They early learned that she was a safe repository for secrets and a valued counselor in times of storm and stress; and although her visits were confined to that anticipated one of early June and an occasional second in October, which they could never entirely depend upon, they found her more than once the one thing needful. Indeed, Roger and John, with other of their associates, never forgot her sudden and unlooked-for appearance and the quick relief it engendered on a certain Saturday morning of September in Roger’s thirteenth year. They were gathered in disheartened council on Mary Wescott’s boulder, in a final and desperate effort to discover some means of averting from themselves the just deserts of a forbidden line of conduct, which, in this case, had to do with some pear trees, an angry farmer, stones, and broken windows. Retribution seemed inevitable. They were silently picturing the chastened glances which they would exchange at church the next morning in an attempt to discover whose fate had been most unendurable, when around a bend in the path at the foot of the boulder came Mary Christmas, taking her favorite short cut through the pasture. Surely here was visible proof of a beneficent Providence, who was not deaf to frenzied prayers, and who caused His rain to fall alike upon the just and upon the unjust! It was no easy matter to disclose all the miserable details of the affair to Mary Christmas, whose piercing black eyes sought out every jot and tittle of the truth; but hope, so long deferred, spurred them on, and they spared themselves nothing, secure at least in the knowledge that a general confession to her was, when compared with acknowledgment made alone and unaided before grieved and disillusioned parents, of two evils most certainly the lesser. They needed five dollars, they told her, after their consciences were, for the time being, freed--just five hundred times the amount which Roger had unearthed from his pockets, and which was the sole wealth among them. They named the sum with hesitation; it was appallingly large in those days; but it was the necessary aggregate which must be extorted from them by sundown if their parents were to remain in ignorance. “I see,” said Mary Christmas, once the miserable tale was told, her stern, sharp eyes scrutinizing each guilty face. “I see.” Surely the first person singular, present indicative of that simple verb had never before been burdened with such weighty disapproval!