“Let me go and carry them some, Ma.  It’s just as warm and nice as can be out-of-doors, real springy, and I know the way to the wood lot.  I’d just love to go.”

“Let’s see—­ten o’clock,” said Mrs. Beamish, putting the last bit of cake into her mouth, and wiping her fingers upon her apron.  “It’s a matter of four miles there by the bridge, Jake says, though if you cross the ford it takes off a mile or more.  You’d better go round by the bridge, anyway.”

“Oh no, Ma; that isn’t worth while, for Pa said only last night that the ice was strong enough yet to sled over all the wood he’d been cutting,” said Roxie, earnestly, for the additional mile rather terrified her.

“Did he?  Well, if that’s so, it is all right,” replied her mother, in a tone of relief, and then she filled a tin pail with nut-cakes, laid a clean, brown napkin over them, and then shut in the cover and set it on the dresser, saying: 

“There, they’ve got cheese with them, and you’ll reach camp before they eat their noon lunch.  Now, get on your leggin’s and thick shoes, and your coat and cap and mittens, and eat some cakes before you start, so as not to take theirs when you get there.”

“I wouldn’t do that, neither; not if I never had any,” replied Roxie, a little resentfully, and then she pulled her squirrel-skin cap well over her ears, tied her pretty scarlet tippet around her neck, and held up her face for a good-bye kiss.  The mother gave it with unusual fervor, and said, kindly: 

“Good-bye to you, little girl.  Take good care of yourself, and come safe home to mother.”

“Yes, Ma.  But I may wait and come with them, mayn’t I?  They’ll let me ride on old Rob, you know.”

“Why, yes, you might as well, I suppose, though I’ll be lonesome without you all day, baby.  But it would be better for you to ride home, so stay.”

It was a lovely day in the latter part of March, and although the ground was covered with snow, and the brooks and rivers were still fast bound in ice, there was something in the air that told of spring,—­something that set the sap in the maple-trees mounting through its million little channels toward the buds, already beginning to redden for their blooming, and sent the blood in little Roxie’s veins dancing upward too, until it blossomed in her cheeks and lips fairer than in any maple-tree.

“How pleasant it is to be alive!” said the little girl aloud, while a squirrel running up the old oak-tree overhead stopped, and curling his bushy tail a little higher upon his back, chattered the same idea in his own language.  Roxie stopped to listen and laugh aloud, at which sound the squirrel frisked away to his hole, and the little girl, singing merrily, went on her way, crossed the river on the ice, and on the other bank stopped and looked wistfully down a side path leading into the denser forest away from her direct road.

“I really believe the checkerberries must have started, it is so springy,” she thought; “I’ve a mind to go down and look in what Jake calls ‘Bear-berry Pasture,’ though I told him they were not bear-berries, but real checkerberries.”  So, saying to herself Roxie ran a few steps down the little path, stopped, stood still for a minute, then slowly turned back, saying: