It was one mid-August afternoon, when the tasseled corn stood high, and the
thistles had begun to take wing and fly away to join the dandelions, that
there came the first thoughts of the carols. Harry had to drive cows that
day; but the others were with her, and as they came out through Mr.
Giertz's woods, and looked down upon the pasture where the sheep were
feeding, little Phil began the quaint old version of the shepherd psalm
that she had taught them,--
"The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want;
He maketh me down to lie,"--
and, the other boys joining, they sang through to the end.
It was beautiful. She had never realized that they could sing so well, and,
suddenly, as she listened, the plan came full-grown into her mind, and she
proposed it then and there. The boys were jubilant; for a half-hour they
discussed details; and then, "all seated on the ground," like those of whom
they sang, she taught them the beginning of, "While shepherds watched their
flocks by night."
That was the first of many open-air rehearsals, transferred, when the
weather grew colder, to Willie Giertz's, where there were no near neighbors
to whom the portentous secret might leak out.
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