“Seems to me you should be able to earn that much,” said Grandmother.

“Earn it?” asked Alice.  “How?”

“Oh, by some sort of work,” answered Grandmother.

“Oh, could I really?” exclaimed Alice delightedly.  “What could I do?”

“Could I earn some too?” asked Mary Jane eagerly.

“What do you want money for?” laughed Alice, as though a little girl wouldn’t have use for such a thing as money!  “You always want to do everything, Mary Jane!”

“Of course she does,” said Grandmother comfortably, “and you do too.  The thing I’m thinking about is more fun if done by two anyway.  But what do you want your money for, dear?” she asked the little girl.

“I want it to get a present for my dear mother,” said Mary Jane, “a present that she don’t know anything about and that Daddah don’t know anything about and that nobody gives me the money for.  Can I really truly earn some money?”

“Surely,” replied Grandmother.  “See those woods, girls?” She pointed across the garden and across the cornfield to the woods about a quarter of a mile away.  “In those woods are blackberry bushes, lots of them.  And this is about the beginning of the blackberry season.  Now if you girls really want to earn some money you may take your little baskets and go berrying.  I’ll buy all you can pick at ten cents a quart.  You ought to easily get your seventy-five cents that way, Alice, for the bushes ate usually loaded with berries.”

“But the berries are yours to begin with,” objected Alice, who liked to be fair; “we can’t sell you something that already belongs to you.”

“Of course you can’t,” replied Grandmother, much pleased with Alice’s honesty.  “I shouldn’t have said ‘buy the berries’; I should have said ‘pay you for the picking’ at ten cents a quart.  If I ‘bought’ the berries of any one I would have to pay fifteen or twenty cents a quart.  And if I hired some one to pick them for me as I have some years, I would have to pay ten cents a quart, just as I offered you.  So, you see, I promised you no more than you will fairly earn.”

“How do you pick berries?” asked Alice.

“There’s only one way,” laughed Grandmother, much amused at the question.  “You touch them and off they come!  Just pick them off the bushes and drop them in your basket and the thing is done.”

“Let’s go now,” said Mary Jane eagerly.

“Not now,” answered Grandmother, “because it’s too near dinner time.  Wait till you have your dinner and a little rest of half an hour.  Then you can start and pick all afternoon.”

By two o’clock the girls had hunted up the berry baskets Grandmother told them to find in the attic (cunning little baskets with long, curving handles they were, too) and, tying on their biggest sun hats, they started out through the garden path.

They crossed the field, climbed the fence into the woods and turned down the wagon road as Grandmother had directed them.  And sure enough, there were the berry bushes just as she had said.  Bushes that were fairly loaded with shining blackberries that glistened in the afternoon sunshine.