"I ’ll ride there some day and get her, if I can, and keep her until you come home," offered Mary kindly. "Rich folks like you can do everything," said the woman bitterly, with a look at the beautiful horse which easily outstepped her. "Alas, we can’t do everything!" said Mary sadly; and there was something in her voice which touched the complainer’s heart. "I guess you would if you could," she answered simply; and then Mary’s own heart was warmed again. The road still led northward along the high uplands above the river; all the northern hills and the mountains of Ossipee looked dark now, in a solemn row. Mary turned her horse into a narrow track off the highroad, and leaned over to give the comforted child into his mother’s arms. He slipped to ground of his own accord, and trotted gayly along. "Look at them pore little feet! I wisht he had some shoes; he can’t git fur afore he ’ll be cryin’ again for me to take an’ car’ him," said the mother ruefully. "You see them furthest peaks? I’ve got to git there somehow ’n other, with this lo’d on my back an’ that pore baby. But I know folks on the road; pore’s they be, they ’ll take me in, if I can hold out to do the travelin’. War ’s hard on pore folks. We ’ve got a good little farm, an’ my man didn’t want to leave it. He held out ’count o’ me till the bounty tempted him. We could n’t be no porer than we be, now I tell ye!" "Go to the store on the hill and get some shoes for the baby," said Mary eagerly, as if to try to cheer her fellow traveler. "Get some warm little shoes, and tell the storekeeper ’t was I who bade you come." And so they parted; but Mary’s head drooped sorrowfully as she rode among the gray birches, on her shorter way to the high slopes of Pine Hill. This piece of country had, years before, furnished some of the noblest masts that were ever landed on English shores. The ruined stump of that great pine which was the wonder of the King’s dockyards, and had loaded one of the old mastships with its tons of timber, could still be seen, though shrunken and soft with moss. A fox, large in his new winter fur, went sneaking across the way; and the young horse pranced gayly at the sight of him, while Mary noticed his track and the way it led, for her brother’s sake, and turned aside across the half-wooded pasture, until she had a sportsman’s satisfaction in seeing the fox make toward a rough, ledgy bit of ground, and warm thicket of underbrush at a spring head. This would be good news for poor old Jack, who might take no time for hunting, but could dream of it any night after supper, like a happy dog before his own fire.