CHAPTER XIV

UNDER A BARK SLANT



The weeks that followed were rare ones for
Margaret and Oliver.

They painted all day and every day.

The little school-children posed for them, and so
did the prim school-mistress, a girl of eighteen in
spectacles with hair cut short in the neck. And old
Jonathan Gordon, the fisherman, posed, too, with
a string of trout in one hand and a long pole cut
from a sapling in the other. And once our two
young comrades painted the mill-dam and the mill--
Oliver doing the first and Margaret the last; and
Baker, the miller, caught them at it, and insisted
in all sincerity that some of the money which the
pictures brought must come to him, if the report were
true that painters did get money for pictures. "It's
my mill, ain't it?--and I ain't give no permission to
take no part of it away. Hev I?"

They climbed the ravines, Margaret carrying the
luncheon and Oliver the sketch-traps; they built fires