Over Paradise Ridge

P.S.--Something is sprouting in your garden that I don't understand.

I knew those hollyhocks would rise up some day and bear witness against me. For the life of me I couldn't make up my mind what to say about them, so I sent the Byrd home by Tolly, who was going to take Edith out to see how her okra was progressing, and stayed in the safe shelter of my home. On the Byrd's rompers I pinned this note: Strike, if you will, my young back, But spare, oh spare, this little brat!

BETTY.

There are all kinds of poetry in the world.

That night when I was beginning to get restless and wish I had gone out to my fate, even if it included being throttled with a pea-vine, Tolly and Edith came into town and stopped at my gate in such a condition that I was positively alarmed about them.

"Five baskets of peas!" gasped Tolly, as he fell forward limp over his wheel.

"My thumb! my thumb!" moaned Edith, with the afflicted member in her mouth.

"But, say, Betty," Tolly revived enough to say, "we are not going to tell Sue and Billy and Julia and Pink. They are going out to-morrow to call. Let 'em go--it's coming to 'em."

"Oh no, I won't say a word," I agreed, with the intensest joy. "Come over to-morrow, Edith, and let's finish My Lady's Fan. I'm dying to know what happened to her at the court ball. Good night!"

"No, you come over to my house; I'll be in bed," Edith wailed from the middle of the road as Tolly turned and made his machine buzz for home.

Then for five days--glorious, warm, growing, blooming days--I stayed in town in a state of relapse from gardening of which the sorenesses in the calves of my legs and my thumbs were the strongest symptoms, and listened to my martyred friends' accounts of what Sam was doing to Peter. I also had a bulletin from Peter every day by the rural-delivery route. That is, they were in Peter's handwriting, but they read more like government crop reports than a poet's letters to the girl to whom he considered himself engaged. I sent them on to Judge Vandyne, and I got a glorious written chuckle in return for them.

Then, one morning when I had about got over the bashfulness about the hollyhocks, and had decided to deny them absolutely and stick to it, for a time at least, I happened to pick up Grandmother Nelson's book. It was full time--maybe past time--for thinning out my sugar-beets and resetting my cosmos. I fled out to the wilderness in greater speed than I had left it, and fairly threw myself prostrate at the feet of my neglected garden. Peter helped me, a sun-blistered, brier-scratched, ragged Peter, whose face had lost none of its beautiful, lofty, aloof expression, but which was rendered almost ordinary by a long scratch across the top of its nose. The scratch was inflicted, he told me, when he held one of the thoroughbred Plymouth Rock biddies to be greased by Sam for lice under her wings.