that the little turkeys had just that day come out of the shell. They peeped at her from under the old turkey hen, not with the bright, saucy looks of little chickens, but with shy, wild, frightened eyes, like timid little birds. Even better than the turkeys and chickens, Judith liked the little geese. They were so big and fluffy when they came out of the shell, and such a beautiful, soft green; and they waddled and bobbed their heads so quaintly, as they moved in a little, compact band over the bluegrass that they loved to eat. They were prettier still when they sailed, like a fleet of little boats at anchor, in some quiet corner of the creek, the sun flecking their green bodies with pale gold as it blinked at them through the boughs of the overhanging willow tree.
She was absorbed in all the small life that fluttered and darted and hopped and crawled about the farm. The robins and finches that sang and built their nests in the big hickory tree by the gate; the butterflies, white, yellow, and parti-colored, that fluttered among the weeds and grasses; the big dragonflies with gauzy wings iridescently green and purple in the sunlight, that darted back and forth over the brook: these little creatures, with their sweet voices, their gay colors and shy, elusive ways, entered into Judith's life and became a part of it. The grass and the bare ground, too, were alive for Judith, alive with the life of beetles, crickets, ants, and innumerable other worms and insects. The toads that hopped about in the evening were her friends; and when she happened upon a snake she did not scream and run as Lizzie May would have done, but stood leaning forward on tiptoe admiring its colors, the wonder and beauty of its pattern and the sinuous grace of its movement until it wiggled out of sight in the grass.
She loved fish, too: the long, slinky pickerel that live where the pond is full of reeds and water lilies, the whiskered catfish and the beautiful perch, banded with light and dark green, as though they had taken their colors from the sun-flecked banks along which they lived. Better than these big pond fish, because they were smaller and nearer and so more intimately hers, she liked the little "minnies" that lived in her own creek.
