"What are you doing, Mary?" he called, as his step on the bridge made her look around. She held up a battered old volume of poems, and moved over in the hammock to make room for him beside her.
"I'm learning a hymn. That's the way we always earned our missionary money back in Kansas. I'm going to Sunday school with Hazel and George this afternoon in the surrey over to the schoolhouse. Her uncle has one there. I didn't have any pennies to take, so mamma said I could begin learning hymns again, as I used to do back home."
As usual Mary rattled on, scarcely pausing to take breath or give her listener a chance to make reply.
"This isn't one of the singing hymns, the kind they have in church. It's by Isaac Watts. I like it because it's about bees, and it's so easy to say:
"How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour, And gather honey all the day From every opening flower.'
"Joyce picked it out for me, and said that she guessed that Isaac Watts must have gone to the School of the Bees himself, and that was where he learned that 'Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.' The bees hate idle hands, you know, that's the drones, and, although they are patient with them longer than you'd suppose they'd be, it always ends in their stinging the drones to death.
"And Lloyd said it was a pity that some other people she knew not a thousand miles away couldn't go to school to the bees and learn that about Satan's finding mischief for idle hands to do.
"And Joyce said yes, it was, for it was too bad for such a fine fellow to get into trouble just because he was a drone, and had no ambition to make anything of himself. And I asked them who they meant, but they just laughed at each other and wouldn't tell me. I don't see why big girls always want to be so mysterious about things and act as if they had secrets. Do you?"
"No, indeed!" answered Phil, in his most sympathetic manner. He stooped and picked a long blade of grass at his feet.
"And Joyce said that if Alaka had gone to school to the bees, he wouldn't have lost his eyes, and Lloyd said that if somebody kept on, he would lose at least his turquoises. When I asked her what she meant, she said, oh, she was just thinking of what Mr. Ellestad told at the picnic, that the Indians thought the turquoises were their most precious stones because they stole their colour from the sky, and she called turquoise the friendship stone because it was true blue."