My father's resting-place had not been invaded by the imperious flood, although a line of driftage, in a zigzag swath, lay near the mound.

This was my favorite spot for thinking, when I felt perplexed and downcast in my young unaided mind.

For although I have not spoken of my musings very copiously, any one would do me wrong who fancied that I was indifferent.
Through the great kindness of Mr.Gundry and other good friends around me, I had no bitter sense as yet of my own dependence and poverty.

But the vile thing I had heard about my father, the horrible slander and wicked falsehood--for such I was certain it must be--this was continually in my thoughts, and quite destroyed my cheerfulness.

And the worst of it was that I never could get my host to enter into it.
Whenever I began, his face would change and his manner grow constrained, and his chief desire always seemed to lead me to some other subject.
One day, when the heat of the summer came forth, and the peaches began to blush toward it, and bronze-ribbed figs grew damask-gray with a globule of sirup in their eyes, and melons and pumpkins already had curved their fluted stalks with heaviness, and the dust of the plains was beginning to fly, and the bright spring flowers were dead more swiftly even than they first were born, I sat with Suan Isco at my father's cross, and told her to make me cry with some of all the many sad things she knew.