“Yes,” said Phonny,—­“because you hurried me.”

“Well, I’m sorry;” said Malleville, looking very much concerned.

Phonny was put quite to a nonplus by this unexpected answer.  He had expected to hear Malleville deny that it was her fault that he had torn his clothes, and was prepared to insist strenuously that it was; but this unlooked-for gentleness seemed to leave him not a word to say.  So he walked along by the side of Malleville in silence.

“Was it a pretty bird’s-nest?” said Malleville in a conciliatory tone, after a moment’s pause.

“No,” said Phonny.  “It was not any bird’s nest at all.”

When the children reached the farm as they called it, Mary Erskine seated Phonny on the bed, and then drawing up her chair near to him, she took his foot in her lap and mended the rent so neatly that there was afterwards no sign of it to be seen.

Little Albert was at this time about three years old, and Bella was seven.  Phonny, while Mary Erskine was mending his clothes, asked where the children were.  Mary Erskine said that they had gone out into the fields with Thomas, to make hay.  So Phonny and Malleville, after getting proper directions in respect to the way that they were to go, set off in pursuit of them.

They went out at a back-door which led to a beautiful walk under a long trellis, which was covered with honey-suckles and roses.  Malleville stopped to get a rose, and Phonny to admire two humming-birds that were playing about the honey-suckles.  He wished very much that he could catch one of them, but he could not even get near them.  From the end of the trellis’s walk the children entered a garden, and at the back side of the garden they went through a narrow place between two posts into a field.  They walked along the side of this field, by a very pleasant path with high green grass and flowers on one side, and a wall with a great many raspberry bushes growing by it, and now and then little thickets of trees, on the other.  The bushes and trees made the walk that they were going in very cool and shady.  There were plenty of raspberries upon the bushes, but they were not yet ripe.  Phonny said that when the raspberries were ripe he meant to come out to Mary Erskine’s again and get some.

Presently the children turned a sort of a corner which was formed by a group of trees, and then they came in sight of the hay-making party.

“Oh, they have got the horse and cart,” said Phonny.  So saying he set off as fast he could run, toward the hay-makers, Malleville following him.

The horse and cart were standing in the middle of the field among the numerous winrows of hay.  The two children of Mrs. Forester, Bella and Albert, were in the cart, treading down the hay as fast as Thomas pitched it up.  As soon as Phonny and Malleville reached the place, Malleville stood still with her hands behind her, looking at the scene with great interest and pleasure.  Phonny wanted to know if Thomas had not got another pitch-fork, so that he might help him pitch up the hay.