" said Katie.

"Now, look, Polly, it's stones! They're pattering, clickety-click, all
over the yard. Dear, dear! The grass will look just like the
gravel-path, and the windows will crack in two."

"Never you mind," said Polly, knitting as usual; "if it does any harm,
'twill only kill a few chickens."

Upon this there was another wail; for next to ducks Dotty loved
chickens. But lo! before her tears had rolled down to meet her dimples,
the patter of hail was over.

"Come and see the rainbow," said Polly, from the door-stone.

It was a glorious sight, an arch of varied splendor resting against the
blue sky.

"That isn't a rainbow," said Dotty; "it's a hail-bow!"

"What a big, big, big bubbil!" shouted Katie.

"She thinks somebody is blowing all that out of soapsuds, I s'pose,"
said Dotty; "I guess 'twould take a giant with a 'normous pipe--don't
you, Polly?"

"There, now," said Miss Polly, "I just want you to hold some of this
hail in your hand. What do you call that but ice?"

"So it is," said Dotty; "cold lumps of frozen ice, as true as this
world."

"And not stones," returned Polly. "Now you won't think next time you
know so much better than older people--will you?"

"But I don't see, Miss Polly, how it got here from Greenland; I don't,
now honest."

"I didn't say anything about Greenland, child. I said it was rain, and
it froze in the air coming down; and so it did."

"Did it? Why, you know a great deal--don't you, Miss Polly? Did you ever
go to school?"

Polly sighed dismally.

"O, yes, I went now and then a day. I was what is called a 'bound girl.'
I didn't have nice, easy times, like you little ones. You have no idea
of my hardships. It was delve and dig from sunrise to sunset."

"Why, what a naughty mother to make you dig! Did you have a ladies'
hoe?"

"My mother died, Dotty, when I was a creeping baby. The woman who took
me to bring up was a hard-faced woman. She made me work like a slave."

"Did she? But by and by you grew up, Miss Polly, and, when you had a
husband, he didn't make you a dog--did he?"

"I never had a husband or anybody else to take care of me," said Polly.
"Come, children, we must go into the house."

They all three entered the parlor, and Miss Whiting fastened the window
tightly to exclude the air, for it was one of her afflictions that she
was "easy to take cold."

"I don't see," queried Dotty, "why your husband didn't marry you. I
should have thought he would."