She might have understood better if Grannie Thornton had explained the real reason: that the Thorntons had gone wild and run through their farm property; mortgaged it and sold it out; and that Ellison, a shrewd buyer, had got it when it was to be had cheapest. But she asked one more question. "Gran'" she said, peeping in at the door, "will we ever get it again, s'pose?" "Mercy sakes, how do I know!" came the answer. "It's ours now, by rights. Will you ever stop talking?" The child looked wonderingly out across the fields; seated herself by the window, and still gazed as she drank her coffee and ate her scanty supper. She was sitting there when night shut down and hid the hill and the brook from sight. The sun, himself an early riser, was up not anywhere near so early next morning as was Bess Thornton. There was light in the east, but the sun had not begun to roll above the hill-tops when the child stole quietly out of bed, slipped into her few garments, and hurried barefoot, from the room where she and Grannie Thornton slept. The old woman was still slumbering heavily. "I'll not ask that old Witham for anything for gran," she said. "I'll get her something,--and something she'll like, too. It all belongs to us, anyway, gran' said." The girl gently slid the bolt of the kitchen door, stepped outside and closed the door after her. Then she made her way out through the neglected garden to an old apple-tree, against which there leaned a long slender alder pole, with a line and hook attached. Throwing this over her shoulder, she started down through the fields in the direction of the brook. On the way, a few grasshoppers, roused from their early naps in the grass by the girl's bare feet, jumped this side and that. But, with the coolness of the hour, they seemed to have some of old Grannie Thornton's rheumatism in their joints, for they tumbled and sprawled clumsily. The girl quickly captured several of them, tying them up in a fold of her handkerchief. Presently she came near the borders of the pool, dear to the heart of Farmer Ellison. But the edge of the pool on the side where she walked was boggy. Gazing sharply for some moments up at the big house on the hill, the girl darted down to the edge of the brook close by the dam, then suddenly skimmed across it to the other side. A little way above the dam, on that side, there were clumps of bushes, among which one might steal softly to the water's edge, on good, firm footing. The girl did this, seated herself on a little knoll behind a screen of shrubs, baited the hook with a fat grasshopper and cast it into the pool. "Grasshopper Green, go catch me a trout," she whispered; "and don't you dare come back without a big--"