But Ike was not so easily reconciled. He did not appreciate the gratulation in this acquisition that pervaded the fireside. She was nothing but a girl, and a little one at that. Girls were not uncommon; in fact they abounded. They were nothing to brag on—Ike was young as yet. They couldn’t do anything that was worth while. To be sure the miller’s daughter _was_ tolerably limber, and could walk on the timbers of the race, which were high above the stream. But how she worked her arms above her head to balance herself! And she pretended to shoot once in a while; he would rather be the mark than stand forty yards from it. That was the best he could say for her shooting. And she was the most valuable and desirable specimen of girlhood in his acquaintance. He noted with a sort of wonder that his mother, through sheer absorption, let the hoe-cake burn to a cinder, and had to make up and bake one anew. And when it was at last done, and placed on the table with the platter of venison and corn dodgers, he did not admire particularly the simple but vivid delight with which Rosamond greeted the prospect of supper. But even the saturnine Hiram Guyther looked at her with a smile as she ran glibly around the table, and with her hands on the edge stood on her tiptoes to see what they were to have, and he turned and said to Jerry Binwell, “She air a powerful bouncin’ leetle gal. I reckon we-uns’ll hev ter borry her, Jerry—ef,” recollecting in his turn that this was the child of his blind brother’s enemy, “ef Ab’s willin’.” The dawdling Jerry, still staring disconsolately at the fire, drawled non-committally, “I dunno ’bout’n that.” Despite all her fervor of anticipation, Rosamondy was not hungry. She knelt in her chair at the table to be tall enough to participate in the exercises, and her beaming pink face, and her tossing yellow hair, and her glittering rows of squirrel teeth—she showed a great many of them when she laughed—irradiated the space between aunt Jemima and Ab. Her conduct was what Ike mentally designated as “robustious.” She bounced up and down; she fed her supper to the dogs; she let the cat climb up the back of her chair and put two paws on her shoulder among her tangled yellow curls and lap milk out of her saucer. She shrieked and bobbed about till Ike did not know whether he was eating hoe-cake or sawdust. She looked as if she were out in a high wind. Aunt Jemima vainly sought to make her eat her supper, but the displeasure on her face was a feigned rebuke for which Rosamond cared as little as might be. When she concluded her defiance of all those observances, which Ike had been taught to respect, by taking her empty saucer, inverting it and perching it on her tousled yellow pate after the manner of a cap, Hiram Guyther, the meal being ended, caught her up delightedly and rode her to the fireplace on his shoulder.