CHAPTER XVIII

BLUEBELL AND TILDY

Then they went behind the garden and along the eastern hill-slope, and gathered unto themselves large families of elders.

A little girl who has never played with these woods-babies cannot realize the delight there is in them. Warm from the sun and freshly green, they seemed more _alive_ than the most complete doll. It always gave Bluebell a heartache to come upon a pile of withered elders left from a former play. She would dig out Rosa, or Lilly, or Alice, and look sorrowfully at the crackling drapery and shrunken body of that departed companion.

The elders were in bloom, so Tildy and Bluebell “p’tended” the white, fragrant smear made of so many little cups was a daughter’s white skirt hanging below her green gown; for it was quite the thing then for a child’s embroidered skirt to show its rich hand-work below the short dress. The girls plunged into the midst of the elder thicket, surrounded by its incense, and came out with rustling armloads. To make an elder doll, you break it smoothly from the parent stem, and how beautifully the pith shows in the top of its head! then you leave arms at a suitable distance below--the elder’s branches spring on exactly opposite sides--and strip all the leaves from these, except three at the extremities, which are hands. And last, you give the darling a length of bare stem for waist, and place her before you to admire the delicate brown bark of her face, which has an expression individual and distinct from the faces of her sisters.

Tildy and Bluebell sought their favorite play-houses up the hill, their arms loaded, and each leading an active young elder by the hand. The play-houses were some distance from their school-path.

“We ain’t been here for so long,” remarked Bluebell, panting up the steep with her family; “I wonder if anything’s broke our acorn dishes?”

Tildy’s house was a big rock cropping out of the soil. She had “up-stairs and down-stairs,” for it was easy to go around behind and step on the top of the rock. Her down-stairs was well rugged with moss, but the gray floor up-stairs stood bare and cool in the wood-shadows. Bluebell’s residence was a mighty stump, cut clean and smooth at the top. She had dragged a fragment of rock near for a doorstone, and lived on that smooth, many-ringed floor. She had a back kitchen, of course, behind the stump, where her acorn delft was stored on little shelves made of bark, propped with pebbles from the run. A fleece of vivid moss, finer than the most gorgeous Persian rug, covered this kitchen. The late storm had only brightened this; but alas! her shelves and acorn cups were all to be built and stored again.

They placed themselves in their respective dwellings, surrounded by daughters, and talked across.

“Now, le’s play _Thinks-I-to-Myself_!” said Bluebell; “it’s such a funny book; and there’s Miss Mandeville, and Robert, and Miss Twist, and old Mrs. Creepmouse--ain’t that a queer name, Tildy! I read it all through, and skipped the parts where it was long. You have one of your dolls be Robert, and I have one of mine be Emily Mandeville.”

Tildy allowed this to be done. The hero of _Thinks-I-to-Myself_ was made of a very jaunty elder switch; and the girls put themselves into parts and at the same time moved their puppets. Robert sent a valentine of a grape-vine leaf to Miss Mandeville; and Miss Mandeville used the language which she did in the book; and Miss Twist appeared at the ball pinned all over with flounces of her natural bloom, while an emerald chain of grass graced her neck. It was very interesting; but when they came to the marriage of the hero and heroine, the movers of the drama were at a loss for a suitable ceremony. They had never seen a wedding.

“Just join their hands,” said Tildy, “and I’ll say ‘Bow-wow-whiddle-ink--Bow-wow-whiddle-ink!’ That will do as well as anything.”

So the three-leaved palm of Miss Emily was laid in the three-leaved palm of gallant Robert, and twisted together, and the couple propped by a tree. Overhead great branches were rocking with a musical rustle, and further up the hill a squirrel barked. Ants crept up the drapery of the bride-expectant, and a bunch of ferns moved as if to fan her.

Tildy took her stand in front, and Bluebell stood by, grouped around with the other characters in _Thinks-I-to-Myself_, such of them as could not stand lying gracefully on their backs. Tildy opened her mouth and said “Bow--” when Teeny, leading the baby, appeared on the scene.

“Didn’t you hear me call you to supper?” she asked.

“No, we didn’t hear anything.”

“What you doing?”

“Ain’t doin’ anything,” returned Tildy, somewhat shamefaced. Her weakness for elders was something Teeny failed to appreciate.

“We’ve played a story out of a book,” explained Bluebell, “and now they are standing up to get married, and Tildy is going to say ‘Bow-wow-whiddle-ink!’”

“No, I ain’t!”

“Oh, Tildy, please go on. And old Mrs. Creepmouse died, and we buried her under grass, with bushes for stones at her head and feet.”

Teeny gurgled in her throat. She was a real grown young woman, you know, who sewed quilt-pieces and had one “Rising Sun” and “Pride of the West” done and quilted in shell-pattern and laid away. Still she did not laugh out loud, and kindly volunteered to help the bridal party out of their predicament.

“You can marry them by the old Connecticut law.”

“How, Teeny! Oh, you do it!”

So Teeny approached and said:

“By the old Connecticut law, I marry this Indian to the squaw; Kiss her and take her for your bride: Now I pronounce you man and wife All your life.”

“Oh, how beautiful that was!” sighed Bluebell. “It doesn’t make any difference ’cause they _wasn’t_ Indians, does it? Now le’s put ’em in the houses, and cry ‘good-by.’ Everybody in the book _cries_ when they talk. I don’t see what made ’em cry when they just say something. It says ‘cried my father,’ ‘cried Miss Mandeville.’ I s’pose they felt bad.”

Rocco helped to pile the elder-people, who had served their time and must lie shrivelling to-morrow, upon the rock and the stump. Then the human dolls who would have so many stories to play in their lives, went down hill chattering together, and sat on split-bottomed chairs around Liza’s table. Rocco was lifted by _Josephus_ and the other available books in the house. Their most luxurious dishes were custard and red currants; and the yellow faces of some of the crocks had yielded up their rich wrinkles, and they had cookies, which Liza indulgently let them crumble in the cream.

“Don’t go home yet,” commanded Tildy, when the first star was trembling out of the evening light and the household gathered outside the door on chairs or step. “I’ll take you clear to the bars, so you won’t be ’fraid if it’s dark.”

“I ain’t a coward,” remarked Doctor Garde’s valiant little girl. Doctor Garde’s baby sat by Liza-Robert’s knee. The evening milking was strained away in the spring-house, and the day’s tasks were told. Teeny had pieced a dozen blocks; the mother folded her bony and work-worn hands, and looked toward the horizon with patient, meditative eyes.

“Hush!” said Tildy; “if you’d hear mother tell about the child in the blackberry patch, it ’ud make you a coward!”