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