Sometimes a pair of oxen, one red, one white, clanked by, dragging,
hooked in the yoke-ring, a log chain that made a jerky trail in the
road, like the track of a broken-backed snake, and we spoke to the
driver, inquiring which one was the saddle horse, and if the team worked
single of a Sunday. And he answered with some laughing jeer that set us
shaking in our saddles.

We had passed the flat lands, and were half way up Thornberg's Hill, a
long gentle slope, covered with vines and underbrush and second-growth
poplar saplings, when I heard a voice break out in a merry carol,--a
voice free, careless, bubbling with the joy of golden youth, that went
laughing down the hillside like the voice of the happiest bird that was
ever born. It rang and echoed in the vibrant morning, and we laughed
aloud as we caught the words of it:

"Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Can she bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?
She can bake a cherry pie quick as a cat can wink its eye,
She's a young thing and can't leave her mother."

It required splendid audacity to fling such rippling nonsense at the
feathered choirs in the sassafras thickets, but they were all listening
with the decorous attitude of a conventional audience. I marked one
dapper catbird, perched on a poplar limb, who cocked his head and heard
the singer through, and then made that almost imperceptible gesture with
which a great critic indicates his approval of a novice. "Not half bad,"
he seemed to say,--this blase old habitue of the thicket music-halls. "I
shouldn't wonder if something could be made of that voice if it were
trained a trifle."

We broke into a trot and, rounding a corner of the wood, came upon the
singer. She was a stripling of a girl in a butternut frock, standing
bolt upright on a woman's saddle, tugging away at a tangle of vines, her
mouth stained purple with the big fox-grapes, her round white arms bare
to the elbows, and a pink calico sun-bonnet dangling on her shoulders,
held only by the broad strings around her throat.

The horse under her was smoking wet to the fetlocks. This piping miss
had been stretching his legs for him. It was Patsy, a madcap protegee of
Cynthia Carper, the biggest tomboy that ever climbed a tree or ran a
saddle-horse into "kingdom come." She slipped down into the saddle when
she saw us, and flung her grapes away into the thicket. We stopped in
the turnpike opposite to the cross road in which her ho