xuries had been brought thither, but
the mother government had a feeling that the colonists ought mostly to
provide for themselves, and was often indifferent to the necessary
demands.

Mere Dubray went out to the kitchen and began to prepare supper. There
was a great stone chimney with a bench at each side, and for a fireplace
two flat stones that would be filled in with chunks of wood. When the
blaze had burned them to coals the cooking began. Corn bread baked on
both sides, sometimes rye or wheaten cakes, a kettle boiled, though the
home-brewed beer was the common drink in summer, except among those who
used the stronger potions. The teas were mostly fragrant herbs, thought
to be good for the stomach and to keep the blood pure.

Mere Dubray dressed half a dozen birds in a trice. It was true that in
the summer they could live on the luxuries of the land in some
respects. Fish and game of all kinds were abundant, and as there were
but few ways of keeping against winter it was as well to feast while one
could. They dried and smoked eels and some other fish, and salted them,
but they had learned that too much of this diet induced scurvy.

The birds were hung on an improvised spit, with a pan below to catch the
drippings with which they were basted. Between whiles the worthy woman
unexpectedly bolted out to the garden with a switch in her hand and laid
it about the two Indian boys, who did not bear it with the stoicism of
their race, as they learned the greater the noise the shorter their
punishment.

The little girl did not heed the screams or the shrill scolding, or even
the singing of the birds that grew deliciously tender toward nightfall.
She often watched the waving branches as the wind blew among them until
it seemed as if they must be alive, bending over caressing each other
and murmuring in low tones. If she could only know what they said. Of
course they must be alive; she heard them cry piteously in winter when
they were stripped of their covering. Why did God do it? Why did He send
winter when summer was so much better, when people were merry and happy
and could hunt and fish and wander in the woods and fight Indians? She
had not had much of an idea of God hitherto only as a secret charm
connected with Mere Dubray's beads, but now it was some great power
living beyond the sky, just as the Indians believed. You could only go
there by growing cold and stiff and being put in the ground. She shrank
from that tho