"I don't know who I rather would have have them. They're only turning yellow where they are. But you're the doctor as the saying is. I'll put the light out. Don't you wait for me: I've just begun the night. You get some sleep. I'll knock so-fashion and peep round the door When I come back so you'll know who it is. There's nothing I'm afraid of like scared people. I don't want you should shoot me in the head. What am I doing carrying off this bottle? There now, you get some sleep." He shut the door The Doctor slid a little down the pillow. BLUEBERRIES "You ought to have seen what I saw on my way To the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day: Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb, Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum In the cavernous pail of the first one to come! And all ripe together, not some of them green And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!" "I don't know what part of the pasture you mean." "You know where they cut off the woods—-let me see—- It was two years ago—-or no!—-can it be No longer than that?—-and the following fall The fire ran and burned it all up but the wall." "Why, there hasn't been time for the bushes to grow. That's always the way with the blueberries, though: There may not have been the ghost of a sign Of them anywhere under the shade of the pine, But get the pine out of the way, you may burn The pasture all over until not a fern Or grass-blade is left, not to mention a stick, And presto, they're up all around you as thick And hard to explain as a conjurer's trick." "It must be on charcoal they fatten their fruit. I taste in them sometimes the flavour of soot. And after all really they're ebony skinned: The blue's but a mist from the breath of the wind, A tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand, And less than the tan with which pickers are tanned." "Does Mortenson know what he has, do you think?" "He may and not care and so leave the chewink To gather them for him—-you know what he is. He won't make the fact that they're rightfully his An excuse for keeping us other folk out." "I wonder you didn't see Loren about." "The best of it was that I did. Do you know, I was just getting through what the field had to show And over the wall and into the road, When who should come by, with a democrat-load Of all the young chattering Lorens alive, But Loren, the fatherly, out for a drive." "He saw you, then? What did he do? Did he frown?" "He just kept nodding his head up and down. You know how politely he always goes by. But he thought a big thought—-I could tell by his eye—- Which being expressed, might be this in effect: 'I have left those there berries, I shrewdly suspect, To ripen too long. I am greatly to blame.'" "He's a thriftier person than some I could name."