ecting half-circle of rock that, like a
gigantic bay-window or balcony in the mighty architecture of the hills,
looked up and down the whole perspective of the valley. Jim Holden would
readily have driven them round its very edge upon the flat, mossy sward,
but for Mrs. Linceford's nerves, and the vague idea of almost an
accident having occurred there lately which pervaded the little party.
"Creggin's horses had backed," as Florrie Arnall said; and already the
new comers had picked up, they scarcely knew how, the incipient
tradition, hereafter to grow into an established horror of the "Cliff."

"It was nothing," Jim Holden said; "only the nigh hoss was a res'less
crittur, an' contrived to git his leg over the pole; no danger with
_his_ cattle." But Mrs. Linceford cried out in utter remonstrance, and
only begged Leslie to be quick, that they might get away from the place
altogether.

All this bustle of arrival and discussion and alighting had failed,
curiously, to turn the head of an odd, unkempt-looking child,--a girl of
nine or ten, with an old calico sun-bonnet flung back upon her
shoulders, tangled, sunburnt hair tossing above it; gown, innocent of
crinoline, clinging to lank, growing limbs, and bare feet, whose heels
were energetically planted at a quite safe distance from each other, to
insure a fair base for the centre of gravity,--who, at the moment of
their coming, was wrathfully "shoo-ing" off from a bit of rude
toy-garden, fenced with ends of twigs stuck up-right, a tall Shanghai
hen and her one chicken, who had evidently made nothing, morally or
physically, of the feeble inclosure.

"I wish you were dead and in your gravies!" cried the child, achieving,
between her righteous indignation and her relenting toward her uncouth
pets at the last breath, a sufficiently queer play upon her own word.
And with this, the enemy being routed, she turned face to face with
Dakie Thayne and Leslie Goldthwaite, coming in at the dilapidated gate.

"They've scratched up all my four-o'clocks!" she said. And then her
rustic shyness overcame suddenly all else, and she dragged her great toe
back and forth in the soft mould, and put her forefinger in her mouth,
and looked askance at them from the corners of her eyes.

"Prissy? Prissy Hoskins?" Leslie addressed her in sweet, inquiring
tones. But the child stood still with finger in mouth, and toe working
in the ground, not a bit harder nor faster, nor changing in the least,
for