Mary Erskine

"Did not I tell you about it? I am going to invite you and all the children in the village that I know, to come here some day when the raspberries are ripe, and have a raspberry party,—like the strawberry party that we had to-day. There are a great many raspberries on my place."

"I'm very glad," said Malleville. "When are you going to invite us?"

"Oh, in a week or two," said Mary Erskine. "But then the new road will not be done until the fall. They have just begun it. We can hear them working upon it in one place, pretty soon."

The party soon came to the place which Mary Erskine had referred to. It was a point where the new road came near the line of the old one, and a party of men and oxen were at work, making a causeway, across a low wet place. As the children passed along, they could hear the sound of axes and the voices of men shouting to oxen. Phonny wished very much to go and see. So Mary Erskine led the way through the woods a short distance, till they came in sight of the men at work. They were engaged in felling trees, pulling out rocks and old logs which were sunken in the mire, by means of oxen and chains, and in other similar works, making all the time loud and continual vociferations, which resounded and echoed through the forest in a very impressive manner.

What interested Phonny most in these operations, was to see how patiently the oxen bore being driven about in the deep mire, and the prodigious strength which they exerted in pulling out the logs. One of the workmen would take a strong iron chain, and while two others would pry up the end of a log with crow-bars or levers, he would pass the chain under the end so raised, and then hook it together above. Another man would then back up a pair of oxen to the place, and sometimes two pairs, in order that they might be hooked to the chain which passed around the log. When all was ready, the oxen were started forward, and though they went very slowly, step by step, yet they exerted such prodigious strength as to tear the log out of its bed, and drag it off, roots, branches, and all, entirely out of the way.

Monstrous rocks were lifted up and dragged out of the line of the road in much the same manner.

After looking at this scene for some time, the party returned to the old road again, and there Mary Erskine said that she would bid her visitors good-bye, and telling them that she would not forget to invite them to her raspberry party, she took leave of them and went back toward her own home.

"If all the children of the village that Mary Erskine knows, are invited to that party," said Phonny, "what a great raspberry party it will be!"

"Yes," said Beechnut, "it will be a raspberry jam."

THE END

notes

1

Per is a Latin word meaning for, and centum another meaning a hundred.

2

See Frontispiece (#x1_x_1_i12).