After breakfast they piled
their implements on a mudboat, which Dannie drove, while Jimmy
rode one of his team, and led the other, and opened the gates.
They began on Dannie's field, because it was closest, and for the
next two weeks, unless it were too rainy to work, they plowed,
harrowed, lined off, and planted the seed.
The blackbirds followed along the furrows picking up grubs, the
crows cawed from high tree tops, the bluebirds twittered about
hollow stumps and fence rails, the wood thrushes sang out their
souls in the thickets across the river, and the King Cardinal of
Rainbow Bottom whistled to split his throat from the giant
sycamore. Tender greens were showing along the river and in the
fields, and the purple of red-bud mingled with the white of wild
plum all along the Wabash.
The sunny side of the hill that sloped down to Rainbow Bottom was
a mass of spring beauties, anemones, and violets; thread-like
ramps rose rank to the scent among them, and round ginger leaves
were thrusting their folded heads through the mold. The
Kingfisher was cleaning his house and fishing from his favorite
stump in the river, while near him, at the fall of every luckless
worm that missed its hold on a blossom-whitened thorn tree, came
the splash of the great Black Bass.
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