aking extra eggs, or using
more sugar than was conformable.

"What you doin' of?" he was accustomed to call. But Della never
answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary
concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.

Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes
from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets.
Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the house
and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing old
associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed the
ornamenting balls from her mother's high-post bedstead. Perhaps the one
element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician, and
she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might decline
to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have flinched;
to Della it was a futile check, a pebble under the wave. She laid her
balls calmly aside. Some day she would whittle them into shape; for
there were always coming to Della days full of roomy leisure and large
content. Meanwhile apples would serve her turn,--good alike to draw a
weary mind out of its channel or teach the shape of spheres. And so,
with two russets for balls and the clothes-slice for a mallet (the heavy
sledge-hammer having failed), Della serenely, yet in triumph, played her
first game against herself.

"Don't you drive over them wickets!" she called imperiously, when Eben
came up from the lot in his dingle cart.

"Them what?" returned he, and Della had to go out to explain. He looked
at them gravely; hers had been a ragged piece of work.

"What under the sun 'd you do that for?" he inquired. "The young ones
wouldn't turn their hand over for 't. They ain't big enough."

"Well, I be," said Della briefly. "Don't you drive over 'em."

Eben looked at her and then at his path to the barn, and he turned his
horse aside.

Thereafter, until we got used to it, we found a vivid source of interest
in seeing Della playing croquet, and always playing alone. That was a
very busy summer, because the famous drought came then, and water had to
be carried for weary rods from spring and river. Sometimes Della did not
get her playtime till three in the afternoon, sometimes not till after
dark; but she was faithful to her joy. The croquet ground suffered
varying fortunes. It might happen that the balls were potatoes, when
apples failed t