Perhaps she'd like to walk
round out doors a spell. It's breezing up, and it'll be cooler than it
is in the house.--No: you needn't think I shall be put out by your
stopping; but you'll have to take us just as we be. Georgie always
calculates to stop when he comes up. I guess he's made off for the
woods. I see him go across the lot a few minutes ago."

So Cynthia put on a discouraged-looking gingham sun-bonnet, which
drooped over her face, and gave her a more appealing look than ever,
and we went over to the pine-woods, which were beautiful that day. She
showed me a little waterfall made by a brook that came over a high
ledge of rock covered with moss, and here and there tufts of fresh
green ferns. It grew late in the afternoon, and it was pleasant there
in the shade, with the noise of the brook and the wind in the pines,
that sounded like the sea. The wood-thrushes began to sing,--and who
could have better music?

Miss Cynthia told me that it always made her think of once when she was
a little girl to hear the thrushes. She had run away, and fallen into
the marsh; and her mother had sent her to bed quick as she got home,
though it was only four o'clock. And she was so ashamed, because there
was company there,--some of her father's folks from over to Eliot; and
then she heard the thrushes begin to call after a while, and she
thought they were talking about her, and they knew she had been whipped
and sent to bed. "I'd been gone all day since morning. I had a great
way of straying off in the woods," said she. "I suppose mother was put
to it when she see me coming in, all bog-mud, right before the company."

We came by my friends, the apple-trees, on our return, and I saw a row
of old-fashioned square bee-hives near them, which I had not noticed
before. Miss Cynthia told me that the bee money was always hers; but
she lost a good many swarms on account of the woods being so near, and
they had a trick of swarming Sundays, after she'd gone to meeting; and,
besides, the miller-bugs spoilt 'em; and some years they didn't make
enough honey to live on, so she didn't get any at all. I saw some bits
of black cloth fluttering over the little doors where the bees went in
and out, and the sight touched me strangely. I did not know that the
old custom still lingered of putting the hives in mourning, and telling
the bees when there had been a death in the family, so they would not
fly away. I said, half to myself, a li