domain, fording new marvels at every step, new delights everywhere. A
slave-girl, Mary, usually attended them, but she was only six years
older, and not older at all in reality, so she was just a playmate, and
not a guardian to be feared or evaded. Sometimes, indeed, it was
necessary for her to threaten to tell "Miss Patsey" or "Miss Jane," when
her little charges insisted on going farther or staying later than she
thought wise from the viewpoint of her own personal safety; but this was
seldom, and on the whole a stay at the farm was just one long idyllic
dream of summer-time and freedom.

The farm-house stood in the middle of a large yard entered by a stile
made of sawed-off logs of graduated heights. In the corner of the yard
were hickory trees, and black walnut, and beyond the fence the hill fell
away past the barns, the corn-cribs, and the tobacco-house to a brook--a
divine place to wade, with deep, dark, forbidden pools. Down in the
pasture there were swings under the big trees, and Mary swung the
children and ran under them until their feet touched the branches, and
then took her turn and "balanced" herself so high that their one wish was
to be as old as Mary and swing in that splendid way. All the woods were
full of squirrels--gray squirrels and the red-fox species--and many birds
and flowers; all the meadows were gay with clover and butterflies, and
musical with singing grasshoppers and calling larks; there were
blackberries in the fence rows, apples and peaches in the orchard, and
watermelons in the corn. They were not always ripe, those watermelons,
and once, when Little Sam had eaten several pieces of a green one, he was
seized with cramps so severe that most of the household expected him to
die forthwith.

Jane Clemens was not heavily concerned.