“I would like to get lost in the woods,” she observed, “and have everybody out hunting me while I had to eat berries and roots. I don't believe I'd like roots, though: they look so big and tough. And I wouldn't touch a persimmon! Nor Injun turnip. You's a bad boy that time you give me Injun turnip to eat, Bobaday Padgett!” She turned upon her nephew, fierce with the recollection, and he laughed, saying he wished he'd some to fool somebody with now. “It bit my mouth so a whole crock of milk wouldn't help it, and if brother Tip'd been home, Ma Padgett wouldn't let you off so easy.” “You wanted to taste it,” said Robert. “And you'd eat the green persimmons if they'd puckered your mouth clear shut.” “I wanted to see what the things that the little pig that lived in the stone house filled his churn with, tasted like,” admitted aunt Corinne lucidly; so she subsided. “Do you see the wagon, children?” inquired Grandma Padgett, who felt the necessity of following Zene's lead closely. She stopped Old Hickory and Old Henry at cross-roads. “No; but he said turn west on the first road we came to,” counseled Bobaday. “And this is the first, I counted,” said aunt Corinne. “I wish we could see the cover ahead of us. We don't want to resk gettin' separated,” said Grandma Padgett. Yet she turned the horses westward with a degree of confidence, and drove up into a hilly country which soon hid the sun. The long shades crept past and behind them. There was a country church, with a graveyard full of white stones nearly smothered in grass and briers. And there was a school-house in an open space, with a playground beaten bare and white in the midst of a yellow mustard jungle. They saw some loiterers creeping home, carrying dinner-pail and basket, and taking a languid last tag of each other. The little girls looked up at the passing carriage from their sunbonnet depths, but the boys had taken off their hats to slap each other with: they looked at the strangers, round-eyed and ready to smile, and Robert and Corinne nodded. Grandma Padgett bethought herself to ask if any of them had seen a moving wagon pass that way. The girls stared bashfully at each other and said “No, ma'am,” but the boys affirmed strongly that they had seen two moving wagons go by, one just as school was out, and the boldest boy of all made an effort to remember the white and gray horses. The top of a hill soon stood between these children, and the travellers, but in all the vista beyond there was no glimpse of Zene. Grandma Padgett felt anxious, and her anxiety increased as the dusk thickened. “There don't seem to be any taverns along this road,” she said; “and I hate to ask at any farmer's for accommodations over night. We don't know the neighborhood, and a body hates to be a bother.” “Let's camp out,” volunteered Bobaday. “We'd need the cover off of the wagon to do that, and kittles,” said Grandma Padgett, “and dried meat and butter and cake and things _out_ of the wagon.”