That Old-Time Child, Roberta | Page 2

busy bees," where city children are trained to think of and help the poor, and she didn't wear the badge of the "Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," as many children do nowadays. Indeed I don't expect she ever heard there was such a society. But she was instrumental nevertheless in doing a great deal of real practical good. O, how her eyes did flash when she saw animals mistreated. She made beds for the cats and beds for the dogs; and when any of the milkers struck the cows while they were milking them, if she was near about, she would say, "Mamma says good milkers are always gentle with the cows, for they won't give down their milk unless you treat them kindly. And anybody can tell by the quantity of milk you get whether you are good to them or not. If I was a cow I wouldn't give down my milk if you struck me and hollered at me."
So she made the cruel milkers ashamed of themselves often. And she practically established a foundling asylum for little motherless lambs and calves; raised them herself on the bottle just like they were babies.
"O, you tootsey weetsy darlin'," I've heard her say to a bright-eyed, gentle lamb, her especial delight. The little creature would run to her and bleat by way of telling her it was hungry, and when she had fed it it would rub its pretty head against her knee and look love at her, just as I have seen babies look love at their mothers.
And, my! how she did fuss over the little negro children when they were sick! It just kept her busy bringing them gourds of fresh water from the spring and watching the well ones to see that they didn't purloin the dainties she brought the sick. She actually learned how to sew, making clothes for the pickaninnies.
And you just ought to have seen her when any of the fathers and mothers whipped their children severely. She would fly down to the cabin, tear the pickaninnies away and trot them up to the big house, and pet them until they were willing to take another whipping to get the good things she gave them.
"She's jes de very spi't ob her par," old Squire would say on those occasions; "Dat's jest de way hees eyes useter flash out at Mis Betsy when she cum 'twix' him an Mis July."
O, I wish I could make the little children who read this story see, as I have seen it, the country place where Roberta Marsden was raised.
On either side fields of golden-tasseled corn, rustling in the breeze and shimmering in the sunlight, many of the stalks so entwined with morning-glories, pink, white, blue, and variegated, one could almost believe fairies had been there and arrayed the yellow silken-haired corn babies for some festival, so crowned and garlanded they were. In front of the house were wooded slopes, where the birds sang their love songs and chattered noisily in bird language all the day long. Those woodlands might have been called a primeval forest, for the trees were truly there in the earliest memory of the oldest living resident of the county.
It used to puzzle me to understand how the birds knew when it was time to wake up and begin their matin songs, for it was so like night there. Roberta, who was an early riser and withal a child of poetic imagination, used to say "that the fairies woke them up." She declared she saw a little glittering thing, with wings and wand of silver, alight on the tops of the trees and peep through at the Darbys and Joans of the bird tribe. And she was sure it must have told them it was time to wake up; for soon would begin a low twitter that swelled louder and louder, as bird after bird joined in until every family of birds was represented. From the back porch of the house could be seen a range of blue misty hills, that Roberta called brides. They were often enveloped in white filmy folds, like bridal veils, and one might catch glimpses of the river from there also gliding along between banks of green.
A giant's great glittering eye she called that; the trees on the hills above the giant's brows, and the ferns and grasses growing on either bank were upper and lower lashes. With a little encouragement Roberta would have been a genuine poet.
But Aunt Betsy took such a literal view of things, she was constantly saying to Mrs. Marsden:
"That child's imagination will get away with her, Julia, if you don't check it. It will, indeed."
And she had a way of making the child repeat over and over again descriptions of things that had