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Page 30
Cousin Ann, in a very short old skirt and a man's coat and high rubber
boots, was just poking some more wood into the big fire which blazed
furiously under the broad, flat pan where the sap was boiling. The
rough, brown hut was filled with white steam and that sweetest of all
odors, hot maple syrup. Cousin Ann turned her head, her face very red
with the heat of the fire, and nodded at the child.
"Hello, Betsy, you're just in time. I've saved out a cupful of hot syrup
for you, all ready to wax."
Betsy hardly heard this, although she had been wild about waxed sugar on
snow ever since her very first taste of it. "Cousin Ann," she said
unhappily, "the Superintendent visited our school this afternoon."
"Did he!" said Cousin Ann, dipping a thermometer into the boiling syrup.
"Yes, and we had EXAMINATIONS!" said Betsy.
"Did you?" said Cousin Ann, holding the thermometer up to the light and
looking at it.
"And you know how perfectly awful examinations make you feel," said
Betsy, very near to tears again.
"Why, no," said Cousin Ann, sorting over syrup tins. "They never made me
feel awful. I thought they were sort of fun."
"FUN!" cried Betsy, indignantly, staring through the beginnings of her
tears.
"Why, yes. Like taking a dare, don't you know. Somebody stumps you to
jump off the hitching-post, and you do it to show 'em. I always used to
think examinations were like that. Somebody stumps you to spell
'pneumonia,' and you do it to show 'em. Here's your cup of syrup. You'd
better go right out and wax it while it's hot."
Elizabeth Ann automatically took the cup in her hand, but she did not
look at it. "But supposing you get so scared you can't spell 'pneumonia'
or anything else!" she said feelingly. "That's what happened to me. You
know how your mouth gets all dry and your knees ..." She stopped. Cousin
Ann had said she did NOT know all about those things. "Well, anyhow, I
got so scared I could hardly STAND up! And I made the most awful
mistakes--things I know just as WELL! I spelled 'doubt' without any b
and 'separate' with an e, and I said Iowa was bounded on the north by
Wisconsin, and I ..."
"Oh, well," said Cousin Ann, "it doesn't matter if you really know the
right answers, does it? That's the important thing."
This was an idea which had never in all her life entered Betsy's brain
and she did not take it in at all now. She only shook her head miserably
and went on in a doleful tone. "And I said 13 and 8 are 22! and I wrote
March without any capital M, and I ..."
"Look here, Betsy, do you WANT to tell me all this?" Cousin Ann spoke in
the quick, ringing voice she had once in a while which made everybody,
from old Shep up, open his eyes and get his wits about him. Betsy
gathered hers and thought hard; and she came to an unexpected
conclusion. No, she didn't really want to tell Cousin Ann all about it.
Why was she doing it? Because she thought that was the thing to do.
"Because if you don't really want to," went on Cousin Ann, "I don't see
that it's doing anybody any good. I guess Hemlock Mountain will stand
right there just the same even if you did forget to put a b in 'doubt.'
And your syrup will be too cool to wax right if you don't take it out
pretty soon."
She turned back to stoke the fire, and Elizabeth Ann, in a daze, found
herself walking out of the door. It fell shut after her, and there she
was under the clear, pale-blue sky, with the sun just hovering over the
rim of Hemlock Mountain. She looked up at the big mountains, all blue
and silver with shadows and snow, and wondered what in the world Cousin
Ann had meant. Of course Hemlock Mountain would stand there just the
same. But what of it? What did that have to do with her arithmetic, with
anything? She had failed in her examination, hadn't she?
She found a clean white snow-bank under a pine-tree, and, setting her
cup of syrup down in a safe place, began to pat the snow down hard to
make the right bed for the waxing of the syrup. The sun, very hot for
that late March day, brought out strongly the tarry perfume of the big
pine-tree. Near her the sap dripped musically into a bucket, already
half full, hung on a maple-tree. A blue-jay rushed suddenly through the
upper branches of the wood, his screaming and chattering voice sounding
like noisy children at play.
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