Though the camp was a fairly comfortable one, it proved lonesome for the children for there was no Center, and it did not seem worth while for them to start to school for so short a time. It was doubtful, anyway, whether the school had room for them. Grandma was too lame to work in the cotton. When she bent over, she could hardly straighten up again; so she stayed home with Jimmie and the baby, and Dick and Rose-Ellen picked. Rose-Ellen felt superior, because there were children her age picking into small sacks, like pillow-slips, and she used one of the regular long bags, fastened to her belt and trailing on the ground behind. At first cotton-picking was interesting, the fluffy bolls looking like artificial roses and the stray blossoms strangely shaped and delicately pink. Sometimes a group of Negro pickers would chant in rich voices as they picked. "Da cotton want a-pickin' so ba-ad!" But it was astonishing to the Beechams to find how many aches they had and how few pounds of cotton when the day's picking was weighed. Tired and achy as they were at night, though, they were glad to find children in the next shack. "Queer ones," Grandma called them. "It's their talk I can't get the hang of," Grandpa added. "It may be English, but I have to listen sharp to make it out." Daddy trotted Sally on his foot and laughed. "It's English all right--English of Shakespeare's time, likely, that they've used for generations. They're Kentucky mountaineers, and as the father says, 'a fur piece from home'." It was through the eldest girl that the children became acquainted: the girl and her toothbrush. Rose-Ellen was brushing her teeth at the door, and Dick was saying, "I ain't going to. Nobody brushes their teeth down here," when suddenly the girl appeared, a toothbrush and jelly glass in her hand, and a younger brother and sister following her. "This is the way we brush our teeth," sang the girl and while her toe tapped the time, two brushes popped into two mouths and scrubbed up and down, up and down--"brush our teeth, brush our teeth!" She spied Rose-Ellen. "Did you-uns larn at the Center, too?" she asked eagerly. "First off, we-uns allowed they was queer little hair-brushes; but them teachers! Them teachers could make 'em fly fast as a sewing machine. We reckoned if them teachers was so smart with such comical contraptions, like enough they knowed other queer doings. And they sure did." Thus began the friendship between the Beecham children and Cissy, Tom and Mary--with toddling Georgie and the baby thrown in. Cissy was beautiful, like Grandma's old cameo done in color, with heavy, loose curls of gold-brown hair. Long evening, visits she and Rose-Ellen had, when they were not too tired from cotton-picking. Little by little Rose-Ellen learned the story of Cissy's past few years. Always she would remember it, spiced with the queer words Cissy used.