ted out: "Oh, hell, boys!" and sat down,
and hid his wet eyes in Stumpy's shaggy hair.

On Big Lonely

It was no doubt partly pride, in having for once succeeded in evading
her grandmother's all-seeing eye, that enabled Mandy Ann to carry, at
a trot, a basket almost as big as herself--to carry it all the way
down the hill to the river, without once stumbling or stopping to take
breath. The basket was not only large, but uneasy, seeming to be
troubled by internal convulsions, which made it tip and lurch in a way
that from time to time threatened to upset Mandy Ann's unstable
equilibrium. But being a young person of character, she kept right on,
ignoring the fact that the stones on the shore were very sharp to her
little bare feet.

At last she reached the sunshiny cove, with shoals of minnows
flickering about its amber shallows, which was the goal of her flight.
Here, tethered to a stake on the bank, lay the high-sided old bateau,
which Mandy Ann had long coveted as a perfectly ideal play-house. Its
high prow lightly aground, its stern afloat, it swung lazily in the
occasional puffs of lazy air. Mandy Ann was only four years old, and
her red cotton skirt just came to her dimpled grimy little knees, but
with that unfailing instinct of her sex she gathered up the skirt and
clutched it securely between her breast and the rim of the basket.
Then she stepped into the water, waded to the edge of the old bateau
and climbed aboard.

The old craft was quite dry inside, and filled with a clean pungent
scent of warm tar. Mandy Ann shook out her red skirt and her yellow
curls, and set down the big covered basket on the bottom of the
bateau. The basket continued to move tempestuously.

"Oh, naughty! naughty!" she exclaimed, shaking her chubby finger at
it. "Jest a minute, jest a teenty minute, an' we'll see!"

Peering over the bow, Mandy Ann satisfied herself that the bateau,
though its bottom grated on the pebbles, was completely surrounded by
water. Then sitting down on the bottom, she assured herself that she
was hidden by the boat's high flaring sides from the sight of all
interfering domestic eyes on shore. She felt sure that even the eyes
of her grandmother, in the little grey cottage back on the green hill,
could not reach her in this unguessed retreat. With a sigh of
unutterable content she made her way back into the extreme stern of
the bateau, lugging the tempestuous basket with her. Sitting down
flat, she t