, or a bird, but having determined the direction
from which it came, he turned his head over his shoulder and saw a
small shape hanging as far out of the window as safety would allow. A
long black braid of hair swung with the motion of the coach; the child
held her hat in one hand and with the other made ineffectual attempts
to stab the driver with her microscopic sunshade.

"Please let me speak!" she called.

Mr. Cobb drew up the horses obediently.

"Does it cost any more to ride up there with you?" she asked. "It's so
slippery and shiny down here, and the stage is so much too big for me,
that I rattle round in it till I'm 'most black and blue. And the
windows are so small I can only see pieces of things, and I've 'most
broken my neck stretching round to find out whether my trunk has fallen
off the back. It's my mother's trunk, and she's very choice of it."

Mr. Cobb waited until this flow of conversation, or more properly
speaking this flood of criticism, had ceased, and then said jocularly:--

"You can come up if you want to; there ain't no extry charge to sit
side o' me." Whereupon he helped her out, "boosted" her up to the front
seat, and resumed his own place.

Rebecca sat down carefully, smoothing her dress under her with
painstaking precision, and putting her sunshade under its extended
folds between the driver and herself. This done she pushed back her
hat, pulled up her darned white cotton gloves, and said delightedly:--

"Oh! this is better! This is like traveling! I am a real passenger now,
and down there I felt like our setting hen when we shut her up in a
coop. I hope we have a long, long ways to go?"

"Oh! we've only just started on it," Mr. Cobb responded genially; "it's
more 'n two hours."

"Only two hours," she sighed "That will be half past one; mother will
be at cousin Ann's, the children at home will have had their dinner,
and Hannah cleared all away. I have some lunch, because mother said it
would be a bad beginning to get to the brick house hungry and have aunt
Mirandy have to get me something to eat the first thing.--It's a good
growing day, isn't it?"

"It is, certain; too hot, most. Why don't you put up your parasol?"

She extended her dress still farther over the article in question as
she said, "Oh dear no! I never put it up when the sun shines; pink
fades awfully, you know, and I only carry it to meetin' cloudy Sundays;
sometimes the sun comes out all of a sudden, and I have a dr