ught about on the
Sabbath day besides shoes."

So Mirandy, sniffing between the solemn words, repeated them after
Daniel, who was twelve years old, and knew his catechism quite
thoroughly. And when the great farm wagon, with the team of oxen, stood
before the door, she climbed in with the rest without a murmur.

But sitting in the meeting-house through the two hours' discourse, she
drew up her little bare feet under her blue petticoat, and going down
the aisle afterwards, she crouched, making it sweep the floor, until her
mother dragged her up forcibly by one arm.

"Ain't you ashamed of yourself?" she whispered. "A great big girl like
you!"

Mirandy was in reality very small for her age, and everybody called her
"little;" but she got very few privileges on account of her youth and
littleness. In those days, and especially in a family like Josiah
Thayer's, where there were so many children that each had to scratch for
itself at an early age or go without, six years was considered
comparatively mature, and the child who had lived that long was not
exempt from many duties.

So Mrs. Thayer did not think herself in the least severe when she said
to Mirandy after meeting: "If you want some shoes so bad, you'll have to
work an' earn 'em."

Mirandy looked up inquiringly at her mother.

"You can pick berries an' sell 'em," replied her mother. "You're plenty
big enough to."

Mirandy said nothing, and soon her mother set her to rocking Jonathan in
his red wooden cradle; but as she sat, with her small bare foot on the
rocker, ambition expanded wider and wider in her childish soul, and she
resolved that she would earn some shoes.

The berries were not ripe before the middle of July. She had some five
weeks to wait before she could fairly begin work. But not a day passed
that she did not visit the pastures to see if the berries were ripe. She
brought home so many partially ripe ones for samples that her brothers
and sisters remonstrated. They, too, were vitally interested in the
berry crop in behalf of shoes and many other things. "She won't leave
any berries on the bushes to get ripe if she picks so many green ones,"
they complained, and her mother issued a stern decree that Mirandy
should not go to the berry pasture until the berries were fairly ripe.

But at last, one hot morning in July, the squad of berry-pickers
started. There were four Thayer girls and two Thayer boys, besides
Jonathan, the baby, whom Eliza dragge