Page:Sheila and Others (1920).djvu/109

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ABEL GOODFRIEND
97

temples, and little criss-cross lines were gathering at the corners of the dark eyes.

She was quite firm, though regretful, about not being able to give us any extra help should occasion require. Mr. Goodfriend would not like it, she said with dignity. And they had "an extry cow this year and between the churnin' and the gyarden there was all she had ought to do."

With this I heartily concurred. After all, fresh butter, friendliness and the ties that would bind Abel to our vicinity, were the chief desiderata, and these the pleasant-faced new comer insured.

For six more happy summers we frolicked the season through under the aegis of Abel's sustaining care. We fished off his shoal (where the biggest perch always lurked and there was rumor of black bass); we filled our jugs with wild roses and spirea off his point in July, and with plumy golden-rod in August; gathered raspberries and fuzzy wild gooseberries for tarts in the tangle of tall grass and woodsy borders behind his pasture. Later in the season, the royal blue of the closed gentian showed in a certain secluded hollow not far away, and in a grove beside the curve