quicksilver,
that always bunch or run together. We don't _stick_, Susie. What's the
reason?"

"Some of these young ladies have been at Madam Routh's; they were over
here last evening. Sin Saxon knows them very well."

"You knew Effie Saxon at school, too."

"Eight years ago. And this is the little one. That's nothing."

"You petted her, and she came to the house. You've told her stories
hundreds of times. And she sees we're all by ourselves."

"She don't see. She doesn't think. That's just the whole of it."

"People ought to see, then. You would, Sue, and you know it."

"I've been used to seeing--and thinking."

"Used! Yes, indeed! And she's been _used_ to the other. Well, it's queer
how the parts are given out. Shall we go to the pines?"

CHAPTER X.

GEODES.

A great cliff-side rearing itself up, rough with inaccessible crags,
bristling with old, ragged pines, and dark with glooms of close cedars
and hemlocks, above a jutting table of rock that reaches out and makes a
huge semicircular base for the mountain, and is in itself a
precipice-pedestal eighty feet sheer up from the river-bank; close in
against the hill front, on this platform of stone, that holds its foot
or two of soil, a little, poor unshingled house, with a tumbledown
picket-fence about it, attempting the indispensable dooryard of all
better country-dwellings here where the great natural dooryard or
esplanade makes it such an utter nonsense,--this is the place at which
the "little red" drew up, ten minutes later, to leave Prissy Hoskins's
parcel.

Dakie Thayne jumped down off the front seat, and held up his arms to
help Leslie out over the wheel, upon her declaring that she must go and
do the errand herself, to get a nearer look at Hoskins life.

Dakie Thayne had been asked, at Leslie's suggestion, to fill the vacant
sixth seat beside the driver, the Thoresbys one and all declining. Mrs.
Thoresby was politic: she would not fall into the wake of this
schoolgirl party at once. By and by she should be making up her own
excursions, and asking whom she would.

"There's nothing like a boy of that age for use upon a picnic, Mrs.
Linceford," Leslie had pleaded, with playful parody, in his behalf, when
the lady had hinted something of her former sentiment concerning the
encroachments and monopolies of "boys of that age." And so he came.

The Haddens got Jim Holden to lift them down on the opposite side, for a
run to the verge of the proj