“We went on a yard or two and passed close to one of the telegraph posts through which a light breeze was humming. Helen stopped short with eyes dilated and open mouth. ‘Oh! I _wonders_!’ she cried. ‘What is it?’ I asked her. She whispered to me to keep quite still while she went to see, and proceeded to put her ear against the post, holding up one finger of the injured hand in warning to me not to stir. ‘There’s beautiful music,’ she said at last very softly, ‘there’s a ball, and all the little backberwies is dancing!’ I said that if the old blackberries let the young ones go to a ball without them it served them right if they got picked themselves. I then suggested that we should go on to the next post and see what was going on there. As we went Helen noticed that near each one there was a heap of stones and a bare gravelly patch of ground. ‘Them is the backberwy houses,’ she said, ‘and all the backberwies are out, and the children are gone to a dancing class, so the old backberwies send them by theirselves.’ So the little difficulty which I had mentioned was explained away, though to the vividness of her imagination it had evidently presented a real difficulty and had not been forgotten. “Presently, after listening to the music in several telegraph posts, saying that there was an organ in one and fiddles in another, while in a third she declared that the blackberries were singing, she returned to the hedge and the more serious duty of filling her little basket. All the time, however, she kept up a comment upon what she saw. The red hips and haws were ‘the backberwies’ soldiers,’ the elderberries were their clergymen, and the sloes were guards. Every few minutes she stopped in a sort of ecstasy at all that was around her, and gazing in one direction and another would softly say, ‘Oh! I wonders!’ It was evidently a revelation of beauty to her, and at the same time a scene of mystery, a sort of fairyland where everything thought and lived and breathed. [Sidenote: The Wicked Soldiers.] “At last the basket was getting nearly full, and in stretching up for some specially fine berries a dog-rose thorn tore the back of my hand, leaving a long scratch. Helen’s anger knew no bounds. “‘The wicked, wicked soldiers,’ she said, and then taking several of the bright red hips she tore them into fragments and threw them away. And now we had wandered backwards and forwards along that special bit of hedge until all the blackberries within reach were picked, and only the baby green ones were left. ‘Will they die if we leaves them all alone?’ she said, and then she gathered as many as possible, and carrying them in her two hands placed them in little heaps near each telegraph post that they might be noticed when the balls and concerts were over. “I said that I wondered what the young blackberries would do when they came out and found all their fathers and mothers gone, and only the little babies left. And Helen said ‘I wonders.’”