“Lord! what a tongue you have!  Put down your things and go out and pick up chips to light the fire with in the morning.”

Pearl laid her bird-cage on a chair and was back so soon with the chips that Mrs. Motherwell could not think of anything to say.

“Now go for the cows,” she said, “and don’t run them home!”

“Where will I run them to then, ma’am?” Pearl asked innocently.

“Good land, child, have I to tell you everything?  Folks that can’t do without tellin’ can’t do much with, I say.  Bring the cows to the bars, and don’t stand there staring at me.”

When Pearl dashed out of the door, she almost fell over the old dog who lay sleepily snapping at the flies which buzzed around his head.  He sprang up with a growl which died away into an apologetic yawn as she stooped to pat his honest brown head.

A group of red calves stood at the bars of a small field plaintively calling for their supper.  It was not just an ordinary bawl, but a double-jointed hyphenated appeal, indicating a very exhausted condition indeed.

Pearl looked at them in pity.  The old dog, wrinkling his nose and turning away his head, did not give them a glance.  He knew them.  Noisy things!  Let ’em bawl.  Come on!

Across the narrow creek they bounded, Pearl and old Nap, and up the other hill where the silver willows grew so tall they were hidden in them.  The goldenrod nodded its plumy head in the breeze, and the tall Gaillardia, brown and yellow, flickered unsteadily on its stem.

The billows of shadow swept over the wheat on each side of the narrow pasture; the golden flowers, the golden fields, the warm golden sunshine intoxicated Pearl with their luxurious beauty, and in that hour of delight she realised more pleasure from them than Sam Motherwell and his wife had in all their long lives of barren selfishness.  Their souls were of a dull drab dryness in which no flower took root, there was no gold to them but the gold of greed and gain, and with it they had never bought a smile or a gentle hand pressure or a fervid “God bless you!” and so it lost its golden colour, and turned to lead and ashes in their hands.

When Pearl and Nap got the cows turned homeward they had to slacken their pace.

“I don’t care how cross she is,” Pearl said, “if I can come for the cows every night.  Look at that fluffy white cloud!  Say, wouldn’t that make a hat trimming that would do your heart good.  The body of the hat blue like that up there, edged ’round with that cloud over there, then a blue cape with white fur on it just to match.  I kin just feel that white stuff under my chin.”

Then Pearl began to cake-walk and sing a song she had heard Camilla sing.  She had forgotten some of the words, but Pearl never was at a loss for words: 

   The wild waves are singing to the shore
   As they were in the happy days of yore.

Pearl could not remember what the wild waves were singing, so she sang what was in her own heart: