forgotten work-basket lying overturned in the grass before her. Will spread himself out at full length on the ground, and kept his eyes open for chippers and spiders, and all the busy little things that crept, or leaped, or flitted around him. Now and then the afternoon hush was broken by the faintly tinkling bells of a horse-car turning some distant corner, the rumbling of a heavy team going over the dusty turnpike, or the voices of the belfry clocks calling the hour to each other from the steeples of the neighboring city.
Master Will, however, soon became tired of this quiet. He scrambled up, and wandering away into the rose garden, lifted caressingly to his cheek the beautiful pink blossoms which leaned towards him from amid the green leaves. He was looking for a choice little bud to fasten in Emily's hair; and when he found it, he came whistling out into the clear grassy spaces again, a little bird in a bough overhead tilting, and twittering, and eying him askance.
Will rushed up to Emily, and hung the bud in her ear; he rearranged it in the blue ribbon of her hair, so that it nodded sleepily over her nose; he dropped it, as if it were a tiny pink egg, in the soft golden moss of curls which he upturned on his sister's head. Then he threw it away, and stamped on it; for Emily had drawn a book from her pocket, and deep in some fairy under-world story, was unmindful of his roses and his pains.
He ran recklessly away into the rose garden; he caught a bumblebee; he pursued a daddy long-leg with the watering-pot, going deeper and deeper all the time among the briery branches. The crashing of the stems caused Emily to come up from fairy-land a moment.