“Maybe they won’t any of them come,” said Rose.

“H’m!  Don’t you worry about that.  They’ll come fast enough.  I never see any trouble yet about folks comin’ to get anything good that they didn’t have to pay for.”

Rose and her mother calculated how many to invite to the party.  They decided to include all the available young people in Pembroke.

“We might jest as well while we’re about it,” said Hannah, judiciously.  “There are cherries enough, and the Lord only knows when your father ’ll have another freak like this.  I guess it’s like an eclipse of the sun, an’ won’t come again very soon.”

Within a day or two all the young people had been bidden to the cherry party, and, as Mrs. Berry had foretold, accepted.  Their indignation was not proof against the prospect of pleasure; and, moreover, they all liked Rose and William, and would not have refused on their account.

The week before the party, when the cherries were beginning to turn red, and the robins had found them out, was an arduous one to little Ezra Ray, a young brother of Tommy Ray, who tended in Silas Berry’s store.  He was hired for twopence to sit all day in the cherry orchard and ring a cow-bell whenever the robins made excursions into the trees.  From earliest dawn when the birds were first astir, until they sought their little nests, did Ezra sit uncomfortably upon a hard peaked rock in the midst of the orchard and jingle his bell.

He was white-headed, and large of his age like his brother.  His pale blue eyes were gravely vacant under his thick white thatch; his chin dropped; his mouth gaped with stolid patience.  There was no mitigation for his dull task; he was not allowed to keep his vigil on a comfortable branch of a tree with the mossy trunk for a support to his back, lest he might be tempted to eat of the cherries, and turn pal of the robins instead of enemy.  He dared not pull down any low bough and have a surreptitious feast, for he understood well that there were likely to be sharp eyes at the rear windows of the house, that it was always probable that old Silas Berry, of whom he was in mortal fear, might be standing at his back, and, moreover, he should be questioned, and had not falsehood for refuge, for he was a good child, and would be constrained to speak the truth.

They would not let him have a gun instead of a bell, although he pleaded hard.  Could he have sat there presenting a gun like a sentry on duty, the week, in spite of discomfort and deprivations, would have been full of glory and excitement.  As it was, the dulness and monotony of the jingling of the cow-bell made even his stupid childish mind dismal.  All the pleasant exhilaration of youth seemed to have deserted the boy, and life to him became as inane and bovine as to the original ringer of that bell grazing all the season in her own shadow over the same pasture-ground.