How delicious it all was! Rebecca clasped her Quackenbos's
Grammar and Greenleaf's Arithmetic with a joyful sense of knowing
her lessons. Her dinner pail swung from her right hand, and she
had a blissful consciousness of the two soda biscuits spread with
butter and syrup, the baked cup-custard, the doughnut, and the
square of hard gingerbread. Sometimes she said whatever "piece"
she was going to speak on the next Friday afternoon.
"A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,
There was lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's
tears."
How she loved the swing and the sentiment of it! How her young
voice quivered whenever she came to the refrain:--
"But we'll meet no more at Bingen, dear Bingen on the Rhine."
It always sounded beautiful in her ears, as she sent her tearful
little treble into the clear morning air.
Another early favorite (for we must remember that Rebecca's only
knowledge of the great world of poetry consisted of the
selections in vogue in the old school Readers)was:--
"Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now."
When Emma Jane Perkins walked through the "short cut" with her,
the two children used to render this with appropriate dramatic
action. Emma Jane always chose to be the woodman because she had
nothing to do but raise on high an imaginary axe.
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