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[illustration: writing the notes.] riverdale story books the birthday party boston, lee & shepard. the riverdale books. the birthday party. a story for little folks. by oliver optic, author of "the boat club," "all aboard," "now or never," "try again," "poor and proud," "little by little," &c. boston: lee and shepard, (successors to phillips, sampson & co.) 1864. entered, according to act of congress, in the year 1862, by william t. adams, in the clerk's office of the district court of the district of massachusetts. electrotyped at the boston stereotype foundry. the birthday party. i. flora lee's birthday came in july. her mother wished very much to celebrate the occasion in a proper manner. flora was a good girl, and her parents were always glad to do any thing they could to please her, and to increase her happiness. they were very indulgent parents, and as they had plenty of money, they could afford to pay well for a "good time." yet they were not weak and silly in their indulgence. as much as they loved their little daughter, they did not give her pies and cakes to eat when they thought such articles would hurt her. they did not let her lie in bed till noon because they loved her, or permit her to do any thing that would injure her, either in body or mind. flora always went to church, and to the sunday school, and never cried to stay at home. if she had cried, it would have made no difference, for her father and mother meant to have her do right, whether she liked it or not. but flora gave them very little trouble about such matters. her parents knew best what was good for her, and she was willing in all things to obey them. it was for this reason that they were so anxious to please her, even at the expense of a great deal of time and money. the birthday of flora came on wednesday, and school did not keep in the afternoon. all the children, therefore, could attend the party which they intended to give in honor of the day. about a week before the time, mrs. lee told flora she might have the party, and wanted her to make out a list of all the children whom she wished to invite. "i want to ask all the children in riverdale," said flora, promptly. "not all, i think," replied mrs. lee. "yes, mother, all of them." "but you know there are a great many bad boys in town. do you wish to invite them?" "perhaps, if we treat them well, they will be made better by it." "would you like to have joe birch come to the party?" "i don't know, mother," said flora, musing. "i think you had better invite only those who will enjoy the party, and who will not be likely to spoil the pleasure of others. we will not invite such boys as joe birch." "just as you think best, dear mother," replied flora. "shall i ask such boys as tommy woggs?" "tommy isn't a bad boy," said mrs. lee, with a smile. "i don't know that he is; but he is a very queer fellow. you said i had better not ask those who would be likely to spoil the pleasure of others." "do you think, my child, tommy woggs will do so?" "i am afraid he would; he is such a queer boy." "but tommy is a great traveller, you know," added mrs. lee, laughing. "the boys and girls don't like him, he pretends to be such a big man. he knows more than all the rest of the world put together--at least, he thinks he does." "i think you had better ask him, for he will probably feel slighted if you don't." "very well, mother." "now, flora, i will take a pencil and paper and write down the names of all the boys and girls with whom you are acquainted; and you must be careful not to forget any. here comes frank; he will help you." frank was told about the party, and he was quite as much pleased with the idea as his sister had been; and both of them began to repeat the names of all the boys and girls they could remember. for half an hour they were employed in this manner, and then the list was read over to them, so as to be sure that no names had been omitted. flora and frank now went through all the streets of riverdale, in imagination, thinking who lived in each house; and when they had completed their journey in fancy, they felt sure they had omitted none. "but we must invite cousins sarah and henry," said flora. "o, i hope they will come! henry is so funny; we can't do without them." "perhaps they will come; at any rate we will send them invitations," replied mrs. lee. the next day, when the children had gone to school, mrs. lee went to the office of the riverdale gazette, which was the village newspaper, and had the invitations printed on nice gilt-edged paper. by the following day mrs. lee had written in the names of the children invited, enclosed the notes in envelopes, and directed them. i will give you a copy of one of them, that you may know how to write them when you have a birthday party, though i dare say it would do just as well if you go to your friends and ask them to attend. if you change the names and dates, this note will answer for any party. _miss flora lee presents her compliments to miss nellie green, and requests the pleasure of her company on wednesday afternoon, july 20._ _riverdale, july 15._ "those are very fine indeed," said flora: "shall i put on my bonnet, and carry out some of them to-day?" "no, my child; it is not quite the thing for you to carry your own invitations. i will tell you what you may do. you may hire david white to deliver them for you. you must pay him for it; give him half a dollar, which will be a good thing for him." this plan was adopted, and frank was sent with the notes and the money over to the poor widow's cottage. "don't you think it is very wicked, mother, for rich folks to have parties, when the money they cost will do so much good to the poor?" asked flora. "i do not think so, my dear child." "well, i think so, mother," added flora, warmly. "perhaps you do not fully understand it." "i think i do." "why should it be wicked for you to enjoy yourself?" "i don't think it is wicked to enjoy myself, but only to spend money for such things. you said you were going to have the riverdale band, and that the music would cost more than twenty dollars." "i did, and the supper will cost at least twenty more; for i have spoken to the confectioner to supply us with ice cream, cake, jellies, and other luxuries. we shall have a supply of strawberries and cream, and all the nice things of the season. we must also erect a tent in the garden, in which we shall have the supper; but after tea i will tell you all about it." [illustration] [illustration: flora and her father.] ii. flora could not help thinking how much good the forty dollars, which her father would have to pay for the birthday party, would do if given to the poor. it seemed to her just like spending the money for a few hours' pleasure; and even if they had a fine time, which she was quite sure they would have, it would be soon over, and not do any real good. forty dollars was a great deal of money. it would pay mrs. white's rent for a whole year; it would clothe her family, and feed them nearly all the next winter. it appeared to her like a shameful waste; and these thoughts promised to take away a great deal from the pleasure of the occasion. "i think, mother, i had just as lief not have the band, and only have a supper of bread and butter and seed cakes." "why, flora, what has got into you?" said her father. mrs. lee laughed at the troubled looks of flora, and explained to her father the nature of her scruples in regard to the party. "where did the child get this foolish idea?" asked her father, who thought her notions were too old and too severe for a little girl. "didn't i see last winter how much good only a little money would do?" replied flora. "don't you think it is wicked for me to live in this great house, keep five or six horses, and nine or ten servants, when i could live in a little house, like mrs. white?" laughed mr. lee. "all the money you spend would take care of a dozen families of poor folks," said flora. "that is very true. suppose i should turn away all the men and women that work for me,--those, i mean, who work about the house and garden,--and give the money i spend in luxuries to the poor." "but what would john and peter, hannah and bridget do then? they would lose their places, and not be able to earn any thing. why, no, father; peter has a family; he has got three children, and he must take care of them." "ah, you begin to see it--do you?" said mr. lee, with a smile. "all that i spend upon luxury goes into the pockets of the farmer, mechanic, and laborer." "i see that, father," replied flora, looking as bright as sunshine again; "but all the money spent on my party will be wasted--won't it?" "not a cent of it; my child. if i were a miser, and kept my money in an iron safe, and lived like a poor man, i should waste it then." "but twenty dollars for the riverdale band is a great deal to give for a few hours' service. it don't do any good, i think." "yes, it does; music improves our minds and hearts. it makes us happy. i have engaged six men to play. they are musicians only at such times as they can get a job. they are shoemakers, also, and poor men; and the money which i shall pay them will help support their families and educate them." "what a fool i was, father!" exclaimed flora. "o, no; not so bad as that; for a great many older and wiser persons than yourself have thought just what you think." "but the supper, father,--the ice cream, the cake, and the lemonade,--won't all the money spent for these things be wasted?" "no more than the money spent for the music. the confectioner and those whom he employs depend upon their work for the means of supporting themselves and their families." "so they do, father. and when you have a party, you are really doing good to the poor." "that depends upon circumstances," replied mr. lee. "i don't think it would be an act of charity for a person who could not afford it to give a party. i only mean to say that when we spend money for that which does not injure us or any body else, what we spend goes into the pockets of those who need it. "a party--a proper party, i mean, such a one as you will have--is a good thing in itself. innocent amusement is just as necessary as food and drink. "god has given me wealth, flora, and he expects me to do all the good i can with it. i hold it as his steward. now, when i pay one of these musicians three or four dollars for an afternoon's work, i do him a favor as well as you and those whom you invite to your party. "and i hope the party will make you love one another more than ever before. i hope the music will warm your hearts, and that the supper will make you happy, and render you thankful to the giver of all things for his constant bounty." "how funny that i should make such a blunder!" exclaimed flora. "i am sure i shall enjoy my party a great deal more now that i understand these things." "i hope you won't understand too much, flora. suppose you had only a dollar, and that it had been given you to purchase a story book. then, suppose mrs. white and her children were suffering from want of fuel and clothing. what would you do with your dollar?" "i would----" "wait a minute, flora," interposed her father. "when you buy the book, you pay the printer, the paper maker, the bookseller, the type founder, the miner who dug the lead and the iron from the earth, the machinist who made the press, and a great many other persons whose labor enters into the making of a book--you pay all these men for their labor; you give them money to help take care of their wives and children, their fathers and mothers. you help all these men when you buy a book. now, what would you do with your dollar?" "i would give it to poor mrs. white," promptly replied flora. "i think you would do right, for your money would do more good in her hands. the self-denial on your part would do you good. i only wanted you to understand that, when you bought a book,--even a book which was only to amuse you,--the money is not thrown away. "riches are given to men for a good purpose; and they ought to use their wealth for the benefit of others, as well as for their own pleasure. if they spend money, even for things that are of no real use to them, it helps the poor, for it feeds and clothes them." flora was much interested in this conversation, and perhaps some of my young friends will think she was an old head to care for such things; but i think they can all understand what was said as well as she did. [illustration] [illustration: on the lawn.] iii. the great day at length arrived, and every thing was ready for the party. on the lawn, by the side of the house, a large tent had been put up, in which the children were to have the feast. under a large maple tree, near the tent, a stage for the musicians had been erected. two swings had been put up; and there was no good reason why the children should not enjoy themselves to their hearts' content. i think the teachers in the riverdale school found it hard work to secure the attention of their scholars on the forenoon of that day, for all the boys and girls in the neighborhood were thinking about the party. as early as one o'clock in the afternoon the children began to collect at the house of mr. lee, and at the end of an hour all who had received invitations were present. the band had arrived, and at a signal from mr. lee the music commenced. "now, father, we are all here. what shall we do?" asked flora, who was so excited she did not know which way to turn, or how to proceed to entertain the party. "wait a few minutes, and let the children listen to the music. they seem to enjoy it very well." "but we want to play something, father." "very soon, my child, we will play something." "what shall we play, father?" "there are plenty of plays. wouldn't you like to march a little while to the music?" "march?" "yes, march to the tune of 'hail, columbia.' i will show you how to do it." "i don't know what you mean, father." "well, i will show you in a few minutes." when the band had played a little while longer, mr. lee assembled the children in the middle of the lawn, and asked them if they would like to march. they were pleased with the idea, though some of them thought it would be rather tame amusement for such an exciting occasion. "you want two leaders, and i think you had better choose them yourselves. it would be the most proper to select two boys." mr. lee thought the choice of the leaders would amuse them; so he proposed that they should vote for them. "how shall we vote, father?" asked frank. "three of the children must retire, and pick out four persons; and the two of these four who get the most votes shall be the leaders." mr. lee appointed two girls and one boy to be on this committee; but while he was doing so, tommy woggs said he did not think this was a good play. "i don't think they will choose the best leaders," said tommy. "don't you, mr. woggs?" asked mr. lee, laughing. "no, sir, i do not. what do any of these boys know about such things!" said tommy, with a sneer. "i have been to new york, and have seen a great many parades." "have you, indeed?" "yes, sir, i have." "and you think you would make a better leader than any of the others?" "i think so, sir." all the children laughed heartily at master woggs, who was so very modest! "none of these boys and girls have ever been to new york," added tommy, his vanity increasing every moment. "that is very true; and perhaps the children will select you as their leader." "they can do as they like. if they want me, i should be very willing to be their leader," replied tommy. it was very clear that master woggs had a very good opinion of himself. he seemed to think that the fact of his having been to new york made a hero of him, and that all the boys ought to take off their caps to him. but it is quite as certain that the riverdale children did not think master woggs was a very great man. he thought so much of himself, that there was no room for others to think much of him. the committee of three returned in a few minutes, and reported the names of four boys to be voted for as the leaders. they were henry vernon, charley green, david white, and tommy woggs. the important little gentleman who had been to new york, was delighted with the action of the committee. he thought all the children could see what a very fine leader he would make, and that all of them would vote for him. "what shall we do for votes, father?" asked frank. "we can easily manage that, frank," replied mr. lee. "we have no paper here." "listen to me a moment, children," continued mr. lee. "there are four boys to be voted for; and we will choose one leader first, and then the other. "those who want henry vernon for a leader will put a blade of grass in the hat which will be the ballot box; those who want charley green will put in a clover blossom; those who want david white will put in a maple leaf; and those who want to vote for tommy woggs will put in a--let me see--put in a dandelion flower." the children laughed, for they thought the dandelion was just the thing for master woggs, who had been to new york. one of the boys carried round mr. lee's hat, and it was found that henry vernon had the most votes; so he was declared to be the first leader. "humph!" said tommy woggs. "what does henry vernon know? he has never been to new york." "but he lives in boston," added charley green. "boston is nothing side of new york." "i think boston is a great place," replied charley. "that's because you have never been to new york," said master woggs. "they will, of course, all vote for me next time. if they do, i will show them how things are done in new york." "pooh!" exclaimed charley, as he left the vain little man. while all the children were wondering who would be the other leader, flora was electioneering among them for her favorite candidate; that is, she was asking her friends to vote for the one she wanted. who do you suppose it was? master woggs? no. it was david white. the hat was passed round again, and when the votes were counted, there was only one single dandelion blossom found in the hat. tommy woggs was mad, for he felt that his companions had slighted him; but it was only because he was so vain and silly. people do not often think much of those who think a great deal of themselves. there was a great demand for maple leaves, and david white was chosen the second leader, and had nearly all the votes. the boys then gave three cheers for the leaders, and the lines were formed. mr. lee told henry and david just how they were to march, and the band at once began to play "hail columbia." the children first marched, two by two, round the lawn, and then down the centre. when they reached the end, one leader turned off to the right, and the other to the left, each followed by a single line of the children. passing round the lawn, they came together again on the other side. then they formed a great circle, a circle within a circle, and concluded the march with the "grand basket." this was certainly a very simple play, but the children enjoyed it ever so much--i mean all but vain master woggs, who was so greatly displeased because he was not chosen one of the leaders, that he said there was no fun at all in the whole thing. about half an hour was spent in marching, and then mr. lee proposed a second game. the children wanted to march a little longer; but there were a great number of things to be done before night, and so it was thought best, on the whole, to try a new game. [illustration] [illustration: the old fiddler.] iv. when the children had done marching, mrs. lee took charge of the games. several new plays, which none of them had heard of before, were introduced. the boys and girls all liked them very well, and the time passed away most rapidly. just before they were going to supper, an old man, with a fiddle in his hand, tottered into the garden, and down the lawn. he was a very queer-looking old man. he had long white hair, and a long white beard. he was dressed in old, worn-out, soldier clothes, in part, and had a sailor's hat upon his head, so that they could not tell whether he was a soldier or a sailor. as he approached the children, they began to laugh with all their might; and he certainly was a very funny old man. his long beard and hair, his tattered finery, and his hobbling walk, would have made almost any one laugh--much more a company of children as full of fun as those who were attending the birthday party. "children," said the old man, as he took off his hat and made a low bow, "i heard there was a party here, and i came to play the fiddle for you. all the boys and girls like a fiddle, because it is so merry." "o mother! what did send that old man here?" cried flora. "he came of himself, i suppose," replied mrs. lee, laughing. "i think it is too bad to laugh at an old man like him," added flora. "it would be, if he were in distress; but don't you see he is as merry as any of the children?" "play us some tunes," said the children. "i will, my little dears;" and the old man raised the fiddle. "let's see--i will play 'napoleon's grand march.'" the fiddler played, but he behaved so queerly that the children laughed so loud they could hardly hear the music. "why, that's 'yankee doodle,'" said henry vernon; and they all shouted at the idea of calling that tune "napoleon's grand march." "now i will play you the solo to the opera of 'la sonnambula,'" said the old man. "whew!" said henry. the old man fiddled again, with the same funny movements as before. "why, that's 'yankee doodle' too!" exclaimed henry. "i guess he don't know any other tune." "you like that tune so well, i will play you 'washington's march;'" and the funny old fiddler, with a great flourish, began to play again; but still it was "yankee doodle." and so he went on saying he would play many different tunes, but he played nothing but "yankee doodle." "can't you tell us a story now?" asked charley green. "o, yes, my little man, i can tell you a story. what shall it be?" "are you a soldier or a sailor?" "neither, my boy." "the story! the story!" shouted the boys, very much excited. "some years ago i was in new york," the old man commenced. "did you see me there?" demanded tommy woggs. "well, my little man, i don't remember that i saw you." "o, i was there;" and tommy thrust his hands down to the bottom of his pockets, and strutted up the space between the children and the comical old fiddler. "i did see a very nice-looking little gentleman----" "that was me," pompously added tommy. "he was stalking up broadway. he thought every body was looking at and admiring him; but such was not the case. he looked just like--just like----" "like me?" asked tommy. "like a sick monkey," replied the fiddler. "go on with your story." "i will, children. several years ago i was in new york. it is a great city; if you don't believe it, ask master tommy woggs." "you tell the truth, mr. fiddler. it is a great city, and i have been all over it, and can speak from observation," replied master woggs. "the story!" shouted the children. "i was walking up broadway. this street is always crowded with people, as well as with carts and carriages." "i have seen that street," said tommy. "now you keep still a few minutes, tommy, if you can," interposed mrs. lee. "at the corner of wall street----" "i know where that is," exclaimed tommy. "at the corner of wall street there was a man with a kind of cart, loaded with apples and candy, which he was selling to the passers-by. suddenly there came a stage down the street, and ran into the apple cart." "i saw the very same thing done," added tommy, with his usual self-important air. "keep still, tom woggs," said charley green. "the apples were scattered all over the sidewalk; yet the man picked up all but one of them, though he was very angry with the driver of the stage for running against his cart." "why didn't he pick up the other apple?" asked henry. "a well-dressed man, with big black whiskers, picked that up. 'give it to me,' said the apple man. 'i will not,' replied the man with whiskers. the apple merchant was as mad as he could be; and then the man with black whiskers put his hand in his pocket and drew out a knife. the blade was six inches long." "o, dear me!" exclaimed flora. "raising the knife, he at once moved towards the angry apple merchant, and--and----" "well, what?" asked several, eagerly. "and cut a piece out of the apple, and put it in his mouth." the children all laughed heartily, for they were sure the man with the whiskers was going to stab the apple merchant. "he then took two cents from his pocket, paid for the apple, and went his way," continued the old man. "now, there is one thing more i can do. i want to run a race with these boys." "pooh! you run a race!" sneered charley. "i can beat you." "try it, and see." the old man and charley took places, and were to start at the word from henry. but when it was given, the fiddler hobbled off, leaving charley to follow at his leisure. when the old man had got half way round the lawn, charley started, sure he could catch him long before he reached the goal. but just as the boy was coming up with the man, the latter began to run, and poor charley found, much to his surprise, that he ran very fast. he was unable to overtake him, and consequently lost the race. the children were much astonished when they saw the old man run so fast. he appeared to have grown young all at once. but he offered to race with any of the boys again; and half a dozen of them agreed to run with him. "i guess i will take my coat off this time," said the fiddler. as he threw away the coat, he slipped off the wig and false beard he wore; and the children found, to their surprise, that the old man was mr. lee, who had dressed himself up in this disguise to please them. the supper was now ready, and all the children were invited to the tent. they had played so hard that all of them had excellent appetites, and the supper was just as nice as a supper could be. it was now nearly dark, and the children had to go home; but all of them declared the birthday party of flora was the best they ever attended. "only to think," said flora, when she went to bed that night, "the old fiddler was my father!" lizzie. mother, what ails our lizzie dear, so cold and still she lies? she does not speak a word to-day, and closed her soft blue eyes. why won't she look at me again, and laugh and play once more? i cannot make her look at me as she used to look before. her face and neck as marble white, and, o, so very cold! why don't you warm her, mother dear, your cloak around her fold? her little hand is cold as ice, upon her waveless breast,- so pure, i thought i could see through the little hand i pressed. your darling sister's dead, my child; she cannot see you now; the damps of death are gath'ring there upon her marble brow. she cannot speak to you again, her lips are sealed in death; that little hand will never move, nor come that fleeting breath. all robed in white, and decked with flowers, we'll lay her in the tomb; the flower that bloomed so sweetly here, no more on earth will bloom; but in our hearts we'll lay her up, and love her all the more, because she died in life's spring time, ere earth had won her o'er. nay, nay, my child, she is not dead, although she slumbers there, and cold and still her marble brow, and free from pain and care. she slept, and passed from earth to heaven, and won her early crown: an angel now she dwells above, and looks in triumph down. she is not dead, for jesus died that she might live again. "forbid them not," the saviour said, and blessed dear sister then. her little lamp this morn went out on earth's time-bounded shore; but angels bright in heaven this morn relighted it once more. some time we, too, shall fall asleep, to wake in heaven above, and meet our angel lizzie there in realms of endless love. we'll bear sweet sister in our hearts, and then there'll ever be an angel there to keep our souls from sin and sorrow free. the queen of the pirate isle by bret harte illustrated by kate greenaway a facsimile from the original publication of 1885 [illustration] universal books ltd, london, england harte, bret, 1836-1902. isbn 0 86441 018 2. list of illustrations page mrs smith 7 polly 10 beggar child 12 school mistress 12 indian maiden 13 proud lady 14 chinese junk 15 swimming for his life 16 a tent 17 capture of merchantman 18 at supper 20 polly in the branches 23 patsey 25 slumgullion 28 each other's hands 30 edge of cliff 31 sliding down hill 32 pig tail rope 34 fireworks in cave 37 lady mary's hair gone 39 invisible medicine 42 clad in deepest mourning 44 brother step-and-fetch-it 48 wan lee 54 not always pirates 56 polly brought home 58 asleep with doll 60 [illustration] the queen of the pirate isle. i first knew her as the queen of the pirate isle. to the best of my recollection she had no reasonable right to that title. she was only nine years old, inclined to plumpness and good humour, deprecated violence and had never been to sea. need it be added that she did _not_ live in an island and that her name was "polly." [illustration] [illustration] perhaps i ought to explain that she had already known other experiences of a purely imaginative character. part of her existence had been passed as a beggar child--solely indicated by a shawl tightly folded round her shoulders and chills,--as a schoolmistress, unnecessarily severe; as a preacher, singularly personal in his remarks, and once, after reading one of cooper's novels, as an indian maiden. this was, i believe, the only instance when she had borrowed from another's fiction. most of the characters that she assumed for days and sometimes weeks at a time were purely original in conception; some so much so as to be vague to the general understanding. i remember that her personation of a certain mrs. smith, whose individuality was supposed to be sufficiently represented by a sun-bonnet worn wrong side before and a weekly addition to her family, was never perfectly appreciated by her own circle although she lived the character for a month. another creation known as "the proud lady"--a being whose excessive and unreasonable haughtiness was so pronounced as to give her features the expression of extreme nausea, caused her mother so much alarm that it had to be abandoned. this was easily effected. the proud lady was understood to have died. indeed, most of polly's impersonations were got rid of in this way, although it by no means prevented their subsequent reappearance. "i thought mrs. smith was dead," remonstrated her mother at the posthumous appearance of that lady with a new infant. "she was buried alive and kem to!" said polly with a melancholy air. fortunately, the representation of a resuscitated person required such extraordinary acting, and was, through some uncertainty of conception, so closely allied in facial expression to the proud lady, that mrs. smith was resuscitated only for a day. [illustration] [illustration] the origin of the title of the queen of the pirate isle, may be briefly stated as follows:-an hour after luncheon, one day, polly, hickory hunt, her cousin, and wan lee, a chinese page, were crossing the nursery floor in a chinese junk. the sea was calm and the sky cloudless. any change in the weather was as unexpected as it is in books. suddenly a west indian hurricane, purely local in character and unfelt anywhere else, struck master hickory and threw him overboard, whence, wildly swimming for his life and carrying polly on his back, he eventually reached a desert island in the closet. here the rescued party put up a tent made of a table cloth providentially snatched from the raging billows, and from two o'clock until four, passed six weeks on the island supported only by a piece of candle, a box of matches, and two peppermint lozenges. it was at this time that it became necessary to account for polly's existence among them, and this was only effected by an alarming sacrifice of their morality; hickory and wan lee instantly became _pirates_, and at once elected polly as their queen. the royal duties, which seemed to be purely maternal, consisted in putting the pirates to bed after a day of rapine and bloodshed, and in feeding them with liquorice water through a quill in a small bottle. limited as her functions were, polly performed them with inimitable gravity and unquestioned sincerity. even when her companions sometimes hesitated from actual hunger or fatigue and forgot their guilty part, she never faltered. it was her _real_ existence--her other life of being washed, dressed, and put to bed at certain hours by her mother was the _illusion_. [illustration] [illustration] [illustration] doubt and scepticism came at last,--and came from wan lee! wan lee of all creatures! wan lee, whose silent, stolid, mechanical performance of a pirate's duties--a perfect imitation like all his household work--had been their one delight and fascination! it was just after the exciting capture of a merchantman with the indiscriminate slaughter of all on board--a spectacle on which the round blue eyes of the plump polly had gazed with royal and maternal tolerance, and they were burying the booty--two table spoons and a thimble in the corner of the closet, when wan lee stolidly rose. [illustration] "melican boy pleenty foolee! melican boy no pilat!" said the little chinaman, substituting "l's" for "r's" after his usual fashion. "wotcher say?" said hickory, reddening with sudden confusion. "melican boy's papa heap lickee him--spose him leal pilat," continued wan lee, doggedly. "melican boy pilat _inside_ housee; chinee boy pilat _outside_ housee. first chop pilat." staggered by this humiliating statement, hickory recovered himself in character. "ah! ho!" he shrieked, dancing wildly on one leg, "mutiny and splordinashun! way with him to the yard arm." "yald alm--heap foolee! allee same clothes hoss for washee washee." it was here necessary for the pirate queen to assert her authority, which, as i have before stated was somewhat confusingly maternal. "go to bed instantly without your supper," she said, seriously. "really, i never saw such bad pirates. say your prayers, and see that you're up early to church to-morrow." it should be explained that in deference to polly's proficiency as a preacher, and probably as a relief to their uneasy consciences, divine service had always been held on the island. but wan lee continued:-"me no shabbee pilat _inside_ housee; me shabbee pilat _outside_ housee. spose you lun away longside chinee boy--chinee boy makee you pilat." [illustration] hickory softly scratched his leg while a broad, bashful smile, almost closed his small eyes. "wot!" he asked. "mebbee you too frightened to lun away. melican boy's papa heap lickee." this last infamous suggestion fired the corsair's blood. "dy'ar think we daresent," said hickory, desperately, but with an uneasy glance at polly. "i'll show yer to-morrow." the entrance of polly's mother at this moment put an end to polly's authority and dispersed the pirate band, but left wan lee's proposal and hickory's rash acceptance ringing in the ears of the pirate queen. that evening she was unusually silent. she would have taken bridget, her nurse, into her confidence, but this would have involved a long explanation of her own feelings, from which, like all imaginative children, she shrank. she, however, made preparation for the proposed flight by settling in her mind which of her two dolls she would take. a wooden creature with easy going knees and moveable hair seemed to be more fit for hard service and any indiscriminate scalping that might turn up hereafter. at supper, she timidly asked a question of bridget. "did ye ever hear the loikes uv that, ma'am," said the irish handmaid with affectionate pride, "shure the darlint's head is filled noight and day with ancient history. she's after asking me now if queen's ever run away!" to polly's remorseful confusion here her good father equally proud of her precocious interest and his own knowledge, at once interfered with an unintelligible account of the abdication of various queens in history until polly's head ached again. well meant as it was, it only settled in the child's mind that she must keep the awful secret to herself and that no one could understand her. [illustration] the eventful day dawned without any unusual sign of importance. it was one of the cloudless summer days of the californian foot hills, bright, dry, and as the morning advanced, hot in the white sunshine. the actual, prosaic house in which the pirates apparently lived, was a mile from a mining settlement on a beautiful ridge of pine woods sloping gently towards a valley on the one side, and on the other falling abruptly into a dark deep olive gulf of pine trees, rocks, and patches of red soil. beautiful as the slope was, looking over to the distant snow peaks which seemed to be in another world than theirs, the children found a greater attraction in the fascinating depths of a mysterious gulf, or "cañon," as it was called, whose very name filled their ears with a weird music. to creep to the edge of the cliff, to sit upon the brown branches of some fallen pine, and putting aside the dried tassels to look down upon the backs of wheeling hawks that seemed to hang in mid-air was a never failing delight. here polly would try to trace the winding red ribbon of road that was continually losing itself among the dense pines of the opposite mountains; here she would listen to the far off strokes of a woodman's axe, or the rattle of some heavy waggon, miles away, crossing the pebbles of a dried up water course. here, too, the prevailing colours of the mountains, red and white and green, most showed themselves. there were no frowning rocks to depress the children's fancy, but everywhere along the ridge pure white quartz bared itself through the red earth like smiling teeth, the very pebbles they played with were streaked with shining mica like bits of looking-glass. the distance was always green and summer-like, but the colour they most loved, and which was most familiar to them, was the dark red of the ground beneath their feet everywhere. it showed itself in the roadside bushes; its red dust pervaded the leaves of the overhanging laurel, it coloured their shoes and pinafores; i am afraid it was often seen in indian like patches on their faces and hands. that it may have often given a sanguinary tone to their fancies, i have every reason to believe. [illustration] it was on this ridge that the three children gathered at ten o'clock that morning. an earlier flight had been impossible on account of wan lee being obliged to perform his regular duty of blacking the shoes of polly and hickory before breakfast,--a menial act which in the pure republic of childhood was never thought inconsistent with the loftiest piratical ambition. on the ridge they met one "patsey," the son of a neighbour, sun burned, broad-brimmed hatted, red handed, like themselves. as there were afterwards some doubts expressed whether he joined the pirates of his own free will, or was captured by them, i endeavour to give the colloquy exactly as it occurred:-_patsey._ "hallo, fellers." _the pirates._ "hello!" _patsey._ "goin' to hunt bars? dad seed a lot o' tracks at sun up." _the pirates_ (hesitating). "no--o--" _patsey._ "i am; know where i kin get a six-shooter." _the pirates_ (almost ready to abandon piracy for bear hunting, but preserving their dignity). "can't! we've runn'd away for real pirates." _patsey._ "not for good!" _the queen_ (interposing with sad dignity and real tears in her round blue eyes). "yes!" (slowly and shaking her head). "can't go back again. never! never! never! the--the--eye is cast!" _patsey_ (bursting with excitement). "no'o! sho'o! wanter know." _the pirates_ (a little frightened themselves, but tremulous with gratified vanity). "the perleese is on our track!" _patsey._ "lemme go with yer!" _hickory._ "wot'll yer giv?" _patsey._ "pistol and er bananer." _hickory_ (with judicious prudence). "let's see 'em." patsey was off like a shot; his bare little red feet trembling under him. in a few minutes he returned with an old fashioned revolver known as one of "allen's pepper boxes" and a large banana. he was at once enrolled and the banana eaten. as yet they had resolved on no definite nefarious plan. hickory looking down at patsey's bare feet instantly took off his own shoes. the bold act sent a thrill through his companions. wan lee took off his cloth leggings, polly removed her shoes and stockings, but with royal foresight, tied them up in her handkerchief. the last link between them and civilization was broken. "let's go to the slumgullion." [illustration] "slumgullion" was the name given by the miners to a certain soft, half-liquid mud, formed of the water and finely powdered earth that was carried off by the sluice boxes during gold washing, and eventually collected in a broad pool or lagoon before the outlet. there was a pool of this kind a quarter of a mile away, where there were "diggings" worked by patsey's father, and thither they proceeded along the ridge in single file. when it was reached they solemnly began to wade in its viscid paint-like shallows. possibly its unctuousness was pleasant to the touch; possibly there was a fascination in the fact that their parents had forbidden them to go near it, but probably the principal object of this performance was to produce a thick coating of mud on the feet and ankles, which, when dried in the sun, was supposed to harden the skin and render their shoes superfluous. it was also felt to be the first real step towards independence; they looked down at their ensanguined extremities and recognized the impossibility of their ever again crossing (unwashed) the family threshold. then they again hesitated. there was a manifest need of some well defined piratical purpose. the last act was reckless and irretrievable, but it was vague. they gazed at each other. there was a stolid look of resigned and superior tolerance in wan lee's eyes. polly's glance wandered down the side of the slope to the distant little tunnels or openings made by the miners who were at work in the bowels of the mountain. "i'd like to go into one of them funny holes," she said to herself, half aloud. wan lee suddenly began to blink his eyes with unwonted excitement. "catchee tunnel--heap gold," he said, quickly. "when manee come outside to catchee dinner--pilats go inside catchee tunnel! shabbee! pilats catchee gold allee samee melican man!" [illustration] "and take perseshiun," said hickory. "and hoist the pirate flag," said patsey. "and build a fire, and cook, and have a family," said polly. the idea was fascinating to the point of being irresistible. the eyes of the four children became rounder and rounder. they seized each other's hands and swung them backwards and forwards, occasionally lifting their legs in a solemn rhythmic movement known only to childhood. "its orful far off!" said patsey, with a sudden look of dark importance. "pap sez its free miles on the road. take all day ter get there." the bright faces were overcast. "less go down er slide!" said hickory, boldly. [illustration] they approached the edge of the cliff. the "slide" was simply a sharp incline zigzagging down the side of the mountain used for sliding goods and provisions from the summit to the tunnel men at the different openings below. the continual traffic had gradually worn a shallow gulley half filled with earth and gravel into the face of the mountain which checked the momentum of the goods in their downward passage, but afforded no foothold for a pedestrian. no one had ever been known to descend a slide. that feat was evidently reserved for the pirate band. they approached the edge of the slide hand in hand, hesitated--and the next moment disappeared! [illustration] * * * * * five minutes later the tunnel men of the excelsior mine, a mile below, taking their luncheon on the rude platform of _débris_ before their tunnel, were suddenly driven to shelter in the tunnel from an apparent rain of stones, and rocks, and pebbles, from the cliffs above. looking up, they were startled at seeing four round objects revolving and bounding in the dust of the slide, which eventually resolved themselves into three boys and a girl. for a moment the good men held their breath in helpless terror. twice, one of the children, had struck the outer edge of the bank and displaced stones that shot a thousand feet down into the dizzy depths of the valley! and now, one of them, the girl, had actually rolled out of the slide and was hanging over the chasm supported only by a clump of chimasal to which she clung! "hang on by your eyelids, sis! but don't stir for heaven's sake!" shouted one of the men, as two others started on a hopeless ascent of the cliff above them. [illustration] but a light childish laugh from the clinging little figure seemed to mock them! then two small heads appeared at the edge of the slide; then a diminutive figure whose feet were apparently held by some invisible companion, was shoved over the brink and stretched its tiny arms towards the girl. but in vain, the distance was too great. another laugh of intense youthful enjoyment followed the failure, and a new insecurity was added to the situation by the unsteady hands and shoulders of the relieving party who were apparently shaking with laughter. then the extended figure was seen to detach what looked like a small black rope from its shoulders and throw it to the girl. there was another little giggle. the faces of the men below paled in terror. then polly--for it was she--hanging to the long pig-tail of wan lee, was drawn with fits of laughter back in safety to the slide. their childish treble of appreciation was answered by a ringing cheer from below. "darned ef i ever want to cut off a chinaman's pig-tail again, boys," said one of the tunnel men as he went back to dinner. meantime the children had reached the goal and stood before the opening of one of the tunnels. then these four heroes who had looked with cheerful levity on the deadly peril of their descent became suddenly frightened at the mysterious darkness of the cavern and turned pale at its threshold. "mebbee a wicked joss backside holee, he catchee pilats," said wan lee, gravely. hickory began to whimper, patsey drew back, polly alone stood her ground, albeit with a trembling lip. "let's say our prayers and frighten it away," she said, stoutly. "no! no!" said wan lee, with sudden alarm. "no frighten spillits! you waitee! chinee boy he talkee spillit not to frighten you."[a] [footnote a: the chinese pray devoutly to the evil spirits _not_ to injure them.] tucking his hands under his blue blouse, wan lee suddenly produced from some mysterious recess of his clothing a quantity of red paper slips which he scattered at the entrance of the cavern. then drawing from the same inexhaustible receptacle certain squibs or fireworks, he let them off and threw them into the opening. there they went off with a slight fizz and splutter, a momentary glittering of small points in the darkness and a strong smell of gunpowder. polly gazed at the spectacle with undisguised awe and fascination. hickory and patsey breathed hard with satisfaction; it was beyond their wildest dreams of mystery and romance. even wan lee appeared transfigured into a superior being by the potency of his own spells. but an unaccountable disturbance of some kind in the dim interior of the tunnel quickly drew the blood from their blanched cheeks again. it was a sound like coughing followed by something like an oath. "he's made the evil spirit orful sick," said hickory, in a loud whisper. a slight laugh that to the children seemed demoniacal, followed. "see," said wan lee, "evil spillet be likee chinee, try talkee him." [illustration] the pirates looked at wan lee not without a certain envy of this manifest favouritism. a fearful desire to continue their awful experiments, instead of pursuing their piratical avocations, was taking possession of them; but polly, with one of the swift transitions of childhood, immediately began to extemporise a house for the party at the mouth of the tunnel, and, with parental foresight, gathered the fragments of the squibs to build a fire for supper. that frugal meal consisting of half a ginger biscuit, divided into five small portions each served on a chip of wood, and having a deliciously mysterious flavour of gunpowder and smoke, was soon over. it was necessary after this, that the pirates should at once seek repose after a day of adventure, which they did for the space of forty seconds in singularly impossible attitudes and far too aggressive snoring. indeed, master hickory's almost upright _pose_, with tightly folded arms, and darkly frowning brows was felt to be dramatic, but impossible for a longer period. the brief interval enabled polly to collect herself and to look around her in her usual motherly fashion. suddenly she started and uttered a cry. in the excitement of the descent she had quite overlooked her doll, and was now regarding it with round-eyed horror! "lady mary's hair's gone!" she cried, convulsively grasping the pirate hickory's legs. [illustration] hickory at once recognised the battered doll under the aristocratic title which polly had long ago bestowed upon it. he stared at the bald and battered head. "ha! ha!" he said, hoarsely; "skelped by injins!" for an instant the delicious suggestion soothed the imaginative polly. but it was quickly dispelled by wan lee. "lady maley's pig-tail hangee top side hillee. catchee on big quartz stone allee same polly, me go fetchee." "no!" quickly shrieked the others. the prospect of being left in the proximity of wan lee's evil spirit, without wan lee's exorcising power, was anything but reassuring. "no, don't go!" even polly (dropping a maternal tear on the bald head of lady mary) protested against this breaking up of the little circle. "go to bed," she said, authoritatively, "and sleep until morning." thus admonished, the pirates again retired. this time effectively, for worn by actual fatigue or soothed by the delicious coolness of the cave, they gradually, one by one, succumbed to real slumber. polly withheld from joining them, by official and maternal responsibility sat and blinked at them affectionately. [illustration] gradually she, too, felt herself yielding to the fascination and mystery of the place and the solitude that encompassed her. beyond the pleasant shadows where she sat, she saw the great world of mountain and valley through a dreamy haze that seemed to rise from the depths below and occasionally hang before the cavern like a veil. long waves of spicy heat rolling up the mountain from the valley brought her the smell of pine trees and bay and made the landscape swim before her eyes. she could hear the far off cry of teamsters on some unseen road; she could see the far off cloud of dust following the mountain stage coach, whose rattling wheels she could not hear. she felt very lonely, but was not quite afraid; she felt very melancholy, but was not entirely sad. and she could have easily awakened her sleeping companions if she wished. [illustration] no! she was a lone widow with nine children, six of whom were already in the lone churchyard on the hill, and the others lying ill with measles and scarlet fever beside her. she had just walked many weary miles that day, and had often begged from door to door for a slice of bread for the starving little ones. it was of no use now--they would die! they would never see their dear mother again. this was a favourite imaginative situation of polly's, but only indulged when her companions were asleep, partly because she could not trust confederates with her more serious fancies, and partly because they were at such times passive in her hands. she glanced timidly round; satisfied that no one could observe her, she softly visited the bedside of each of her companions, and administered from a purely fictitious bottle spoonfuls of invisible medicine. physical correction in the form of slight taps, which they always required, and in which polly was strong, was only withheld now from a sense of their weak condition. but in vain, they succumbed to the fell disease--(they always died at this juncture)--and polly was left alone. she thought of the little church where she had once seen a funeral, and remembered the nice smell of the flowers; she dwelt with melancholy satisfaction on the nine little tombstones in the graveyard, each with an inscription, and looked forward with gentle anticipation to the long summer days when, with lady mary in her lap, she would sit on those graves clad in the deepest mourning. the fact that the unhappy victims at times moved as it were uneasily in their graves or snored, did not affect polly's imaginative contemplation, nor withhold the tears that gathered in her round eyes. [illustration] presently the lids of the round eyes began to droop, the landscape beyond began to grow more confused, and sometimes to disappear entirely and reappear again with startling distinctness. then a sound of rippling water from the little stream that flowed from the mouth of the tunnel soothed her and seemed to carry her away with it, and then everything was dark. the next thing she remembered was that she was apparently being carried along on some gliding object to the sound of rippling water. she was not alone, for her three companions were lying beside her, rather tightly packed and squeezed in the same mysterious vehicle. even in the profound darkness that surrounded her, polly could feel and hear that they were accompanied, and once or twice a faint streak of light from the side of the tunnel showed her gigantic shadows walking slowly on either side of the gliding car. she felt the little hands of her associates seeking hers, and knew they were awake and conscious, and she returned to each a reassuring pressure from the large protecting instinct of her maternal little heart. presently the car glided into an open space of bright light, and stopped. the transition from the darkness of the tunnel at first dazzled their eyes. it was like a dream. they were in a circular cavern from which three other tunnels like the one they had passed through, diverged. the walls, lit up by fifty or sixty candles stuck at irregular intervals in crevices of the rock, were of glittering quartz and mica. but more remarkable than all were the inmates of the cavern, who were ranged round the walls; men, who like their attendants, seemed to be of extra stature; who had blackened faces, wore red bandanna handkerchiefs round their heads and their waists, and carried enormous knives and pistols stuck in their belts. on a raised platform made of a packing box, on which was rudely painted a skull and cross bones, sat the chief or leader of the band covered with a buffalo robe; on either side of him were two small barrels marked "grog" and "gunpowder." the children stared and clung closer to polly. yet, in spite of these desperate and warlike accessories, the strangers bore a singular resemblance to "christy minstrels" in their blackened faces and attitudes that somehow made them seem less awful. in particular, polly was impressed with the fact that even the most ferocious had a certain kindliness of eye, and showed their teeth almost idiotically. "welcome," said the leader. "welcome to the pirate's cave! the red rover of the north fork of the stanislaus river salutes the queen of the pirate isle!" he rose up and made an extraordinary bow. it was repeated by the others with more or less exaggeration to the point of one humourist losing his balance! "o, thank you very much," said polly, timidly, but drawing her little flock closer to her with a small protecting arm; "but could you--would you--please--tell us--what time it is?" "we are approaching the middle of next week," said the leader, gravely; "but what of that? time is made for slaves! the red rover seeks it not! why should the queen?" "i think we must be going," hesitated polly, yet by no means displeased with the recognition of her rank. "not until we have paid homage to your majesty," returned the leader. "what ho! there! let brother step-and-fetch-it pass the queen around that we may do her honour." observing that polly shrank slightly back, he added: "fear nothing, the man who hurts a hair of her majesty's head, dies by this hand. ah! ha!" [illustration] the others all said, ha! ha! and danced alternately on one leg and then on the other, but always with the same dark resemblance to christy minstrels. brother step-and-fetch-it, whose very long beard had a confusing suggestion of being a part of the leader's buffalo robe, lifted her gently in his arms and carried her to the red rovers in turn. each one bestowed a kiss upon her cheek or forehead, and would have taken her in his arms, or on his knees, or otherwise lingered over his salute, but they were sternly restrained by their leader. when the solemn rite was concluded, step-and-fetch-it paid his own courtesy with an extra squeeze of the curly head, and deposited her again in the truck--a little frightened, a little astonished, but with a considerable accession to her dignity. hickory and patsey looked on with stupefied amazement. wan lee alone remained stolid and unimpressed, regarding the scene with calm and triangular eyes. "will your majesty see the red rover's dance?" "no, if you please," said polly, with gentle seriousness. "will your majesty fire this barrel of gunpowder, or tap this breaker of grog?" "no, i thank you." "is there no command your majesty would lay upon us?" "no, please," said polly, in a failing voice. "is there anything your majesty has lost? think again! will your majesty deign to cast your royal eyes on this?" he drew from under his buffalo robe what seemed like a long tress of blond hair, and held it aloft. polly instantly recognized the missing scalp of her hapless doll. "if you please, sir, it's lady mary's. she's lost it." "and lost it--your majesty--only to find something more precious! would your majesty hear the story?" a little alarmed, a little curious, a little self-anxious, and a little induced by the nudges and pinches of her companions, the queen blushingly signified her royal assent. "enough. bring refreshments. will your majesty prefer winter-green, peppermint, rose, or accidulated drops? red or white? or perhaps your majesty will let me recommend these bull's eyes," said the leader, as a collection of sweets in a hat were suddenly produced from the barrel labelled "gunpowder" and handed to the children. "listen," he continued, in a silence broken only by the gentle sucking of bull's eyes. "many years ago the old red rovers of these parts locked up all their treasures in a secret cavern in this mountain. they used spells and magic to keep it from being entered or found by anybody, for there was a certain mark upon it made by a peculiar rock that stuck out of it, which signified what there was below. long afterwards, other red rovers who had heard of it, came here and spent days and days trying to discover it; digging holes and blasting tunnels like this, but of no use! sometimes they thought they discovered the magic marks in the peculiar rock that stuck out of it, but when they dug there they found no treasure. and why? because there was a magic spell upon it. and what was that magic spell? why, this! it could only be discovered by a person who could not possibly know that he or she had discovered it, who never could or would be able to enjoy it, who could never see it, never feel it, never, in fact know anything at all about it! it wasn't a dead man, it wasn't an animal, it wasn't a baby!" "why," said polly, jumping up and clapping her hands, "it was a dolly." "your majesty's head is level! your majesty has guessed it!" said the leader, gravely. "it was your majesty's own dolly, lady mary, who broke the spell! when your majesty came down the slide, the doll fell from your gracious hand when your foot slipped. your majesty recovered lady mary, but did not observe that her hair had caught in a peculiar rock, called the 'outcrop,' and remained behind! when, later on, while sitting with your attendants at the mouth of the tunnel, your majesty discovered that lady mary's hair was gone; i overheard your majesty, and despatched the trusty step-and-fetch-it to seek it at the mountain side. he did so, and found it clinging to the rock, and beneath it--the entrance to the secret cave!" patsey and hickory, who, failing to understand a word of this explanation, had given themselves up to the unconstrained enjoyment of the sweets, began now to apprehend that some change was impending, and prepared for the worst by hastily swallowing what they had in their mouths, thus defying enchantment, and getting ready for speech. polly, who had closely followed the story, albeit with the embellishments of her own imagination, made her eyes rounder than ever. a bland smile broke on wan lee's face, as, to the children's amazement, he quietly disengaged himself from the group and stepped before the leader. "melican man plenty foolee melican chillern. no foolee china boy! china boy knowee you. _you_ no led lofer. _you_ no pilat--you allee same tunnel man--you bob johnson! me shabbee you! you dressee up allee same as led lofer--but you bob johnson--allee same. my fader washee washee for you. you no payee him. you owee him folty dolla! me blingee you billee. you no payee billee! you say, 'chalkee up, john.' you say, 'bimeby, john.' but me no catchee folty dolla!" [illustration] a roar of laughter followed, in which even the leader apparently forgot himself enough to join. but the next moment springing to his feet, he shouted, "ho! ho! a traitor! away with him to the deepest dungeon beneath the castle moat!" hickory and patsey began to whimper. but polly, albeit with a tremulous lip, stepped to the side of her little pagan friend. "don't you dare to touch him," she said, with a shake of unexpected determination in her little curly head; "if you do, i'll tell my father, and he will slay you! all of you--there!" "your father! then you are _not_ the queen!" it was a sore struggle to polly to abdicate her royal position, it was harder to do it with befitting dignity. to evade the direct question she was obliged to abandon her defiant attitude. "if you please, sir," she said, hurriedly, with an increasing colour and no stops, "we're not always pirates, you know, and wan lee is only our boy what brushes my shoes in the morning, and runs of errands, and he doesn't mean anything bad, sir, and we'd like to take him back home with us." "enough," said the leader, changing his entire manner with the most sudden and shameless inconsistency. "you shall go back together, and woe betide the miscreant who would prevent it. what say you brothers? what shall be his fate who dares to separate our noble queen from her faithful chinese henchman?" "he shall die!" roared the others, with beaming cheerfulness. "and what say you--shall we see them home?" "we will!" roared the others. [illustration] before the children could fairly comprehend what had passed, they were again lifted into the truck and began to glide back into the tunnel they had just quitted. but not again in darkness and silence; the entire band of red rovers accompanied them, illuminating the dark passage with the candles they had snatched from the walls. in a few moments they were at the entrance again. the great world lay beyond them once more with rocks and valleys suffused by the rosy light of the setting sun. the past seemed like a dream. but were they really awake now? they could not tell. they accepted everything with the confidence and credulity of all children who have no experience to compare with their first impressions and to whom the future contains nothing impossible. it was without surprise, therefore, that they felt themselves lifted on the shoulders of the men who were making quite a procession along the steep trail towards the settlement again. polly noticed that at the mouth of the other tunnels they were greeted by men as if they were carrying tidings of great joy; that they stopped to rejoice together, and that in some mysterious manner their conductors had got their faces washed, and had become more like beings of the outer world. when they neared the settlement the excitement seemed to have become greater; people rushed out to shake hands with the men who were carrying them, and overpowered even the children with questions they could not understand. only one sentence polly could clearly remember as being the burden of all congratulations. "struck the old lead at last!" with a faint consciousness that she knew something about it, she tried to assume a dignified attitude on the leader's shoulders even while she was beginning to be heavy with sleep. [illustration] and then she remembered a crowd near her father's house, out of which her father came smiling pleasantly on her, but not interfering with her triumphal progress until the leader finally deposited her in her mother's lap in their own sitting room. and then she remembered being "cross" and declining to answer any questions, and shortly afterwards found herself comfortably in bed. then she heard her mother say to her father:-"it really seems too ridiculous for any thing, john, the idea of these grown men dressing themselves up to play with children." "ridiculous or not," said her father, "these grown men of the 'excelsior' mine have just struck the famous old lode of red mountain, which is as good as a fortune to everybody on the ridge, and were as wild as boys! and they say it never would have been found if polly hadn't tumbled over the slide directly on top of the outcrop, and left the absurd wig of that wretched doll of hers to mark its site." "and that," murmured polly sleepily to her doll as she drew it closer to her breast, "is all that they know of it." [illustration] transcriber's note: for the benefit of certain readers, explanatory names have been added to some illustration tags and these have been identified with an asterisk. _bulletin number eight price thirty-five cents_ a catalogue of play equipment _compiled by_ jean lee hunt bureau _of_ educational experiments 16 west 8th street, new york 1918 [illustration: wooden wheel-barrow and cabinet.]* [illustration: children at play.]* introduction what are the requisites of a child's laboratory? what essentials must we provide if we would deliberately plan an environment to promote the developmental possibilities of play? these questions are raised with ever-increasing insistence as the true nature of children's play and its educational significance come to be matters of more general knowledge and the selection of play equipment assumes a corresponding importance in the school and at home. to indicate some fundamental rules for the choice of furnishings and toys and to show a variety of materials illustrating the basis of selection has been our aim in compiling the following brief catalogue. we do not assume the list to be complete, nor has it been the intention to recommend any make or pattern as being indispensable or as having an exclusive right to the field. on the contrary, it is our chief hope that the available number and variety of such materials may be increased to meet a corresponding increase of intelligent demand on the part of parents and teachers for equipment having real dignity and play value. the materials listed were originally assembled in the exhibit of toys and school equipment shown by the bureau of educational experiments in the spring and summer of 1917, and we wish to make acknowledgment, therefore, to the many who contributed to that exhibit and by so doing to the substance of the following pages. chief among them are teachers college, the university of pittsburgh, the ethical culture school, the play school and other experimental schools described in our bulletins, numbers 3, 4 and 5. the cuts have been chosen for the most part from photographs of the play school, where conditions fairly approximate those obtainable in the home and thus offer suggestions easily translatable by parents into terms of their own home environment. while this equipment is especially applicable to the needs of children four, five and six years old, most of it will be found well adapted to the interests of children as old as eight years, and some of it to those of younger children as well. bureau of educational experiments. new york city, june, 1918. [illustration: children at play.]* out-of-door furnishings out-of-door furnishings should be of a kind to encourage creative play as well as to give exercise. playground apparatus, therefore, in addition to providing for big muscle development should combine the following requisites: intrinsic value as a toy or plaything. "the play of children on it and with it must be spontaneous."[a] adaptability to different kinds of play and exercise. "it must appeal to the imagination of the child so strongly that new forms of use must be constantly found by the child himself in using it."[a] adaptability to individual or group use. it should lend itself to solitary play or to use by several players at once. additional requisites are: safety. its use should be attended by a minimum of danger. suitable design, proper proportions, sound materials and careful construction are essentials. durability. it must be made to withstand hard use and all kinds of weather. to demand a minimum of repair means also to afford a maximum of security. [footnote a: dr. e. h. arnold, "some inexpensive playground apparatus." bul. 27, playground association of america.] [illustration: the city yard equipped to give a maximum of exercise and creative play] [illustration: an outdoor play area.]* the outdoor laboratory in the country, ready-to-hand resources, trees for climbing, the five-barred fence, the pasture gate, the stone wall, the wood-pile, mother earth to dig in, furnish ideal equipment for the muscle development of little people and of their own nature afford the essential requisites for creative and dramatic play. to their surpassing fitness for "laboratory" purposes each new generation bears testimony. if the furnishings of a deliberately planned environment are to compare with them at all they must lend themselves to the same freedom of treatment. the apparatus shown here was made by a local carpenter, and could easily be constructed by high school pupils with the assistance of the manual training teacher. the ground has been covered with a layer of fine screened gravel, a particularly satisfactory treatment for very little children, as it is relatively clean and dries quickly after rain. it does not lend itself to the requirements of organized games, however, and so will not answer for children who have reached that stage of play development. a number of building bricks, wooden boxes of various sizes, pieces of board and such "odd lumber" with a few tools and out-of-door toys complete the yard's equipment. [illustration: the see-saw.]* the see saw board--straight grain lumber, 1-1/8" x 9" x 12'-0". two cleats 1-1/4" x 9" bolted to the under side of the board to act as a socket on the hip of the horse. horse--height 25". length 22-1/2". spread of feet at ground 20". legs built of 2" x 3" material. hip of 2" x 3" material. brace under hip of 7/8" material. note--all figures given are for outside measurements. apparatus except see-saw board and sliding board should be painted, especially those parts which are to be put into the ground. [illustration: the stand and slide.]* the stand and slide stand or platform--26" wide, 30" long, 5'-4" high. top made of 1-3/8" tongue and groove material. uprights or legs of 2" x 3" material. cleats nailed to front legs 6-1/4" apart to form ladder are of 1-1/8" x 1-3/4" material. cross bracing of 7/8" x 2-1/4" material. apron under top made of 7/8" x 5" material nailed about 1-1/8" below to act as additional bracing and provide place of attachment for iron hooks secured to sliding board. the stand is fastened to the ground by dogs or pieces of wood buried deep enough (about 3') to make it secure. slide--straight grain piece of lumber, 1-1/8" x 12" x 12'-0". two hooks at upper end of sliding board are of iron, about 3/8" x 1-1/2", set at a proper angle to prevent board from becoming loose. hooks are about 1-1/4" long. [illustration: the swinging rope.]* the swinging rope upright--3" x 3" x 6'-9". top piece--3" x 3" x 2'-9". upright and top piece are mortised or halved and bolted together. bracing at top (3" x 3" x 20-1/2" at long point of mitre cuts) is nailed to top piece and upright at an angle of about 45 degrees. upright rests on a base measuring 3'-0". this is mortised together and braced with 2" x 3" material about 20" long, set at an angle of about 60 degrees. unless there are facilities for bracing at the top, as shown in the cut, the upright should be made longer and buried about 3' in the ground. the swinging rope (3/4" dia.) passes through a hole bored in the top piece and held in place by a knot. successive knots tied 8" to 9" apart and a big knot at the bottom make swinging easier for little folks. [illustration: the trapeze.]* the trapeze two uprights--3" x 3" x 6'-10". top piece--3" x 3" x 2'-10". ends of top piece secured to uprights by being mortised or halved and bolted together. uprights rest on bases of 2" x 3" material, 3'-7" long, connected by a small platform in the form of an h. bases and uprights are bolted to dogs or pieces of wood 2" x 4" x 5'-8" set in the ground about 3'-0". adjustable bar (round) 1-3/8" dia. 3 holes bored in each upright provide for the adjustable bar. the first hole is 3'-0" above ground, the second 3'-5", the third 3'-10". swing bar (round), 1-3/8" dia., is 20" long. should hang about 16" below top piece. 2 holes 5/8" dia. bored in the top piece receive a continuous rope attached to the swing bar by being knotted after passing through holes (5/8" dia.) in each end of the bar. [illustration: the ladder and support.]* the ladder and support ladder--14" x 10'-2" sides of 1-1/2" x 1/2" material rungs 1/4" dia. set 10-1/4" apart at upper ends of the sides a u-shaped cut acts as a hook for attaching the ladder to the cross bar of the support. these ends are re-inforced with iron to prevent splitting. support--height 4'-6". spread of uprights at base 4'-2". uprights of 1-1/2" x 2-1/2" material are secured to a foot (1-1/2" x 4" x 20-1/2") with braces (11-1/2" x 2-1/2" x 12") set at an angle of about 60°. tops of the two uprights are halved and bolted to a cross bar 1-1/8" x 2-1/2" x 10" long. the uprights are secured with diagonal braces 1-3/8" x 3-1/2" x 3'-9" fastened together where they intersect. [illustration: a pretend airship.]* a borrowed step ladder converts this gymnastic apparatus into an airship. [illustration: a borrowed ladder helps the game.]* the ladder detached from the support is an invaluable adjunct to building and other operations. [illustration: the parallel bars.]* the parallel bars the two bars are 2" x 2-1/4" x 6'-10" and are set 16-1/2" to 18-1/2" apart. the ends are beveled and the tops rounded. each bar is nailed to two uprights (2" x 3" x 5'-0") set 5' apart and extending 34" above ground. an overhang of about 6" is allowed at each end of the bar. [illustration: the sand box.]* the sand box the sloping cover to the sand box pictured here has been found to have many uses besides its obvious purpose of protection against stray animals and dirt. it is a fairly good substitute for the old-time cellar door, that most important dramatic property of a play era past or rapidly passing. [illustration: sand box with cover closed.]* [illustration: box village.]* box village the child is to be pitied who has not at some time revelled in a packing-box house big enough to get into and furnished by his own efforts. but a "village" of such houses offers a greatly enlarged field of play opportunity and has been the basis of miss mary rankin's experiment on the teachers college playground.[b] in addition to its more obvious possibilities for constructive and manual development, miss rankin's experiment offers social features of unusual suggestiveness, for the village provides a civic experience fairly comprehensive and free from the artificiality that is apt to characterize attempts to introduce civic content into school and play procedure. [footnote b: see "teachers college playground," bulletin no. 4, bureau of educational experiments.] [illustration: of interest to carpenters.] [illustration: a boom in real estate.] [illustration: boy playing pretend piano.]* indoor equipment the requisites for indoor equipment are these: a suitable floor--the natural place for a little child to play is the floor and it is therefore the sine qua non of the play laboratory. places to keep things--a maximum of convenience to facilitate habits of order. tables and chairs--for use as occasion demands, to supplement the floor, not to take the place of it. blocks and toys--for initial play material. the carpenter's bench--with tools and lumber for the manufacture of supplementary toys. a supply of art and craft materials--for the same purpose. [illustration: the indoor laboratory.] the indoor laboratory the _floor_ should receive first consideration in planning the indoor laboratory. it should be as spacious as circumstances will permit and safe, that is to say clean and protected from draughts and dampness. a well-kept hardwood floor is the best that can be provided. individual light rugs or felt mats can be used for the younger children to sit on in cold weather if any doubt exists as to the adequacy of heating facilities (see cut, p. 32). battleship linoleum makes a good substitute for a hardwood finish. it comes in solid colors and can be kept immaculate. deck canvas stretched over a layer of carpet felt and painted makes a warm covering, especially well adapted to the needs of very little children, as it has some of the softness of a carpet and yet can be scrubbed and mopped. second only in importance is the supply of _lockers_, _shelves_, _boxes_ and _drawers_ for the disposal of the great number and variety of small articles that make up the "tools and appliances" of the laboratory. the cut on page 24 shows a particularly successful arrangement for facilities of this kind. the _chairs_ shown are the mosher kindergarten chairs, which come in three sizes. the light _tables_ can be folded by the children and put away in the biggest cupboard space (p. 24). _block boxes_ are an essential part of the equipment. their dimensions should be planned in relation to the unit block of the set used. those shown are 13-3/4" x 16-1/2" x 44" (inside measurements) for use with a set having a unit 1-3/8" x 2-3/4" x 5-1/2". they are on castors and can be rolled to any part of the room. the low _blackboards_ are 5'-5" in height and 2'-0" from the floor. all the furnishings of the laboratory should lend themselves to use as dramatic properties when occasion demands, and a few may be kept for such purposes alone. the light screens in the right-hand corner of the room are properties of this kind and are put to an endless number of uses (see cut, p. 40). [illustration: the balcony in a room with high ceiling.] [illustration: the balcony and a low ceiling.] the _balcony_ is a device to increase floor space that has been used successfully in the play school for several years. it is very popular with the children and contributes effectively to many play schemes. the tall block construction representing an elevator shaft shown in the picture opposite would never have reached its "singer tower proportions" without the balcony, first to suggest the project and then to aid in its execution. _drop shelves_ like those along the wall of the "gallery" (p. 22) can be used for some purposes instead of tables when space is limited. materials for storekeeping play fill the shelves next the fireplace, and the big crock on the hearth contains modelling clay, the raw material of such objets d'art as may be seen decorating the mantlepiece in the cut on page 20. [illustration: a place for everything] [illustration: the indoor sandbox.]* the indoor sand box the indoor _sand box_ pictured here was designed by mrs. hutchinson for use in the nursery at stony ford. a box of this kind is ideal for the enclosed porch or terrace and a great resource in rainy weather. the usual kindergarten sand table cannot provide the same play opportunity that is afforded by a floor box, but it presents fewer problems to the housekeeper and is always a valuable adjunct to indoor equipment. [illustration: the carpenter bench.]* the carpenter bench the carpenter equipment must be a "sure-enough business affair," and the tools real tools--not toys. the sheldon bench shown here is a real bench in every particular except size. the tool list is as follows: manual training hammer. 18 point cross-cut saw. 9 point rip saw. large screw driver, wooden handle. small screw driver. nail puller. stanley smooth-plane, no. 3. bench hook. brace and set of twist bits. manual training rule. steel rule. tri square. utility box--with assorted nails, screws, etc. combination india oil stone. oil can. small hatchet. choice of lumber must be determined partly by the viewpoint of the adult concerned, largely by the laboratory budget, and finally by the supply locally available. excellent results have sometimes been achieved where only boxes from the grocery and left-over pieces from the carpenter shop have been provided. such rough lumber affords good experience in manipulation, and its use may help to establish habits of adapting materials as we find them to the purposes we have in hand. this is the natural attack of childhood, and it should be fostered, for children can lose it and come to feel that specially prepared materials are essential, and a consequent limitation to ingenuity and initiative can thus be established. on the other hand, some projects and certain stages of experience are best served by a supply of good regulation stock. boards of soft pine, white wood, bass wood, or cypress in thicknesses of 1/4", 3/8", 1/2" and 7/8" are especially well adapted for children's work, and "stock strips" 1/4" and 1/2" thick and 2" and 3" wide lend themselves to many purposes. [illustration: boy painting toy.]* [illustration: girl playing with dolls house.]* toys the proper basis of selection for toys is their efficiency as toys, that is: they must be suggestive of play and made for play. they should be selected in relation to each other. they should be consistent with the environment of the child who is to use them. they should be constructed simply so that they may serve as models for other toys to be constructed by the children. they should suggest something besides domestic play so that the child's interest may be led to activities outside the home life. they should be durable because they are the realities of a child's world and deserve the dignity of good workmanship. [illustration: children re-create the world as they see it with the equipment they have at hand] [illustration: a house of blocks.]* floor games "there comes back to me the memory of an enormous room with its ceiling going up to heaven.... it is the floor i think of chiefly, over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks...the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown "surround" were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine.... "justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write about toys--my bricks and my soldiers were my perpetual drama. i recall an incessant variety of interests. there was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and steps and windows through which one could peep into their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the hold of a waiting ship.... and there was commerce; the shops and markets and storerooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and such-like provender from the garden; such stuff one stored in match boxes and pill boxes or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by wagons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the indian frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps.... "i find this empire of the floor much more vivid in my memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that went gingerly across its territories." h. g. wells, "the new machiavelli," chapter 2. [illustration: the unsocial novice] nowhere else, perhaps, not even in his "floor games" and "little wars" has mr. wells, or any other author succeeded in drawing so convincing a picture of the possibilities of constructive play as is to be found in those pages, all too brief, in "the new machiavelli" where the play laboratory at bromstead is described. one can imagine the eager boy who played there looking back across the years strong in the conviction that it could not have been improved, and yet the picture of a child at solitary play is not, after all, the ideal picture. our laboratory, while it must accommodate the unsocial novice and make provision for individual enterprise at all ages and stages, must be above all the place where the give and take of group play will develop along with block villages and other community life in miniature. floor blocks in his reminiscences of his boyhood play mr. wells lays emphasis on his great good fortune in possessing a special set of "bricks" made to order and therefore sufficient in number for the ambitious floor games he describes. comparatively few adults can look back to the possession of similar play material, and so a majority cannot realize how it outweighs in value every other type of toy that can be provided. where the budget for equipment is limited, floor blocks can be cut by the local carpenter or, in a school, by the manual training department. the blocks in use at the play school (see cut, p. 20) are of white wood, the unit block being 1-3/8" x 2-3/4" x 5-1/2". they range in size from half units and diagonals to blocks four times the unit in length (22"). [illustration: the hill floor blocks at the gregory avenue school] at present there is but one set of blocks on the market that corresponds to the one mr. wells describes. these are the "_hill floor blocks_," manufactured and sold by a. schoenhut & co., of philadelphia. they are of hard maple and come in seven sizes, from 3" squares to oblongs of 24", the unit block being 6" in length. there are 680 pieces in a set. half and quarter sets are also obtainable. they are the invention of professor patty smith hill of teachers college, columbia university, and are used in the teachers college kindergarten and in many other schools. [illustration: useful alike to builders and cabinet makers] [illustration: advanced research in peg-lock construction] the school of childhood at the university of pittsburgh makes use of several varieties of blocks, some of commercial manufacture, others cut to order. the list given is as follows:[c] a. nest of blocks. b. large blocks made to order of hard maple in five sizes: cubes, 5" x 5". oblongs, 2-1/2" x 5" x 10". triangular prisms made by cutting cube diagonally into two and four parts. pillars made by cutting oblongs into two parts. plinths made by cutting oblongs into two parts. light weight 12" boards, 3'-0" to 7'-0" long. c. froebel's enlarged fifth and sixth gifts. d. stone anchor blocks. e. architectural blocks for flat forms. f. peg-lock blocks. as children become more dexterous and more ambitious in their block construction, the _peg-lock blocks_ will be found increasingly valuable. these are a type of block unknown to mr. wells, but how he would have revelled in the possession of a set! they are manufactured by the peg-lock block co. of new york. cut on a smaller scale than the other blocks described, they are equipped with holes and pegs, by which they may be securely joined. this admits of a type of construction entirely outside the possibilities of other blocks. they come in sets of varying sizes and in a great variety of shapes. the school of childhood uses them extensively, as does the play school. [footnote c: see university of pittsburgh bulletin, "report of the experimental work in the school of childhood."] [illustration: small wooden toy.]* floor toys the "do-with toys" shown in the accompanying cuts were designed by miss caroline pratt some years ago to meet the need generally felt by devotees of the play laboratory of a consistent series of toys to be used with floor blocks. for if the market of the present day can offer something more adequate in the way of blocks than was generally available in mr. wells' boyhood, the same is not true when it comes to facilities for peopling and stocking the resulting farms and communities that develop. mr. wells tells us that for his floor games he used tin soldiers and such animals as he could get--we know the kind, the lion smaller than the lamb, and barnyard fowl doubtless overtopping the commanding officer. such combinations have been known to children of all generations and play of the kind mr. wells describes goes on in spite of the inconsistency of the materials supplied. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* but when we consider fostering such play, and developing its possibilities for educational ends, the question arises whether this is the best provision that can be made, or if the traditional material could be improved, just as the traditions concerning blocks are being improved. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* a few pioneers have been experimenting in this field for some years past. no one of them is ready with final conclusions but among them opinion is unanimous that constructive play is stimulated by an initial supply of consistent play material calculated to suggest supplementary play material of a kind children can manufacture for themselves. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* blocks are of course the most important type of initial material to be provided; beyond this the generally accepted hypothesis is embodied in the "do-with" series which provides, first a doll family of proportions suited to block houses, then a set of farm animals and carts, then a set of wild animals, all designed on the same size scale, of construction simple enough to be copied at the bench, and suggesting, each set after its kind, a host of supplementary toys, limited in variety and in numbers only by the experience of the child concerned and by his ability to construct them. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* this working hypothesis for the selection of toys is as yet but little understood either by those who buy or those who sell play materials. the commercial dealer declares with truth that there is too little demand to justify placing such a series on the market. not only does he refuse to make "do-withs" but he provides no adequate substitutes. his wooden toys are merely wooden ornaments without relation to any series and without playability, immobile, reasonless, for the philosophy of the play laboratory is quite unknown to the makers of play materials, while those who buy are guided almost entirely by convention and have no better standard by which to estimate what constitutes their money's worth. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* on the other hand enthusiasts raise the question, why supply any toys? is it not better for children to make all their toys? and as miss pratt says, "getting ready for play is mistaken for play itself." [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* too much "getting ready" kills real play, and if our purpose is to foster and enrich the actual activity, we must understand the subtle value of initial play materials, of having at hand ready for the promptings of play impulse the necessary foundation stones on which a superstructure of improvisation can be reared. [illustration: transportation toys] [illustration: a trunk line] when by hook or crook the devotees of floor games have secured a population and live stock for their block communities, then, as mr. wells reminds us, comes commerce and in her wake transportation problems to tax the inventive genius of the laboratory. simple transportation toys are the next need, and suitable ones can generally, though not always, be obtained in the shops. a few well-chosen pieces for initial material will soon be supplemented by "peg-lock" or bench-made contrivances. for railroad tracks the block supply offers possibilities better adapted to the ages we are considering than any of the elaborate rail systems that are sold with the high-priced mechanical toys so fascinating to adult minds. additional curved blocks corresponding to the unit block in width and thickness are a great boon to engineers, for what is a railroad without curves! transportation toys can be perfectly satisfactory when not made strictly to scale. indeed, the exigencies of the situation generally demand that realists be satisfied with rather wide departures from the general rule. train service, however, should accommodate at least one passenger to a car. [illustration: play area.]* large and small scale toys the floor scheme pictured here is a good illustration of our principles of selection applied to toys of larger scale. the dolls, the tea set, the chairs are from the toy shop. the little table in the foreground, and the bed are bench made. the bedding is of home manufacture, the jardiniere too, is of modelling clay, gaily painted with water colors. the tea table and stove are improvised from blocks as is the bath room, through the door of which a block "tub" may be seen. the screen used as a partition at the back is one of the play school "properties" with large sheets of paper as panels. (see cut p. 20.) there are some important differences, however, between the content of a play scheme like this and one of the kind we have been considering (see cut page 30). these result from the size and character of the initial play material, for dolls like these invite an entirely different type of treatment. one cannot build villages, or provide extensive railroad facilities for them, nor does one regard them in the impersonal way that the "do-with" family, or mr. wells' soldiers, are regarded, as incidentals in a general scheme of things. these beings hold the centre of their little stage. they call for affection and solicitude, and the kind of play into which they fit is more limited in scope, less stirring to the imagination, but more usual in the experience of children, because play material of this type is more plentifully provided than is any other and, centering attention as it does on the furnishings and utensils of the home, requires less contact with or information about, the world outside and its activities to provide the mental content for interesting play. [illustration: a "furnished apartment" at the ethical culture school] in the epochs of play development interest in these larger scale toys precedes that in more complicated schemes with smaller ones. mr. wells' stress on the desirability of a toy soldier population really reflects an adult view. for play on the toy soldier and paper doll scale develops latest of all, and because of the opportunities it affords for schemes of correspondingly greater mental content makes special appeal to the adult imagination. play material smaller than the "do-with" models and better adapted to this latest period than are either soldiers or paper dolls remains one of the unexplored possibilities for the toy trade of the future. [illustration: supplementary (a small toy train.)] [illustration: a play laundry.]* housekeeping play materials for housekeeping play are of two general kinds, according to size--those intended for the convenience of dolls, and those of larger scale for children's use. the larger kind should be strong enough and well enough made to permit of actual processes. plentiful as such materials are in the shops, it is difficult to assemble anything approaching a complete outfit on the same size scale. one may spend days in the attempt to get together one as satisfactory as that pictured here. the reason seems to be that for considerations of trade such toys are made and sold in sets of a few pieces each. if dealers would go a step further and plan their sets in series, made to scale and supplementing each other, they would better serve the requirements of play, and, it would seem, their own interests as well. storekeeping play from housekeeping play to storekeeping play is a logical step and one abounding in possibilities for leading interest beyond the horizon line of home environment. better than any toy equipment and within reach of every household budget is a "store" like the one pictured here where real cartons, boxes, tins and jars are used. [illustration: a "grocery store" at the ethical culture school] schools can often obtain new unfilled cartons from manufacturers. the fels-naphtha and national biscuit companies are especially cordial to requests of this kind, and cartons from the latter firm are good for beginners, as prices are plainly marked and involve only dime and nickel computation. the magazine "educational foundations" maintains a department which collects such equipment and furnishes it to public schools on their subscribers' list. sample packages add to interest and a small supply of actual staples in bulk, or of sand, sawdust, chaff, etc., for weighing and measuring should be provided as well as paper, string, and paper bags of assorted sizes. small scales, and inexpensive sets of standard measures, dry and liquid, can be obtained of milton bradley and other school supply houses. a toy telephone and toy money will add "content," and for older children a "price and sign marker" (milton bradley) is a valuable addition. the school of childhood (pittsburgh) list includes the following miscellaneous articles for house and store play: spoons various sized boxes stones pebbles buttons shells spools bells enlarged sticks of the kindergarten ribbon bolts filled with sand rice shot bottles, etc. craft and color materials materials of this kind are a valuable part of any play equipment. of the large assortment carried by kindergarten and school supply houses the following are best adapted to the needs of the play laboratory: _modelling materials_--modelling clay and plasticine, far from being the same, are supplementary materials, each adapted to uses for which the other is unsuited. _weaving materials_--raphia, basketry reed, colored worsteds, cotton roving, jute and macrame cord can be used for many purposes. _material for paper work_--heavy oak tag, manila, and bogus papers for cutting and construction come in sheets of different sizes. colored papers, both coated (colored on one side) and engine colored (colored on both sides) are better adapted to "laboratory purposes" when obtainable in large sheets instead of the regulation kindergarten squares. colored tissue papers, scissors and library paste are always in demand. _color materials_--crayons, water color paints, chalks (for blackboard use) are best adapted to the needs of play when supplied in a variety of colors and shades. for drawing and painting coarse paper should be furnished in quantity and in sheets of differing sizes. "_if children are let alone with paper and crayons they will quickly learn to use these toys quite as effectively as they do blocks and dolls._" [illustration: children playing with wagon.]* toys for active play and outdoor tools among the many desirable _toys for active play_ the following deserve "honorable mention": express wagon sled horse reins "coaster" or "scooter" velocipede (and other adaptations of the bicycle for beginners) football (small size association ball) indoor baseball rubber balls (various sizes) bean bags steamer quoits as in the case of the carpenter's bench it is poor economy to supply any but good _tools_ for the yard and garden. even the best garden sets for children are so far inferior to those made for adults as to render them unsatisfactory and expensive by comparison. it is therefore better to get light weight pieces in the smaller standard sizes and cut down long wooden handles for greater convenience. the one exception to be noted is the boy's shovel supplied by the peter henderson company. this is in every respect as strong and well made as the regulation sizes and a complete series to the same scale and of the same standard would meet a decided need in children's equipment where light weight is imperative and hard wear unavoidable. in addition to the garden set of shovel, rake, hoe, trowel and wheel-barrow, a small crow-bar is useful about the yard and, in winter, a light snow shovel is an advantage. jean lee hunt. [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* [illustration: small wooden toy.]* a small permanent exhibit of the play equipment described may be seen at the bureau of educational experiments, 16 west 8th street, new york, and is occasionally loaned. suggested reading for convenience it has seemed well to divide the following list into two parts--the first devoted to the discussion of theory, the other offering concrete suggestions. such a division is arbitrary, of course. no better exposition of theory can be found than is contained in some of these references dealing with actual laboratory usage and furnishings. on the other hand the two books by dr. kilpatrick, with their illuminating analysis of didactic materials, afford many concrete suggestions, at least on the negative side. part i. chamberlin, a. e. "the child: a study in the evolution of man," scribner, 1917. chap. i, "the meaning of the helplessness of infancy." chap. ii, "the meaning of youth and play." chap. iv, "the periods of childhood." dewey, john "democracy and education," macmillan, 1916. chap. xv, "play and work in the curriculum." "how we think," d. c. heath and co. chap. xvii, "play, work, and allied forms of activity." chap. xvi, "process and product." "interest and effort in education," houghton mifflin co., 1913. chap. iv, "the psychology of occupations." "the school and society," university of chicago press, 1916. chap. iv, "the psychology of occupations." chap. vii, "the development of attention." "cyclopedia of education," edited by paul monroe, macmillan co. articles on "infancy," "play." dopp, katherine e. "the place of industries in elementary education," university of chicago press, 1915. groos, karl "the play of man," appleton, 1916. hall, g. stanley "educational problems," appleton, 1911. chap. i, "the pedagogy of the kindergarten." "youth: its regimen and hygiene," appleton, 1916. chap. vi, "play, sports and games." kilpatrick, william heard "the montessori system examined," houghton mifflin, 1914. "froebel's kindergarten principles critically examined," macmillan, 1916. lee, joseph "play in education," macmillan, 1915. wood, walter "children's play and its place in education," duffield, 1913. part ii. arnold, dr. e. h. "some inexpensive playground apparatus," bulletin no. 27, playground association of america and playground extension committee of the russell sage foundation. deming, lucile p. and others "playthings," bulletin no. i. "the play school," bulletin no. iii. "the children's school, the teachers college playground, the gregory school," bulletin no. iv. bureau of educational experiments publications, 1917. chambers, will grant and others "report of the experimental work in the school of childhood," university of pittsburgh bulletin, 1916. cook, h. caldwell "the play way," stokes co., 1917. corbin, alice m. "how to equip a playroom: the pittsburgh plan," bulletin no. 118, playground and recreation association of america, 1913. dewey, john and evelyn "schools of to-morrow," dutton, 1915. chap. v, "play." hall, g. stanley "aspects of child life," ginn, 1914. "the story of a sand pile." hetherington, clark w. "the demonstration play school of 1913," university of california bulletin, 1914. hill, patty smith and others "experimental studies in kindergarten education," teachers college publications, 1915. johnson, george e. "education by plays and games," ginn & co., 1907. lee, joseph "play for home," bulletin no. 102, playground and recreation association of america. read, mary l. "the mothercraft manual," little, brown & co., 1916. wells, h. g. "floor games," small, maynard & co., 1912. "the new machiavelli," duffield co., 1910. chap. ii, "bromstead and my father." images generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) mrs. leslie's books for little children. * * * * * the little frankie series. books written or edited by a. r. baker, and sold by all booksellers. * * * * * question books on the topics of christ's sermon on the mount. vol. i. for children. vol. ii. for youth. vol. iii. for adults. lectures on these topics, _in press_. mrs. leslie's sabbath school books. tim, the scissors grinder. sequel to "tim, the scissors grinder." prairie flower. the bound boy. the bound girl. virginia. the two homes; or, earning and spending. the organ-grinder, _in press_. question books. the catechism tested by the bible. vol. i. for children. vol. ii. for adults. the dermott family; or, stories illustrating the catechism. vol. i. doctrines respecting god and mankind. " ii. doctrines of grace. " iii. commandments of the first table. " iv. commandments of the second table. " v. conditions of eternal life. mrs. leslie's home life. vol. i. cora and the doctor. " ii. courtesies of wedded life. " iii. the household angel. mrs. leslie's juvenile series. vol. i. the motherless children. " ii. play and study. " iii. howard and his teacher. " iv. trying to be useful. " v. jack, the chimney sweeper. " vi. the young housekeeper. " vii. little agnes. the robin redbreast series. the robins' nest. little robins in the nest. little robins learning to fly. little robins in trouble. little robins' friends. little robins' love one to another. * * * * * the little frankie series. little frankie and his mother. little frankie at his plays. little frankie and his cousin. little frankie and his father. little frankie on a journey. little frankie at school. [illustration: teaching ponto to read.] little frankie at his plays. by mrs. madeline leslie, author of "the home life series;" "mrs. leslie's juvenile series," etc. boston: crosby and nichols. 117 washington street. entered, according to act of congress, in the year 1860, by a. r. baker, in the clerk's office of the district court of the district of massachusetts. electrotyped at the boston stereotype foundry. little frankie at his plays. chapter i. frankie and his wheelbarrow. i have already told you that frankie lived in a pretty cottage, separated from the road by a green lawn, which lay in front of it. on the other side of the street, the land was much lower, a little shining brook running through it, and sometimes, after a rain, there was quite a pond of water. in winter this was a pleasant place for willie to skate. his mamma liked it, because she could watch him from the windows; willie liked it, because when his hands were cold he could run home to warm himself; and frankie liked it, because it made him laugh and clap his hands to see his brother bow and turn this way and that, run a few steps, and then make such pretty figures on the ice. he had no doubt at all but willie did all this just to amuse him. if you could have seen him as he stood in his chair at the front window, how he jumped up and down, and threw his head back, and then held it far forward on his breast, laughing so merrily, bursting out afresh every time willie made a bow or stretched out his arms, you could not have helped laughing yourself, out of sympathy. sally seemed to enjoy it as much as he did. "i declare," she said one day, as her mistress entered the room and found her sitting by the fire with her work, while frankie stood at the window, "i haven't laughed so much in a month. it does one's heart good just to see how the little fellow enjoys his brother's sport." back of the house where he lived there was a barn. his papa did not keep a horse in it, but one day, after some months, a gentleman came to pass a few days at the cottage, and his horse was put up in the barn. one pleasant evening, when papa, and mamma, and their friends were walking in the garden, the gentleman said he would lead his horse down to the pond, and give him some water to drink, and he invited willie to ride upon the horse's back. willie's papa helped him on, and he held fast by the horse's mane. when he came back, frankie wanted to ride too. mamma was afraid he would fall; but the gentleman said the horse was gentle, and papa said he would hold him very tightly. so frankie mounted the horse, and took his first lesson in riding. papa was going to walk about the grounds, but the little boy said, "pony want water gen, papa; pony must have more water." frankie had never been to the pond before. first they had to cross the road, then go through the rail fence into the field. the gentleman let down two bars, and the horse carefully stepped over the other. then papa held his baby very tight, because they were going down a steep place into the water. the gentleman thought pony would not drink again; but he did, and frankie leaned over, and saw him suck up great mouthfuls of water. then they turned back, and went out of the field, papa holding the horse, while the gentleman put up the bars again. mamma was very glad to get her boy safely home. she had been anxious all the time, for fear he would fall and hurt himself, though papa laughed, and told her there was no danger. she had kept ponto near her, for fear he would bark and frighten the strange horse. but the moment frankie was taken off, he flew up to him, and licked his face and hands, and tried to spring on his neck, he was so glad to see him. i don't know what frankie would have done without ponto. willie and margie were at school; and there were a great many hours when he would have had to play alone. but ponto was always ready for a frolic. he was never tired or out of humor, though sometimes he was rather too rough; and then he loved his young master so much, that he wanted to kiss him oftener than frankie liked. early in the summer, papa had bought a wheelbarrow for his boy to roll in the yard. it was painted red, and on the sides were pretty pictures painted in gilt. it had long, smooth handles, and a large wheel, so that it ran along the walks very nicely indeed. i wish you could have been there to see what pleasant plays frankie had with his dog and his wheelbarrow; but as you were not, i will try to tell you about it. mamma had made a pretty sun bonnet, with a deep frill to shade his face, and as soon as the sun had dried up the dew, she tied it on his head, and let him run all about the grounds with only ponto to take care of him. ponto knew very well that the little fellow was left in his charge; and when mamma said, "ponto, look here, sir; take care of your little master," he would hold up his head, and wag his tail, and bow, wow, wow, as much as to say, "yes, indeed, ma'am." then frankie would run along wheeling his barrow, and ponto close beside him, until they came to the woodpile. here the little boy stopped, and began to fill his barrow with sticks; and ponto picked them up in his teeth almost as fast as frankie did with his hands. sometimes he was wild and full of fun, so that when frankie wanted to take the stick from his mouth and put it in the barrow, ponto would spring up into the air, and run away; but when he heard his master say, "come here, sir," he would be sober in a moment. o, ponto was a very knowing dog indeed! when the barrow was full, frankie rolled it to the back door, and put it in a basket set there for him by jane. when she saw him coming, she called out through the window, "sure and he's not a baby at all, but a man entirely, to be bringing me all my wood. sure and i'll make him a nice cake for his supper." then frankie felt very large, and walked off with his head up and his lips parted in a pleasant smile. by and by frankie would be tired of wheeling wood; then he used to take jane's small kitchen shovel, and fill his barrow with sand; and what do you think he did with it. i am sure you cannot guess. why, he poured it all over ponto. the first time he did this, the dog did not like it at all; but when he heard frankie laughing so merrily, and saw how much he was pleased, he felt, i suppose, willing to submit. so he lay down again in the walk, and this time frankie laughed so that he did not half fill the barrow before he poured it over the dog again. much as he tried to like it, i suppose ponto was not very much pleased, for he soon got up and shook himself thoroughly, and then barked a little, as if to say, "no more, if you please." chapter ii. frankie and his dog. a few days after frankie's ride on horseback, he was out of doors playing with ponto, and he thought he would take a walk down to the pond. before this time, he had been a very good boy, and had never gone through the gate into the road, though sometimes he would stand at the fence, and look through to see people passing by. mamma was busy in the parlor with company; and sally was at work in the back part of the house. when ponto saw that his master was going into the street, he began to bark furiously, for he knew this was not exactly right. mrs. gray heard him, and ran to the window; but just at this moment frankie was behind a tree, and she did not see him; so she thought that the dog was barking at something he saw in the road. for a minute ponto was very much excited, and ran back toward the house, but presently turned and followed frankie to the water. the little boy did not seem at all afraid, but went right down the steep path where he had rode on the horse. i suppose he thought the water looked very pretty, for he walked right into it up to his waist. a few minutes after frankie went away from the back door, sally went out to shake the hearth rug. as she did not see him any where about, she called, "frankie, frankie! ponto, ponto!" she ran around to the front of the house, still calling, "frankie, frankie!" and "ponto, ponto!" mamma heard her, and ran to the door. "have you seen frankie, ma'am?" asked sally, pale with fright. "where's ponto?" cried the lady, without stopping to answer. "there he is," screamed nurse, running as fast as she could toward the water. mamma ran too, and the ladies who were in the parlor; but mamma was so frightened that her head swam round and round, and she could hardly stand. when ponto heard them coming, he barked louder than ever, but he did not run toward them; and sally sprang over the fence without waiting to let the bars down, and in one moment more caught the poor frightened frankie in her arms. ponto had taken the little fellow in his teeth, and put him on the bank. he lay quite still, as if he were very tired, only when sally placed him in his mamma's arms, he put up his little wet hand, and tried to stroke her cheek. his eyes were very red, as if he had been crying, and his clothes all dripping with water and stained with mud. sally ran forward to get the bath tub filled with warm water, while mamma carried him gently toward the house. no one seemed to be in such good spirits as ponto. he danced and jumped, trying to catch frankie's foot, and whisked his tail up and down, and did every thing he could to express his joy at having his little friend safe again. how and when the ladies went away mamma did not know. she carried her dear boy up into the nursery, and then sank down, and began to cry. when sally saw her, she cried too; and jane, who, was pulling off frankie's stockings, wiped her eyes with her apron. they were all crying for joy that dear, darling little frankie had not been drowned. and mamma whispered a few words as she bent over her boy. she knew that god could hear, and so she said, "o my heavenly father, i do thank thee for restoring my precious child to my arms. once more i give him to thee." while she was washing him, she told sally that she had heard ponto bark some time before, but could not see that frankie was with him. "i shall always love ponto," she said, "for he saved my boy." ponto was lying on the hearth rug, resting himself. he had had a great deal to do that morning, and he had done it well. now, when he heard mamma repeat his name, he rapped with his tail on the floor. "good fellow!" said mamma; "good ponto!" he rapped again, louder than before. this was the way he meant to say, "i am as glad as you are, that dear frankie is safe." when the little fellow had been dressed in his clean clothes, sally said she would run down to the water and bring up his wheelbarrow, which she saw there. jane went with her, and they found where he went in, for his tiny shoe was sticking fast in the mud. then they went round to the other side, where ponto had carried him, and found it was very deep water, so that if the noble dog had not taken him out, he must have been drowned. when willie came home from school, and heard what a trusty friend ponto had been, he put his arms round the dog's neck and kissed him. frankie had kissed him very often, but willie had never done so before. but ponto seemed to understand it very well; and when papa came in, all the while mamma was telling him about poor frankie's accident, he stood gazing into her face. for a few moments papa could not speak; his heart was too full. he walked away to the window and wiped his eyes; but presently he came back, and patted ponto on the head, and said, "noble ponto! good fellow!" then ponto knew that he was glad too; and he went to the bed where frankie was lying, and putting up his fore paws, began to lick the little fellow's hand. when sally took up the wet clothes to carry them to the wash, there were the marks of ponto's teeth, where he had fastened them firmly through the dress, cambric and flannel skirts. chapter iii. frankie in trial. i have told you so much about frankie, i suppose you will want to know whether he was always a good boy. did he never show a naughty temper? was he never unkind to his brother willie? or to his little nurse margie? did he never tell a lie? never take what was not his own? i am sorry to say that he did some of these things, and no doubt would have done a great many more, but that he had a kind mamma and papa to teach him. one of the greatest blessings which god can give a little boy or a little girl, is a good christian mother. i hope, my dear young friend, if god has been so kind as to give you such a mother, that you will thank him every day of your life. when you wake up in the morning and repeat your little hymn, thanking god for letting you see another day, with the pleasant sun and sweet-smelling flowers, don't forget to thank him, too, for giving you a dear mamma to love you and watch over you. and then, when you are tired with play, and lie down at night to rest your head upon the soft pillow, don't go to sleep without thanking him for preserving her who has prepared you nice food, made you warm clothes, and tried to lead your little feet in the path of right. i think whatever faults little frankie had, he dearly loved his mother. ever so many times in a day he would run to her side, sometimes right in the midst of his play, and say, "i want to kiss oo. i love oo." when he meddled with her work-basket, or did other troublesome things, and she spoke sharply, "frankie, don't do so," he would turn in a moment and ask, with a quivering lip, "am i your darling now, mamma?" once in a while frankie would get up in the morning, and instead of the bright smile he generally wore, his face looked cross. nurse used to say he got out of bed the wrong way. when this was the case, nothing seemed to go right with him. at breakfast he pushed away his plate, and would not let margie fasten on his bib, and seemed very unhappy. this was not because he was sick, but because he was out of humor, and needed to be brought right again. his mamma was very much troubled about it, and she said to herself, "if i do not correct my little son, he will grow more unhappy, and his temper will become so sullen that no one will love him; and what is worst of all, god will not love him." she went away alone into her chamber, and knelt down by her bed, and asked god to direct her what to do in order to make frankie a good boy. i suppose god did put some good thoughts into her mind, for the next day, when the little boy was naughty again, she arose at once, and led him away to her chamber, and talked with him a long time. and then they knelt down together, and she held his little hands while she asked god to take away his wicked heart, and give him a good one, that would be full of pleasant, happy thoughts, and of love to the dear saviour and to every body. perhaps you would like to know one thing she told him. it was this. she said, "my dear frankie, when you look so cross, and speak unkindly to willie, and do not wish to obey me, do you know who is close by you, whispering in your ear?" "no, mamma," said frankie; "i didn't see any body." "it is the wicked satan," said mamma. "he likes to see you naughty, and so he puts unkind thoughts into your heart. he would like to have you naughty all the time, because then he knows you could not be happy. he don't like good children, and he can't bear to stay where they are; so he has to run off by himself when you are obedient, and kind, and happy. shall i tell you what i think he was whispering in your ear this morning?" "yes, mamma." "well, when you rubbed out willie's figures, after he asked you not to do so, i think he said, 'i wouldn't mind my brother; i'd do it just to vex him.' then, when i forbade you to touch it again, he whispered, 'get away, mamma; i don't love you this morning.'" frankie hung down his head, and looked very sober. he did not like to think he had been pleasing satan, but still he was troubled, for he did not know exactly what to do. in a minute he said, "i will try to be good frankie, mamma." "that is right, my darling. if you try to be good, and when you hear satan tempting you to do such wicked things, tell him at once to go away, then the good spirit will come and help you to be kind, and to do every thing that is right. if you had not been listening to satan this morning, you could have heard him, though he talks very softly indeed." "what did he say, mamma?" asked frankie. "i suppose he was saying, 'willie is a very kind brother, and loves you dearly. i wouldn't trouble him, my dear;' and then when i spoke, perhaps he said, 'your mother knows what is right, little boy. she does it for your good, for she wants you to be happy.'" chapter iv. frankie's block house. a few days after mamma talked with frankie, he was building a high house on the floor with his blocks, when sally passed along and hit them, and over they went. the little boy looked very angry. "you naughty girl," he said. mamma laid down her work, and gazed at him, and her eyes looked very sorry. as soon as sally went out of the room, she said, "what is satan whispering to you now, my dear?" frankie started up and looked behind him: "i don't see him any where," he said. "but didn't you hear his voice?" asked mamma. "yes, i did: he said, 'throw a block at nurse; she is so naughty to knock your house over.'" "shall i blow satan away?" said mamma. "yes, please." she blew very hard; then opened the door, and blew again, as if she meant to send him off. "now he's gone, i think," she said, looking in frankie's bright face. "the next time he comes i'll whip him, mamma," cried the little fellow, standing very straight, "'cause he tells me naughty things." in a few minutes sally came in again, and glanced at the little boy to see whether he felt happier than he did before. frankie looked at her, too, and his mamma thought he seemed sorry that he had called her naughty. she called him to her, and whispered, "is any body speaking to you now, my darling?" "yes, mamma. it says, 'tell sally you're sorry.'" "are you going to mind the good spirit?" "yes, mamma. i'm sorry, nurse, i called you naughty." nurse looked very much pleased. "i am sorry myself, dear," she said, "that my dress hit your blocks; and, if mamma is willing, i'll build you a high house." "yes, indeed," said mamma. so sally sat down on the carpet, and frankie passed her the blocks; and she built a meeting house, with a high steeple. mamma thought it was splendid, and the little boy danced about, and put his arms round sally's neck, and kissed her ever so many times. "i'm so happy, mamma," he said, when she had gone. "children are always happy, my dear," she said, "when they have tried to be good." "satan can't stay here now; can he, mamma?" "no, he has gone to trouble some other little boy with naughty thoughts." the next morning, frankie had forgotten all about this; and when papa said he must not have so much sugar on his cakes, his lips began to pout, and they were all afraid he was going to be very naughty. mamma leaned over her plate, and said, softly, "is satan here again?" "yes, mamma," said frankie; "may i whip him out?" she nodded yes; and he then jumped down from the table, and began to blow with all his might. then he caught up a newspaper, and whisked it all about, saying, "go long, old feller; go long out of this house." "whew! whew!" said papa; "what is all this?" mamma smiled, as if she understood it well; and presently the little fellow climbed up in his chair, looking very bright and happy, but quite out of breath with his exercise. "satan's gone, papa," he said. "now i'm your dear little frankie." "yes, indeed, you are," said his father, laughing heartily. "i am glad we have found a way to get rid of satan so easily." "what does it mean?" asked willie. "i will tell you presently, my dear," said papa. when they had done breakfast, mr. gray opened the bible for prayers, and taking frankie on his knee, and calling willie to stand by his side, he said, "in god's book, he tells us that satan is our great enemy, who is trying to make us do wrong. he is called a roaring lion, who goeth about seeking whom he may devour. this means that he loves to destroy our happiness, and to see people miserable; and he knows if we are naughty, we shall suffer. he goes about whispering in the ears of little boys and girls, prompting them to mischief, persuading them to tell lies, to be disobedient and unkind. if children listen to his voice, they soon become like him; but if they say, 'get thee behind me, satan,' or drive him away, as frankie did, the holy spirit will come and put good thoughts into their minds, and teach them, as the bible says, what they ought to say and what they ought to do." papa then knelt down, and holding frankie's little hand, prayed that he might always listen to the voice of the good spirit, and be led by it to do all that is right. chapter v. frankie and the sugar. one morning mrs. gray was finishing a piece of work which she wished to send away, when frankie ran in from the dining hall, and asked, "mamma, may i have some chucher?" he meant sugar, but he could not speak the word plainly. "where is the sugar that you want, my dear?" asked mamma. "on the table," said frankie. "nurse is washing the dishes." "look in my face, darling," said mamma, "did you take any sugar without my leave?" frankie looked up with his clear, truthful eyes, and said, "no, mamma, i didn't take any." "then go and get two large lumps, and bring them to me." the little boy ran off, saying, "i will, mamma; i will get some." presently he returned with them; and she said, "now, my dear, you shall have these, because you didn't take any without asking leave." a few months before this time, willie one day found frankie in the store closet dipping up sugar with his hand from the barrel, and crowding it into his mouth. his whole face was covered with sugar, when willie lifted him down from the chair, and led him to his mother. when mamma had washed his hands and face, she took him in her lap, and told him it was very naughty to take mother's sugar without her permission. when he wanted sugar, or candy, or figs, he must always ask for them. since that time she had not known him to touch any thing until he had first asked leave. once she had left a paper of cough candy in her drawer for several days, and she knew he often went to this drawer on errands for her. she was coughing severely one afternoon, and said, "i really wish i had some candy." "i will get you some," he said. "i saw some in the drawer;" and away he ran for it. mamma was so much pleased that he had not taken any, that she gave him a small paper of sugar plums. the cough candy was not good for him. ever since frankie could remember, his mamma had told him the pretty stories in the bible. the account of adam and eve in the garden; the sad death of good abel, and the punishment of wicked cain; the ark, and the dreadful flood; the stories of joseph and his brethren, of samuel and of ruth, were as familiar to him as the names of the family circle. indeed, the little boy seemed to connect the events of the bible with every thing he saw. one day a gentleman gave him a short cane. he had often seen frankie play horse with his father's cane, and he thought it would please the child to have one of his own. frankie was very much delighted, and ran around the garden with it for several hours, ponto following close at his heels, quite delighted with the new sport. at last he came in, and, sitting down by his mamma, began to play with the string she had tied around the head of the cane. then he looked very thoughtful for a minute, when he said, "i don't like that cane any more." "why don't you like it?" she asked, in surprise. "because it killed good abel, you know." "o, no," said mamma, with a laugh. "that cain was a man, and not a stick." the little fellow was once playing out near the barn, when he fell and cut his finger against a piece of glass. it bled very freely, so that mamma could not bind it up. she told sally to bring a bowl of water, and held his poor finger in it. the water was soon red with the blood; and frankie cried louder than ever. all at once he stopped, and said, "mamma, it seems like the red sea. how could the israelites get through so much blood?" "that was not red with blood, my dear," said mamma. "it was only the name of the sea. there are the red sea, and the black sea, and the white sea." frankie was very fond of cake, and would have liked to make his whole supper of it. but mamma knew it would make him sick. sometimes, when he was in the kitchen, jane gave him a piece; and one day his mother was very much pleased when he came running to her with a rich cake in his hand, fresh from the oven. "may i eat it, mamma?" he asked. "i didn't taste it without your leave." mamma broke off a small piece, and gave it to him, and then took him in her lap, and repeated a pretty little hymn she had learned when she was a child. i think you will like to hear it too. "mamma, do hear eliza cry; she wants a piece of cake i know; she will not stir to school without; do give her some, and let her go." "o, no, my dear; that will not do; she has behaved extremely ill; she pouts instead of minding me, and tries to gain her stubborn will. "this morning, when she had her milk, she gave her spoon a sudden twirl, and tipped it over on the floor; o, she's a naughty, wicked girl! "and now, forsooth, she cries for cake; but that i surely shall refuse; for children never should object to eating what their parents choose. "the pretty little girl who came to sell the strawberries here to-day, would have been very glad to eat what my eliza threw away;- "because her parents are so poor that they have neither milk nor meat; but gruel and some indian cake are all the children have to eat. "they have four little girls and boys; mary's the oldest of the whole, and hard enough she has to work, to help her ma--poor little soul! "as soon as strawberries are ripe, she picks all day, and will not stop to play or eat a single one, till she has filled her basket up. "then down she comes and sells them all, and lays the money up at home, to buy her stockings and her shoes, to wear when freezing winter's come. "for then she has to trudge away, and gather wood through piles of snow, to keep the little children warm, when bites the frost, and cold winds blow. "and then, when she comes home at night, hungry and tired, with cold benumbed, how she would jump to find a bowl of bread and milk all nicely crumbed! "but she, dear child, has no such thing; of gruel and the indian cake, whether she chooses it or not, poor mary must her supper make. "eliza, dear, will you behave so ill again, another day? be cross and pert, and cry for cake, and fling your breakfast all away?" "ah, never, never, dear mamma! i'm sorry that i gave you pain; forgive me, and i never will be such a naughty girl again." chapter vi. frankie's rocking horse. when frankie was between three and four years old, there were a good many words he could not pronounce distinctly. he could not say kitchen, but called it chichen; and he called sugar chucher. he could not say sing, but said ting. his papa was afraid he never would be able to pronounce them; and he took a great deal of pains to have him try to say them over and over again. he used to take frankie on his knee, and make him sound s-s-, and then say s-sing. but frankie always said s-ting. one day his mamma was passing through the back hall, and she saw her little boy kneeling in a chair by the table where jane was making bread. he was talking very earnestly, and she stopped a moment to hear what he was saying. he was giving jane a lesson. "now say knife," he began. so jane said "knife." "no, that not wight; you must say sknife." jane laughed: "knife is right," she said. "no, no!" he repeated; "papa say sknife; so you must say it wight." he thought it was as well to put son any other word as on sing. he was very fond of playing school, and was quite happy when willie and margie would be his scholars. dinah was always set up in her chair too, and another dolly whose name was lily gray. frankie would set them all before him, and then ask, "margie, who first man?" "adam." "now, you good girl, you may go wight to your seat. willie, who first boy?" "cain." "yes, that's wight; now you be vely till, cause i shall peach." then he would stand in his chair and preach very loud, spreading his arms, and always closing with a long amen. once, when he was kneeling with his father, he thought the prayer rather long, and putting up his face, he whispered, "say amen, papa;--can't you say amen?" frankie was very happy one day when his mamma told him that his aunt and cousin were coming to make them a visit. he packed all his playthings in a trunk, to have them ready for the little baby, and then went round the house telling every body that eddie was coming to see him. the day before they were expected, a beautiful present came for frankie from mr. wallace, the same kind gentleman who had given him the silver cup. can you guess what it was? it was not a cup and ball, nor a top, nor an iron hoop, but a rocking horse with a carriage fastened to it large enough for him to get in it. then there was a place for the whip, and two pairs of reins for him to drive with. at first, frankie stood looking at it, his eyes growing larger and larger, until papa asked, "well, frankie, how do you like your new horse?" "is it for me, papa, for mine own telf?" exclaimed the little boy, clapping his hands and dancing up and down. "o, i'm to glad!" then raising his eyes, he said, soberly, "tank you, dod. tank you vely much indeed." his mamma had taught him that all our blessings come from god; and the dear boy wished to thank him for this new favor. i can hardly tell you how much pleased he was with his present. he could scarcely stop riding to eat his dinner; and then had to put up the horse in the corner of the room he called the stable, and tie him very tightly to a chair, for fear he would run away. then, before his mother noticed what he was about, he slipped from his seat, and carried his silver cup of water to the pony, and held it to his mouth to drink. "pony hungry," he said, when she called him back. "pony vely hungry indeed." when willie and margie came from school, mamma watched her boy, to see whether he would be generous, and allow them to share in his rides. "o, my!" called out willie, "how pretty it is! let me get in." "yet, you may," said frankie, stepping out of the carriage. "here, take dinah too. dinah wants to wide." while willie was whipping the horse to make him go as fast as he could, frankie danced up and down, every now and then calling out, "go long, pony, go long!" in the mean time, margie stood awaiting her turn, hardly daring to expect that frankie would give up his new plaything to her. mamma was looking on too, and was very happy when he said, "there, willie, you must get out now, cause margie wants to wide. top a minute, margie; i'll fix the reins for you," he cried; and he went to the pony's head, and patted him, and said, "whoa, sir, whoa!" just like any gentleman. the next day, when eddie and his mamma came, frankie seemed very happy to share his pleasure with his little cousin. they rode away together to visit other papas and mammas, but always came back at last to the stable in the corner of the room. can you tell what it was made mrs. gray so happy, when she looked at the pretty pony? it was because her darling boy had not been selfish with it, and tried to keep it all to himself, but had liked to see others riding in it, and enjoying it too. when little boys or girls are generous and kind, then look for smiles and kisses from their mammas. [illustration] chapter vii. the try company. "o mamma!" cried willie, one day, running home from school in great haste, "the boys are going to have a little company; may i have a soldier cap and belong to it?" mrs. gray sat busily at work, but she at once laid down her sewing in her lap, and thought a moment, and then she said, "i want you to belong to my company, my dear!" "what company, mamma? will they wear soldier caps, and jackets with red all down here, and stripes on their pantaloons?" "yes, they will be all dressed up with plumes and stars on their shoulders. it will be called the try company." "may i have a cap too?" asked frankie. "yes, any little boy may join who will agree to the rules." "rules, mamma," said willie, "do companies have rules?" "o, yes, my dear! soldiers always have to obey the captain; and if an enemy comes, to go and fight him." "shall we fight, then?" asked the boy in surprise. "there will be one kind of fighting, my dear; but it will not be fighting with swords. you may ask all the little boys, who wish to form a company, up here after school this evening, and i will talk with them. perhaps they will like to join my company." willie laughed quite heartily. "yours, mamma! shall you be the captain?" "if they choose me i shall, my dear." as soon as willie had gone to school, mrs. gray began to cut long strips of colored paper and wind them into plumes. there was a very long waving one of yellow for the captain, and one of blue for the lieutenant, and twelve of pink for the soldiers. she did not think there would be more than fourteen at first. then she cut sheets of paper, and taught sally to form them into caps; and after they were done, she sewed the plumes on, and laid them all out on the table, which stood in the hall, so as to attract the notice of the boys when they came in from school. next she sent sally to the attic for some strips of red and blue cloth. of the red she made pretty stars to fasten on the shoulders, while nurse cut long smooth stripes to trim their jackets and pantaloons. they had but just finished their work when a shout from willie called mamma to the door, where she saw a company of boys awaiting her orders. "come in," she said, smiling at their bright, expectant faces; "come in, and we will form the company." as they entered the hall they stopped short at sight of the beautifully plumed caps. "o mamma!" was all that willie could say. she led them into the dining hall, and then told them her plan. "i want to form a company of boys," she began. "it will be called the 'try company,' because every one belonging to it must learn to try to do things for himself. but first of all i must tell you the rules. no little boy can join my company unless he will promise not to use one naughty or vulgar word, not to tell a lie, and not to be unkind. if he has ever told lies, he must try to do so no more. next he must try in his lessons. sometimes the words are very long, and boys say, 'i can't learn them;' but my company will never say so. "my boys will say, 'i'll try.' if the geography lesson is difficult, and you can't readily find the places on the maps, you will think of your pretty plumes, and say, 'i won't give up; i'll try again.' "then, when the sum is long, and it makes your head ache to add up four and ten and two and five, you won't mind that, but keep on trying until you succeed." "mother wants to know if my little brother can't join your company," asked a dear boy whose name was james; "but he don't learn sums; he is too small." "o, yes, indeed!" said mamma; "frankie has a cap like the rest, and your brother shall have one too, and a star on his shoulder." "may i carry my drum?" eagerly asked willie. "certainly, my dear; but wait a little. i have not told all the rules yet. my company must try, too, when they are at play. if james throws a ball, and hits john, he must _try_ not to do so again. and if john feels a little angry, and thinks it very hard for james to hurt him, he must _try_ to put all these naughty thoughts away, and call it an accident, and say 'i don't believe he meant to do it.' then, if james or willie wants to be captain, and the company choose another, james or willie must _try_ to be pleased and good humored about it." "i thought you were to be captain, mother," cried willie. "i am afraid you would all laugh," said mamma, "to see me marching round at the head of such a troop of boys." "we would _try_ not to," exclaimed willie, laughing. mrs. gray laughed too; and then she said, "i want to see whether you understand about my rules; so i shall ask you a few questions. i once saw a boy sawing a stick of wood. it was a very large stick, and the saw went hard; the little fellow sat down and looked at it. 'it's too large,' said he; 'i can't get through it. i may as well give up first as last.' but presently he said, 'i'll try once more though;' and he started up, and sawed away, up and down, up and down, until the stick fell in two. then the boy laughed and wiped his forehead, which was quite wet with perspiration, and said, 'there, i'm right glad i tried again. i never should have done it without trying.' now tell me, could that little fellow be admitted into the try company?" "yes, ma'am, o, yes, ma'am!" answered all the boys. "he ought to be the captain," said one. willie blushed, and held down his head. "i knew another boy, who was winding some silk for his mother," said the lady. "he jerked it so much that it snarled badly. he pulled it, and twitched it, and made it worse than ever; and then he said; 'i can't do any thing with it.' when his mother came back for the silk, there it was upon the chair, so tangled up that she could not use it." "he can't belong," called out the boys. "i think you understand quite enough to form the company," said mamma. "now i will put the vote. would you all like to form a try company? if you would, you may hold up your hands." every small hand was quickly raised. "and you promise to _try_, according to the rules?" said the lady. each little hand was raised again. "who is the oldest boy?" she asked. "sammy lanman, ma'am." "then i advise you to let sammy be the captain the first time, and then each of you take turns, until it comes down to little frankie." "may i run home for my brother?" asked james. the lady stopped a moment to count the boys, and finding there were only twelve with frankie, and that there would be caps enough for all, she said yes. while he was gone, willie ran to his play room for his drum, and mrs. gray dressed the try company in their new uniform, which did indeed look very fine. then james came leading his little brother walter; and when they were all dressed, their captain arranged them in order, and they then marched off down the yard, into the road, looking as happy as you please. mamma and nurse stood at the door gazing after them, while jane and margie stood in the walk, shading their eyes and laughing heartily. poor sammy, indeed, found that the office of captain was a most responsible one. his face grew very red as he perceived the younger members marching out of line, and a sharp word of rebuke rose to his lips, as little frankie laughed aloud in his glee. but suddenly he remembered that he had promised not to speak unkindly, and his heart beat fast as he said to himself, "any body will know such little boys can't train very well the first time. at any rate, i'll try to keep my temper." * * * * * transcriber's notes: obvious punctuation errors repaired. page 83, "toming" changed to "coming" (eddie was coming to) [illustration: "colonel take your colors!"] the sock stories, by "aunt fanny's" daughter. red, white, and blue socks. part first. being the first book of the series. by "aunt fanny's" daughter, the author of "the little white angel." with an introductory chapter, by "aunt fanny" herself. new york: leavitt & allen, 21 & 23 mercer st. 1863. entered, according to act of congress, in the year 1862, by s. l. barrow, in the clerk's office of the district court of the united states for the southern district of new york. john f. trow, printer, stereotyper, and electrotyper, 60 greene street, new york. contents of vol. i. page introduction--the story of the socks, 7 colonel freddy; or, the march and encampment of the dashahed zouaves, chap. i.--raising a regiment, 35 ii.--"marching along," 55 iii.--camp life, 76 dedication. my dear little cooley and georgie: when you see that this book is dedicated to you, i hope your bright eyes will sparkle with pleasure; but i am afraid your pretty curly heads will hardly retain a recollection of a little personage who once lived close to your beautiful home on staten island. she remembers _you_, however, and sends you this soldier story with her very best love--the love she bears in her inmost heart for god and little children. and now she asks you to hunt in every corner of those same precious little heads for a kindly remembrance of your affectionate friend, "aunt fanny's" daughter. the story of the socks. by aunt fanny. "oh dear! what _shall_ i do?" cried george, fretfully, one rainy afternoon. "mamma, do tell me what to do." "and i'm _so_ tired!" echoed helen, who was lazily playing with a kitten in her lap. "i don't see why it should rain on a friday afternoon, when we have no lessons to learn. we can't go out, and no one can come to see us. it's too bad, there!" "helen, do _you_ know better than _god_?" asked her mother, speaking very gravely. "you forget that he sends the rain." "i suppose i was thoughtless, mamma," answered the child; "i did not mean to be wicked, but, dear me, the time passes _so_ slowly, with nothing to do." "have you and george read all your books?" "oh yes! two or three times over," they both answered; "and oh, mamma," continued helen, "if the one who wrote 'two little heaps,' or the 'rollo' book writer, or the author of 'the little white angel,' would only write some more books, i, for one, would not care how hard it rained. if i was grown up and rich, i wouldn't mind giving a dollar a letter for those stories." "nor i," shouted george in an animated tone, quite different from the discontented whine he had favored his mother with a few moments before; "the best thing is to have them read aloud to you; that makes you understand all about it so much better. i say, mamma, couldn't you write a letter to one of those delightful people and beg them to hurry up with more stories, especially some about bad children;--not exactly wicked, you know, but full of mischief. _then i am sure that they are all true._ only wait till i'm a man! i'll just write the history of some jolly fellows i know who are always getting into scrapes, but haven't a scrap of meanness about them. that's the kind of book i like! i'll write dozens of them, and give them to all the sunday school libraries." his mother smiled at this speech, and then said quietly, "i know a gentleman who likes the story of 'the little white angel,' as much as you do, and he has written a letter to request the author to write six books for him." "six! hurrah!" shouted george, "how glad i am!" and he skipped up to helen, caught her by the hands, and the two danced round the room, upsetting a chair, till helen, catching her foot in the skirt of her mother's dress, they both tumbled down on the carpet together. "if you cut up such violent capers," said the kind mother, laughing, "at the first part of my information, it may be dangerous to tell you what the author replied." "oh no, do tell us!" cried the children. "we'll be as still as our shadows;" and while they made violent efforts to look grave and stand quiet, their mother told them that the author had consented, the six books were to be written, and she would buy them the very first day they were published. "perhaps," she continued, "mind, only perhaps, i may get them for you _before_ they are ever printed." "why, how, mamma?" they both asked. "well, suppose you make some very good resolutions--let me see," and she took a pencil out of her pocket, and drawing a sheet of paper toward her, began to write: "1st. to endeavor to say your prayers morning and evening without a _wandering thought_. "2d. to try to keep faithfully 'the golden rule.' "3d. to obey your parents immediately, without asking 'why?' "4th. (a little rule, but very important.) to keep your teeth, nails, and hair scrupulously clean and neat. "5th. to bear disappointments cheerfully. "there, i think that will do. they are all hard rules except the fourth. i do not keep them well myself, my dear children. no one can, without constant watchfulness and prayer for help from above; but you can try, will you?" "i will, mamma," said helen, in a low, earnest tone, her blue eyes filling with tears. "and you, george, will you?" "yes, mamma, i will try. i can't be a very good boy, as you know. i get so tired of being good sometimes, that i feel like jumping over the house to get the badness out of me, instead of sitting down quietly and thinking about my duty, as papa says i must. when papa locked me up in his dressing room last summer, and i kicked the door as hard as ever i could, which made him call out that i should stay there two hours longer, i was mad enough, i tell you! but i did not cut my name with a knife on his rosewood bureau _because_ i was angry. it was because i was almost crazy with doing nothing but think what a bad boy i was. that made me worse, you see. the best way to punish me is to see you crying about my conduct. i can't stand that," and the boy put his arms round his mother's neck, and kissed her fondly. "my dear boy," said his mother, returning the caress, "there is one whom you grieve more than me. i wish you would think oftener of that. i know that different children require different sorts of punishment, and as neither your father nor i approve of beating you like a dog, and you say that shutting you up with nothing to do only makes you worse, i shall advise him the next time you are naughty, to send immediately for a load of wood, and make you saw it all up into small pieces, or take you where some house is building and order you to run up and down a long ladder all day with a hod of bricks on your shoulder, or hire you out to blow the big bellows for a blacksmith. how do you think you would like that?" "i had a great deal rather run after the fire engines, to put the fire out. that's the kind of work i would like. every body screaming, and pumping, and playing streams of water--twenty firemen rushing up ladders, pulling old women and cats out of the windows, and somebody inside pitching out the looking glasses and crockery to save them! i wish our house was on fire this very minute, so i could pull you and helen out, and save all the furniture. that would be the greatest fun in the world!" "please don't set fire to the house," cried his mother, laughing, "for the fun of saving our lives. i prefer to keep it just as it is, and walking quietly out at the door." as she spoke, the sun suddenly burst forth from the clouds, and his bright rays darting into the room, the children sprang joyfully up, and, with their mother's consent, were soon out of the house with jumping-rope and hoop, to join their little companions in a neighboring park. george and helen were two charming, ingenuous children. george was full of frolic, mischief, and fun, with generous impulses and excellent intentions, which only required peculiar and careful training and encouragement to develop him into a steady, high-principled man. locking him up with nothing to do, as he truly said, did him more harm than good; he required active punishment, and his mother wisely intended to take the hint for his future benefit. her little helen, though just as full of play and fun, was more easily managed. a present of a book so won upon her love and gratitude, that her mother had only to hold out the prospect of a new one, and a loving kiss (helen prized the kiss even more than the book) as a reward for good behavior, to make her quite a pattern of a dear, amiable little girl. the next morning the kind mother called upon her friend aunt fanny, bringing george and helen with her, as it was saturday. first she told all the conversation of the afternoon before, which amused aunt fanny very much, and then she continued, "you told me the other day that your daughter was very busy writing six books for mr. leavitt the publisher. i know you love my children." "yes, indeed!" cried aunt fanny. "i love children from my heart, straight out to the ends of my fingers; and when a pen is in my hands, the love runs into it, and then out again, as fast as it can scratch all over ever so many sheets of paper. my thumb aches so sometimes with writing, that i often wish i had half a dozen extra ones, so i could take the tired one off and screw another on, and even then i am afraid i could never exhaust my love for my darlings;" and she looked at the children and held out her hand with such an affectionate smile, that helen came timidly up and gave her a little winning kiss immediately, while george, blushing all over his face, showed two great dimples in his cheeks, but had not the courage to leave his chair. you may be sure that aunt fanny, after helen's kiss, was quite ready to grant any favor the mother might ask for her children. she was perfectly willing to catch a comet for them to play with, or jump down a volcano to find out who lived in the bottom of it, if anybody would only show her how. helen's mother knew this, but she hesitated a little before she made this strange request: "my dear friend, my two children have made me the promises i have told you of, in regard to keeping my little rules and resolutions, and now i think it will be the most wonderful and delightful reward possible, if they were to be permitted to see and read your daughter's stories in manuscript." "manuscript! what does that mean, mamma?" "in her own handwriting, dear." "oh yes! yes! how very strange and delightful! and then to see the very same stories printed! that would be so astonishing! we should like that better than anything, aunt fanny!" "very well," continued their mamma; "now i have come to beg you to lend me the stories as fast as they are written. i will take the greatest care of them, and return them to your daughter quickly and punctually. i have a plan in my head which will make my children very happy, if you consent." "to be sure i will," said aunt fanny, "but what is your plan?" thereupon commenced a great whispering between the two ladies, while the children looked pleased, puzzled, and eagerly curious all at once; but they were not to know. aunt fanny and their mother, after a great deal of nodding of heads together, and laughing and whispering, got this mysterious affair settled to their satisfaction, and then took leave of each other. aunt fanny kissed helen, and george, too, in spite of his blushes, and told them to bottle up their patience so that it would last for one whole week, observing that she was thankful that curiosity was not made of gunpowder, and there was no danger of their blowing up before the great secret came out. it is very seldom that you hear of such remarkably good children as george and helen were for the next few days. they were really something astonishing! george did not slam the door more than once or twice in a whole day; and one morning when he was going to ride on the bannisters as usual, he said "oh, i forgot!" and immediately walked down stairs as slowly and gravely as a grandfather. as for helen, she was, if possible, still more wonderful, for she learned "six times" in the multiplication table, and said it straight on, and skipping, and even backward, in a way that surprised her teacher. helen could say "twice one" up to "five times twelve," very glibly, but "six times" never would stay in her head, she said; especially "six times nine." she always said it was "seventy-two," or "sixty-three," or "eighty-one," at a desperate venture, and was always wrong. now she knew, and meant to remember; and would pack away the fact that "six times nine are fifty-four," in a comfortable place in the very middle of her head, to be ready for any one that wanted to know it. at last the next friday came, and just before the children retired for the night, their mother said: "something came for you to-day. guess what it is?" up they both sprang, exclaiming, "something for us? oh, that is so very delightful! what can it be?" "my instructions are, to put it either in george's sock or in helen's stocking, after you are fast asleep. it is for both of you, and i leave you to decide where it shall be put." "in my sock!" shouted george. "in my stocking!" cried helen. "oh certainly, i forgot!" exclaimed george, generously; "in helen's stocking." "no, mamma," said helen, "in george's sock." "stocking!" cried george. "sock!" cried helen. they kept this up about a dozen times, laughing and jumping about the room like two crazy monkeys, their mamma and papa laughing too, till all their faces were in a perfect glow, which made them look like a very handsome family--for, let me tell you, that good humor and innocent merriment are very becoming to everybody, while ill-temper makes one look like a fright. but how was this difficult matter of sock and stocking to be settled? why, by the children's papa, to be sure! for he was a lawyer, and did nothing all day long but settle difficulties, or make them worse, i don't know which. he took two long slips of paper, and wrote "socks" on one and "stockings" on the other. these he put in his hat, which george brought out of the hall. then he rang the bell, and told the waiter who answered it to request mrs. custard, the cook, to come up to the parlor for a moment. mrs. custard, who was very fat, and, besides, had the rheumatism, came into the room quite breathless, looking very much surprised and a little frightened. she had dropped her thimble that day, when she was sewing up the stuffing in the turkey, and had not had time to look for it; and she was panic struck lest her master had found it roasted in the very middle of the turkey, and was going to ask her if she thought she was cooking for an ostrich, which, as everybody knows, prefers a dinner of iron spikes, pebble stones, and oyster shells to roast beef. but nothing of the kind happened. the children's papa only said, "good evening, mrs. custard, you gave us a very nice dinner to-day. i want you to put your hand in this hat and draw out one piece of paper." "laws me, sir!" exclaimed the cook, "i hopes you don't mean to play no trick on me; will it bite?" the children fairly screamed with laughter at the idea of a piece of paper biting; and the cook made them laugh still harder, when she put her hand in very cautiously, and twitched it out three times, before she ventured to feel for the paper. at last one piece was caught, and on it was written "socks," which made george first jump up and down in an ecstacy of delight, and then run to helen and tell her he was really sorry that it had not been the other. this decided the momentous question, and mrs. custard hobbled down stairs, and the children hopped, skipped, and jumped up stairs, both wondering what would come of this magical word "socks." helen had a pretty little room opening out of her mother's, but george's was in an upper story. when they were both asleep, the mother took out of her son's bureau a clean white sock, sewed a tape loop on the edge, put a small parcel inside, and hung it on a neat brass nail, which was driven in a door directly opposite his bed, where it would catch his eye as soon as he awoke. you may be sure both the children were up bright and early the next morning. helen dressed herself quickly and ran down stairs into the dining-room to wait for her brother. george opened his eyes upon the sock the very first thing. he sprang out of bed and made but two steps to the door, raised his hand eagerly, and then the generous little fellow stopped. "no!" he cried aloud, "i will not even squeeze the outside to guess what it is, till i am with helen." [illustration: george and helen reading "socks"] he did not stop to count his toes or fingers, though he did manage to clean his teeth, wash his face, neck, and hands, and brush his hair in about five minutes, then taking hold of the precious sock by the loop at the top, he carried it down stairs very much as if he had hold of a mouse by the tail. he was met by helen at the door with an "oh, george, what is it?" they both stared with all their eyes, while george told helen she might take the wonderful thing out. she gladly obeyed, and drew out a compact roll of letter paper neatly tied with sky-blue ribbon. helen untied the little bow, her fingers trembling with eagerness, and unrolled the paper. it seemed to be a great many pages covered with writing, and they were all fastened together at the top with another bit of blue ribbon. the fair and clear handwriting was delightful to look at. "oh, mamma! oh papa! do come and look!" cried george. "i do believe this is a story before it is printed. see! on the top of the page is written 'colonel freddy; or, the march and encampment of the dashahed zouaves.'" "yes; aunt fanny sent it to me yesterday; and her daughter hopes her little story about soldiers will please you." "please us! i guess it will! i'd rather hear about soldiers than anybody else in the world, even giants! because, you know, mamma, uncle charley has gone to fight, and if the southerners had only put off the war a few years longer, i would have gone to fight them too; so hurrah for the dashahed zouaves!" "three cheers for the dashahed zouaves!" cried helen, and they were given with a will. the children could hardly eat their breakfast in their eagerness to hear the story which was sent to them before it was printed. this latter fact gave it an extraordinary interest which they could not explain. it seemed to be such a remarkable honor to be singled out in this way; particularly as their mother told them, before she began to read, that aunt fanny had requested them to be sure to let her know if they thought any part stupid or too long, and her daughter would improve and shorten it immediately. how extremely complimentary! to be asked to sit and listen as critics and judges, and they only children! really, it was almost too much to believe! but it added tremendously to the charm, and george and helen took their seats after breakfast, invested with this new and important dignity, with such an expression of solemn delight on their faces, that their mother had to run out of the room and have a good laugh by herself in the hall, after which she returned, and, with as serious a face as she could call up with those two little figures so stiff and stark before her, smoothed out the manuscript, and began as follows: colonel freddy; or, the march and encampment of the dashahed zouaves. chapter i. raising a regiment. one bright afternoon last summer, about two weeks after the dreadful battle of bull run, freddy jourdain burst open the door of his mother's room and rushed in, exclaiming: "jolly, mother! such fun! what _do_ you think the boys in our school are going to do?" "why what?" asked his mother. "yes, i should really like to know why you come tearing up stairs yelling like forty steam engines!" added his sister bella, who was rather a particular young lady. "well," began freddy, looking very important, "i'll _try_ to explain, but i don't believe _you women_ can understand about _us boys_!" "after that speech i think you had better explain," said bella, "if you're not in want of a thimble pie on your knuckles." "well, then," cried freddy, with sparkling eyes, "the boys at our school are all _square_ against that old jeff. davis, and in recess yesterday, we concluded that we ought to go and help shoot the southerners. so we've organized a regiment, and i'm chosen colonel; and i'm going to take my regiment to camp on monday, that is, if you'll let me. mayn't i, mother? it's such fun, and tom pringle's given me such a jolly popgun! hurrah for jackson and the stars and stripes!" so saying, freddy cut a caper in the air, that made about forty "chaney alleys," "stony alleys," "glass agates," and "middles," pop out of his satchel, which was slung over one shoulder, and roll into all the corners of the room. "where is your encampment to be?" said his mother, as gravely as she could. "oh, down on mr. schermerhorn's place at astoria. peter schermerhorn told us to-day that his father was willing we should have it there, and has invited us all to come and stay a whole week. we're to live in _real tents_!" (here freddy couldn't help cutting another caper,) "and cook our own dinners, and--oh, mother, mayn't i go? say!" "i do not think of any objection at present," replied mrs. jourdain, "but you must wait until your father comes home, and hear what he has to say. it was very kind of mr. schermerhorn to invite you all, but i am afraid he will be driven distracted with such a number of harem-scarem boys running about his place." at this moment joseph, the black waiter, knocked at the door, and announced, with an air of high-flown elegance, that "major schermerhorn was in the _drawing salon_ (which he considered the purest parisian french for front parlor), and desired to see col. jourdain;" and our young friend was off like a shot, joseph following at a dignified pace. joseph, like most other colored servants in new york, was a person of the highest fashion, according to his own notions. no short words for _him_, i can tell you. i remember well the first time i called upon his mistress, i inquired, "does mrs. jourdain live here?" and joseph, drawing himself up with an air of superior refinement, replied, "mrs. jourdain _resides_ here, madam." at dinner parties, when he waited upon table, he was the most dignified person present, and held his head up so high that he looked as if it would shortly go through the chandelier. he was always dressed in the finest broadcloth and patent leather, his black face and white necktie presenting an admirable contrast, while he used all the five cornered words in the dictionary in replying to any question, and always handed the dishes to the ladies with a flourish of the most astonishing character. now, if i tell you a secret, you must promise not to let any one know it. freddy's parents live in the fifth avenue above madison square, in the city of new york. his father is a rich man, and freddy, a bright, manly lad, between thirteen and fourteen at the time i am writing about, and the only son, is a good deal indulged. but don't think he ever abuses the kindness of his loving papa and mamma; no--although he is full of noise, fun, and innocent mischief, he is a good, obedient little fellow--and that is why they love to do all they can to make him happy. but you must not tell that i said where he lives. when mr. jourdain came home that evening, freddy, of course, began to tell him the first thing, about the regiment and mr. schermerhorn's delightful invitation. you may be sure he gave a full-length description of the pleasures of camp life, as retailed by peter to an enthusiastic audience at recess; and backed up his request to go by such powerful pleas of sparkling, eager eyes, flushed, happy face, and irresistible, dimpling smile, that the hardest-hearted papa in existence would have said "yes." mr. jourdain, being anything but hard-hearted, readily consented, as he was intimately acquainted with mr. schermerhorn and family, and knew there was no fear on a private place of their meeting with danger, or getting into trouble. then his father went on to ask a great many questions about the regiment, how many boys belonged to it, what their sizes were, and where they lived; all of which freddy delightedly answered, and kept up a continuous chattering until a quarter past nine, which, being his bed time, he was reluctantly obliged to trot up stairs. after he was fairly out of the room, his father and mother had a long consultation, which resulted next day in mr. jourdain's paying a visit to "brooks brothers," the tailors in broadway, and afterward going to a certain store in maiden lane, which had all manner of toy knapsacks and guns in the window. what could he have gone there for, i wonder? and then betaken himself to the police station in b---street? really, it seems very mysterious, but wait a little, and you'll see. meanwhile freddy, with his satchel hanging down his back to look as much like a knapsack as possible, marched off to school bright and early; whistling the "star-spangled banner" as he went along, and looking with the utmost pity upon strange boys, who hadn't the honor of belonging to his glorious regiment, the "dashahed zouaves," as his father had advised him to name it. he reached dr. larned's academy just as peter, harry, and half a dozen others were going in. they greeted him directly with a shout of "well, fred, what does your father say?" "oh, i'm to go!" cried freddy, "i say, fellows, what do you think of the dashahed zouaves for a name?" "that's splendid! capital!" was the cry of the party. i am afraid i must add that peter said "that's _gay_!" there was no time to talk now, however, for it was full nine o'clock; so the boys, hanging up their hats in the hall, entered the school room, and prayers over, the lessons began. but who could be very attentive to his _ante_-cedents, or _uncle_-cedents either, when, in three days, the _se_-cedents were to be utterly routed by the dashahed zouaves? the boys were so full of chuckle and bounce, that, i'm afraid, poor dr. larned would have become cracked and crazy, if he hadn't reflected that the holidays and fourth of july, or, as peter called it, "the fourth of ju-new year's" were coming, and that probably the state of things was owing to those important facts. the recitations on that memorable friday, however, were something wonderful, sure enough. for instance, the lesson in geography was about china. the doctor asked a boy, "where is shanghai situated?" and he replied, "on long island, about two miles from astoria landing!--that is," and there he stopped, looking as awkward and silly as a shanghai chicken. "won't do, sir," said the doctor, in a grave tone, "you must study the lesson over again, and go down one;" and down he had to go, feeling rather flat. then the doctor asked freddy what the principal manufactures were, and he answered, "tea, porcelain, silk, and zouave drill--no, no, the other kind of drill! dear me, what do i mean?" "i cannot imagine," returned doctor larned, in a severe tone, but with a little bit of a smile hiding in the corner of his mouth. "you appear to be thinking of anything but your lessons, young gentlemen--but as it is the last day of school, i excuse you. we will have recess earlier than usual, and see if we cannot do better afterward." so saying, he opened the door leading from the school room to his private study, and went in; while the boys, luncheon in hand, ran to the playground. "the playground," as it was called, was the large yard attached to the house, which had been fitted up with a few simple gymnastic contrivances, and formed a capital place where the boys might amuse themselves in fine weather. down they sat, and for a few moments were so busy trying who could take the biggest semicircular bite out of a slice of bread and butter that nobody spoke a word. at last freddy commenced, by calling out, "i say, fellows!" "silence in the guard tent! the colonel's going to speak!" cried peter, making a new version of the old school saying. "don't you know all the real zouaves have their hair cut as short as anything? and just look at mine!" and freddy tossed back his silky, golden curls in high disgust. "fellows, _it must be done_! we must have that hair off, short order!" continued the colonel, solemnly. "well," exclaimed george chadwick, who was the oldest of the party, and would certainly have been colonel if freddy had not been prime favorite with everybody, "don't you see how we can manage that?" "why, how?" was the general question. "just you wait a moment," replied the inventor, and he put for the house in double quick time, whence he presently returned with an immense pair of scissors, which he had borrowed of the cook. "now, then, who'll be scissorized first?" "i! i! i!" cried a chorus of voices. "can't do every one at once; come, freddy, you're the commander-in-chief, suppose you set the example." "here goes, then!" exclaimed freddy; and down he sat on the spring board. snip! went the long scissors, and off came a beautiful curl. snap! more demolition on the other side, and in five minutes such a worn-out old scrubbing brush as his head looked like, never was seen anywhere, even on a zouave; george, of course, running out his tongue so far at every snip of the scissors, that it was a mercy it didn't get cut off, too. [illustration: "fire away old chap!"] "jolly! what a fright you look!" shouted peter. "i say freddy, i expect you'll scare general beauregard into the cholera the first time he sees you. now, then, it's my turn; fire away old chap!" my conscience! what hair cutting that was! some parts were scratched nearly bald, while in others, little bunches of hair were left standing up like stubble in an autumn cornfield. their heads looked as if they had been gnawed by the mice or dug up in spots by the roots; and i am sure their own mammas would scarcely have known them again. "come, number three's turn now!" exclaimed george, flourishing his scissors. "no, i don't know about that," put in tom pringle, who was the most thoughtful of the party, "i guess i'd rather see what my mother thinks before i have _my_ hair cut off." this speech caused the rest of the regiment to think of something which hadn't struck them before, namely what _their_ mothers would say on the subject of zouave hair dressing, and as george began to be a little frightened by this time, at the fearful and astonishing results of his patent plan, it was decided to defer the rest of the operation until another time. but the amazement of dr. larned, when he beheld his pupils in such a condition, was beyond everything. "why, peter! freddy! what have you been doing?" he exclaimed, raising his hands, and pushing his spectacles to the top of his forehead, to look at them better. "oh, only getting our hair cut in the zouave pattern," said peter, as cool as a cucumber. "don't you know, doctor, that we've organized a regiment?" "organized a regiment!" repeated the doctor, his spectacles almost falling off with astonishment. "yes, sir, the dashahed zouaves; haven't you heard of them?" "is there any end to the mischief of boys?" exclaimed the doctor; "if such things had happened in my young days, our old master, dr. birchemwell, would have verified his name even oftener than he did. i do not know what your mothers will say when they see such a couple of scarecrows; but come, we have wasted quite time enough; lessons! lessons!" and to the credit of the boys, be it said, they really did set to work like good fellows, recited the unlucky geography lesson without a single mistake, ciphered like perfect calculating machines, and had the pleasure of hearing dr. larned say, as they shook hands for good-bye, "really, young gentlemen, you have done very well--very well, indeed; so now good-bye, and pleasant holidays!" chapter ii. "marching along." monday morning at last! and a bright, beautiful day. the sky was as blue as possible; the sun shone so brightly that it seemed as though it must have been polished up for the occasion, and colonel freddy, as soon as he awoke, could not help giving a little shout of joy. but what was that right opposite his bed? a large wooden box, with "colonel jourdain, dashahed zouaves, first regiment l. i. volunteers," painted on the lid in great black letters. up jumped the new colonel quicker than any grasshopper, rushed to the mysterious box, and raised the lid. lying on top was a letter at least six inches square, directed like the box, and closed with a great red seal. underneath _that_ was--what do you think? a splendid uniform for a colonel of zouaves! sword, cap, and epaulettes, complete! freddy's eyes and mouth opened to their widest compass, as he stared at the box, too much surprised to move. presently his father came in, looking highly amused. "good morning, colonel," he began. "oh, father!" interrupted freddy, finding his tongue at last, "do look here! did you ever see anything so splendid in your life? where _did_ they come from?" "perhaps the letter will tell you," was all his father would say. freddy snatched up the big letter, broke the seal, and with sparkling eyes read the following. new york, _july --th, 1861_. my dear son: in consideration of your heroic determination to enter the army in the service of your country, and seeing how nobly you have prepared to engage in the contest by making your hair look as if it had been driven in or pulled out, i have thought best to present you with this uniform to whip the southerners in; a suit of which i have also sent to every _man_ in your regiment. as i entertain scarcely a doubt that old abe will shortly summon you to start down south to dixie, i hope that you will have a brave regiment, a pleasant encampment, and a first-rate time. and that, in later years, should it be necessary, you will _truly_ distinguish yourself, through god's assistance, under the banner of our country, and stand up in the field in the cause of truth and justice, is the sincere wish of your affectionate father, l. jourdain. freddy was delighted at this letter, with its mingled playfulness and sincere patriotism. with all his fun, he was uncommonly intelligent, and understood and appreciated many things which far older boys might have failed to comprehend; and now his splendid blue eyes were raised to his father's face, flashing with real enthusiasm; he felt and looked at that moment, like his noble french ancestors, a born soldier. but the serious mood was soon displaced by a fresh access of glee. "oh, thank you, papa!" he cried, "how very kind of you! how surprised the boys will be! hurrah! what a jolly time we shall have! and do you think the president will really send for us? he will be a perfect jay-bird of a president if he does!" "no doubt he will be highly desirous to secure the services of the gallant dashahed zouaves," replied his father, laughing; "but make haste now, fred, it's nearly breakfast time." so saying, he left the room. of course, the new clothes had to go on directly; and first my young soldier donned a pair of remarkably baggy red trowsers, which looked as if they had a connection with the manhattan gas company like a new sort of balloon, they were so puffy; and a pair of leather gaiters reaching from the calf of the leg to the ancle. then came a most splendid bluejacket, covered in every direction with gold lace, a killing little ruffled shirt, and a flourishing blue sash. perched on top of his head, where his hair had been the day before, was a red fez with a long blue tassel, and, to crown all, or, i might say, _cutting-out_ everything else, was a splendid sword, as bright as silver, with a terribly sharp-looking edge, and an elegant gold handle. when he was all dressed, he ran down stairs and found, on entering the dining room, that he was the only one there. a large mirror was over the mantel, which reflected the handsome room, with its deep bay window, filled with flowers, its sideboard, loaded with massive plate, and the breakfast table, covered with its snowy cloth, and nice beefsteak, muffins, and coffee, looking so tempting to hungry folks. freddy's eye fell on the mirror, and a new idea came into his head. "hurrah! here's a capital chance to see how i look from head to foot," he thought; so, without remembering the long pier glasses in the parlor, he dragged his father's arm chair in front of the fireplace, and, jumping on the seat, stood turning and twisting about, staring at himself all the time, and quite put out at not being able to see the whole of his back at once. finally he concluded his performance by striking a tremendous attitude, with his legs as far apart as the chair would permit, his sword in the air, and such a ferocious scowl on his face, that it was a mercy his brows didn't get tied up in a double bow knot then and there. all at once there was a little laugh in the direction of the door. freddy wheeled round, and there were papa, mamma, and bella looking on, and trying hard to keep in the laughter! down scrambled colonel freddy from his perch, blushing up to the very roots of his hair. there wasn't much more than the roots left, to be sure; but his father laid his hand on the epauletted shoulder with a good-natured, "never mind, old fellow, you look fine enough to justify a little personal reflection." hardly had freddy taken his place at the table, and his father asked a blessing, than there came such a tremendous ring at the bell, that they thought the president must have come to town to see the regiment off on its travels; but, instead of old abe, major peter schermerhorn (who passed the week with an aunt in town, and only went down to astoria on saturdays) popped into the room. he was dressed, like freddy, in a bran new zouave suit, and the very first thing he said was, "oh, fred! only see what i found in my room this morning;" and peter stood on one leg, and twirled round to show off his new clothes. "so did i in mine!" said freddy. "where could they have come from?" continued peter. "i asked aunt edith, and all she would tell me was that the box was sent last night, from a friend. have you any idea, fred?" freddy burst out laughing. "they came from a good fairy," he said, "and there he is!" and he pointed to his father, who pretended not to hear. "hurrah for mr. jourdain!" shouted peter, tossing his cap in the air. "will you have some breakfast, peter?" asked mrs. jourdain. "thank you, ma'am, i had my breakfast before i started, all alone by myself--but," looking at the nice beefsteak, "i think i _could_ eat a little more." "how many apples, by the way peter?" asked bella, mischievously. "only two," he answered, quite seriously, "and a piece of taffy, and two cents' worth of peanuts! that's all, i think; no, a cent's worth of ice cream!" "of ice cream!" exclaimed bella, "where can you get ice cream for a cent?" "why, on the street corners--real good ice cream, too--don't you know that?" and peter put on an air of superior wisdom, as though he was a knowing young gentleman, who understood better than anybody where nice things were to be had. "but come, peter," said mr. jourdain, "i should like to hear something more about your encampment. how long is your father willing you should have it?" "father says, sir," replied peter, "that we can stay until he leaves for niagara, which will be next week, i guess. we're to have our camp on the lawn, most a quarter of a mile from the house, and some of our men are fixing the tents this morning. there are to be eight of 'em--isn't that gay, fred? and we've got the smoke house by way of a guard tent beside; but there--i forgot all this time that i have a letter from papa for you, sir--here it is." mr. jourdain opened the letter, and read as follows: my dear jourdain: i send you three words, through my harum-scarum peter, merely to beg that mrs. jourdain and yourself will feel no uneasiness concerning the military expedition which has been the principal subject of discussion in my household, and i presume in yours also, since thursday last. the invincible zouaves will be stationed too near the house to make any danger possible, and as my family are going to niagara on tuesday, and i shall be left a "lone lorn creetur," it will be as much an amusement as anything to make their safety and happiness my special care. hoping that you will permit fred to remain in my charge a few days, i am, with regards to mrs. jourdain, very sincerely yours, h. schermerhorn." ting-a-ling-ling went the front door bell, as if the bull in cock robin had hold of the handle. tramp, tramp, shuffle, shuffle, in the hall, and then joseph tapped at the door, and showed in a whole troop of merry, noisy boys, all costumed ã  la zouave, and with their hair shaved so close that they had to frown very hard to keep their caps on. the famous dashahed zouaves were all mustered, sure enough; and turned out to consist of sixteen high privates, four captains, and a standard-bearer, master tom pringle, with a perfectly magnificent star-spangled banner in his hand, surmounted by an astonishing spread eagle. then came major peter schermerhorn, who was the prime spirit of mischief of the party, and last, though not least, the great colonel freddy; who was dancing about in a high state of glee; while the rest of the _men_, seeing that the _colonel_ didn't regard dignity in the least, had an impromptu zouave drill (which consists principally in turning somersaults) all round the dining room, the grown people looking on, in agonies of suppressed laughter. while this novel entertainment was in full swing, the bell tingled again, and joseph entered once more, to announce, "master frederic, the escort and the band have _arriven_, and desire me to say that they are awaiting your pleasure." the escort and the band! was there any end to wonders this morning? at those magical words, the regiment couldn't resist giving three cheers that nearly took the top of the house off; followed by three for mr. jourdain, when peter made a mock-heroic speech about the uniforms; and finished off with a dozen more for anybody and everybody. at last mr. jourdain glanced at his watch and said, "come, colonel, i'm afraid you'll miss the boat if you don't make haste. remember, you have a long march before you, and it is almost ten o'clock now." "ah, that's a fact!" exclaimed the commander. "ahem! fall in, old chaps, that is, squad--battalion--what's his name; pshaw! and let's be off." this mandate to "fall in" certainly appeared to be translated "poke in" by the greater part of the corps, for it was directly followed by such a treading upon everybody's toes, and a ramming of elbows into other people's stomachs and chests, and such imminent danger incurred of every eye in the company being put out with bayonets held upside down, straight out, wiggle-waggle, and "various," as rendered it highly likely that matters would be terminated by a fall _out_; but at last they were fairly in line, and marched down the steps into the street; feeling a little shame-faced, but excessively proud of their new and conspicuous position. all the neighbors were leaning out of windows, nearly petrified with astonishment at what was going on; while at least fifty little ragged boys stood staring at the door, their eyes almost popping out of their heads, as the glorious dashahed zouaves made their appearance; trying desperately to tuck in the broad grins that _would_ show at the corners of their mouths, and disturb the proper gravity of a soldier. but their good behavior was nearly put to flight altogether when they beheld, waiting to escort them, three of the tallest policemen in the city (to engage whom mr. jourdain had made that third call, you remember, in b---street), and dodworth's splendid brass band, marshalled in full force. oh! how their eyes did sparkle! they could hardly get into marching order, or wait until freddy, who had lingered behind to say good-by, came out and took his place at the head of the regiment. then, with one more tremendous cheer, rang out the command, march! out burst the band with the glorious "star-spangled banner;" brightly streamed the folds of the flag itself in the wind; proudly colonel freddy waved his sword in the air; and so, with steps that kept time to the music, and hearts that thrilled with a mixture of fun and patriotism, the gallant dashahed zouaves marched off for camp mcclellan. chapter iii. camp life. toot-tooo! went the whistle of the steamboat "mattano." "all aboard!" yelled the captain, and all aboard it was for the dashahed zouaves, and ever so many people beside, who, you may be sure, were all eyes when they found out that such a _killing_ regiment was going down with them. "good-by, my boy," called mr. jourdain (who had followed the march in a stage) from the wharf. "good-by, father; i say, old beauregard will have to keep his eyes open now the dashahed zouaves are in the field!" and freddy waved his cap in one hand and his sword in the other to his father, as long as he could see him. in a few moments the boat was fairly out from the wharf, and the whole regiment comfortably seated on the promenade deck; very proud of their new responsibilities as members of the army and society generally, and surrounded by a crowd of admirers. "jolly, ain't i hungry!" exclaimed freddy, as he joined them; "i went off with hardly any breakfast, i declare! wasn't that noble?" "noble? i don't see it!" said charley spicer. "nobody asked you to go without your breakfast!" "why, wasn't i in a hurry to serve my country? when i was so full of glory, i couldn't stop to get full of beefsteak and coffee beside!" "never mind!" cried harry livingston, "i have some sandwiches in my knapsack, and you shall have some, fred." "have you? there's six big apples in mine," said charley. "here's a quart of peanuts and half a pound of taffy for my share," added jimmy boorman. "and i've a pair of broiled spring chickens! high diddle-diddle!" shouted george. "good boy!" exclaimed tom pringle; "here, take my molasses and water bottle--canteen, i mean, and pass round the tin plate for the colonel!" amid high glee, every one bestowed a part of his provisions on freddy until a sufficiently motley meal was collected; half of which he immediately offered again to his companions, who, of course, were quite ready to feel hungry too, and they all munched together, like a company of gypsies. "i say, capting," said a tall yankee in a fur hat, to peter, "what may yew calculate dewing on long island?" "why, we're going into camp, to be sure." "lors-a-massy! them air boys all alone by theirselves!" exclaimed an old countrywoman, carrying a large market basket, and wearing a great pair of brass-rimmed spectacles. "it beats all natur!" "yew ha'n't got no one to look arter you?" continued the tall yankee. "certainly; here's our commanding officer, col. jourdain." "let me present mr. ----," added freddy, full of laugh, and highly enjoying the fun. "captin george washington kosciusko peter bonaparte solomon hopkins!" said the countryman, with an awkward bow; while the boys hardly dared to look at each other, they were so afraid of bursting out laughing at his ridiculous name. its fortunate possessor, nothing abashed, went on, "but dew tell, wha--at on airth _dew_ you call yourselves?" "these, sir," replied freddy, as grave as a judge, though his eyes sparkled with fun, "are the famous dashahed zouaves, first regiment long island volunteers; i am the colonel, this is major schermerhorn, captains spicer, chadwick, livingston, and boorman, sergeant pringle, and adjutant costar." "oh, _light infantry_ regiment, i calculate." "no, sir, _heavy veterans_!" put in will costar. "wal i never!" exclaimed captin george washington kosciusko peter bonaparte solomon hopkins (here the boat touched the pier of the flushing railroad); "naow mind, kurnel jordan, if ever your regiment comes to hempstead, yeou put for captin hopkins' farm, and if yeou don't get the biggest lot of red apples yeou ever _did_ see, i'll be made into apple pie myself!" and off marched the yankee, while the boys, as soon as he was fairly out of sight, indulged rather ungratefully in an explosion of laughter. presently the boat stopped at ravenswood, and here the old woman got off; but before she went, she took an immense shiny hunk of gingerbread out of the great market basket, and bestowed it on freddy, saying, "here, take this, sonny; you air a dear little fellow, so like my sammy, too"--and the poor old woman's voice broke, and tears began to gather under the brass-bound spectacles, as she turned to leave the boat. freddy put down his cake, and ran after her, saying, "thank you, ma'am, thank you very much; i am sorry you are distressed." the old woman stopped, and saying softly, "bless you, my son!" she kissed the bright, rosy cheek, and went away quite comforted. freddy wasn't ashamed either, not a bit, when they teased him afterward, but said, "i don't care, she's a real nice old thing; now, there!" soon the boat ran up to the wharf at astoria. delighted to arrive at their journey's end, the boys scampered off as soon as the plank touched the shore, and "formed" on the road in fine style. "goodness, peter!" exclaimed freddy, "i hope it's not very far to your father's place; i'm afraid i shall be melted altogether if it is." "well, it _is_ a good way," began peter, with rather a rueful face. "so far that i intend to take you there in comfort," said a pleasant voice close behind them. "oh, father," cried peter (for it was mr. schermerhorn), "how kind of you! only look, boys!" and he pointed to two double rockaways which were waiting on the pier. in they all swarmed, managing to find places for everybody (and really, it is surprising how a rockaway can _stretch_ on occasion), and after a rapid drive along a level sandy road, the ha-ha fences of mr. schermerhorn's splendid country seat, "locust grove," came in view. soon the carriages entered the beautiful rustic gate, its pillars surmounted by vases, filled with trailing plants; and in a moment more were dashing over the gravelled drive toward the western side of the place. at one point, the road led directly over a deep ravine, spanned by a bridge of rough logs. then they whirled past a tranquil lake, dotted with pond lilies, and shaded by drooping willows, through which might be caught a glimpse of the tall white chimneys of the house. at last, with a sudden bend, the drive came out on a wide velvet lawn, relieved by a fringe of the beautiful locusts, covered, at this season of the year, with the fragrant pinkish flowers. at some distance a quaint chinese summer house served as an observatory; beds of brilliant scarlet verbena and many-colored petunias dotted the grass here and there, and right before them, most beautiful of all in their eyes, was the encampment itself, eight snowy white tents, four in a row, while in the midst rose a tall flagstaff, with the dear old red, white, and blue floating from the summit. "hurrah, boys, there's the tents!" shouted peter, at the top of his voice "come, let's see who'll get there first;" and, before the carriage could stop, peter had hopped out, tumbled head over heels on the soft grass, jumped up, and scampered on in advance, followed a moment after by the rest. these wonderful tents were furnished just like real soldiers' dwellings; with a good warm blanket for each of the three occupants, a bright tin basin and tooth mug, a cedar bucket to draw water, a square looking glass, like a sticking plaster, and a couple of wooden lockers (which, between ourselves, were made of claret boxes) in each one; beside camp stools in abundance for everybody. "here's the officers' quarters!" cried george, as he flung open the door of the smoke house. "no, that's the guard house, chadwick," said harry, "where we put the refracti-rac-tic-tactories." "oh, is it? i go in for that!" shouted will costar, "whatever reractitactories may be." "you're on the wrong tack now, old chap," added tom pringle. "but only see what i've discovered! such a high old battery, boys! six brass cannon nearly as big as boot-jacks. hurrah for the dashahed zouaves!" and away scampered the boys to look at the guns, while colonel freddy, quite forgetting his dignity, fell to and executed a volunteer jim crow polka, and peter sang the following ridiculous song, making up words as he went along: "ain't i glad i'm out in the wilderness, out in the wilderness, out in the wilderness, ain't i glad i'm out in the wilderness, down in astori-_or_? "good-by, boys, i'm off for dixie, off for dixie, off for dixie, good-by, boys, i'm off for dixie, and sha'n't come back no more!" meanwhile, mr. schermerhorn had been superintending certain arrangements for the provisioning of the camp, and presently a bugle call, sounded by one of the stable men, summoned the regiment to prepare for dinner. peter took a bucket and went to draw some water; george and harry made a fire in the smoke house, which, after all the guesses, turned out to be intended for the regimental kitchen; jimmy and tom were initiated into the mysteries of frying ham and potatoes by the cook, and the rest set the table (for the soldiers considered it a point of honor that they should wait on themselves). amid high glee the table, consisting of a broad smooth plank placed upon horses, was laid with the tin cup and plates, the pewter forks and spoons, and horn-handled knives, which the boys carried in their knapsacks just like real soldiers, after which the table was further embellished by the remains of the rations they had brought with them, disposed around wherever they thought the dishes would have the best effect. the grand feast of fried ham was ready at last, and the new cooks presented themselves and it at table, very hungry and happy. mrs. mincemeat, the fat cook, had made the boys each put on one of her blue check aprons, tied under their chins, to save their uniforms; and when they appeared in this new array, their faces as red and shining as a stick of sealing wax, there was a general shout of laughter. "well, my precious babies," cried one. "don't soil your new bibs, my tiddy-ikle duckies!" called another. "there, don't tease them," said freddy, the general peacemaker; "come, fellows, let's have dinner; ham's good, i tell you!" and down they sat at table, in high, good humor. of course the cooking business was rather to amuse the boys than in earnest, for the fried ham formed only a small part of the abundant dinner set before the gallant zouaves. there was lamb, and green peas, new potatoes, fresh tomatoes, custard pudding, and raspberries, all of which was pronounced "fine," although jimmy declared there never was any dish at delmonico's to equal or surpass his fried ham, and the others fully concurred in this opinion. as soon as the dinner was fairly under way, mr. schermerhorn rose from his place at the table, where he had been carving, and said, with a pleased smile on his face, "now, my brave soldiers, i must take my leave. have the goodness not to do double-quick over the flower beds, leave a dish or so of cherries in the orchard, and, whatever you do, don't tumble into the lake, and i shall be satisfied." "three cheers for mr. schermerhorn!" shouted colonel freddy. in an instant every fellow was on his feet, every cap was in the air, and a tremendous "hurrah! hurrah! ti-ga-a-ah!" made the echoes around camp mcclellan wake up in a hurry, and poke their heads out of the hills to see where the cannonading was. of course, being boys, the regiment cleared the dishes in astonishing style, and polished their plates so thoroughly that you would hardly have thought they wanted the grand washing they had when dinner was over. after stowing all the things away neatly in the smokehouse, and arranging their surplus luggage (which had been sent down the previous saturday), in the lockers, they all had a grand game at fox and geese, which lasted until freddy, perfectly worn out with laughing and scampering about, exclaimed, "come, fellows, do let's sit down and be quiet; i'm as tired as if i had walked from here to china." "yes, let's be _solemn_ a little while," said peter. "in these _momentous_ times, we _army men_ ought to be thinking how to fix off the old secessionists and that sort of thing. i move we all sit down in a circle, and the first who laughs shall tell a story." the boys thought this was a grand idea. so they found a nice place, just beneath the sheltering boughs of the locusts, and, putting the camp stools in a ring, they sat down, to see how solemn they could be. but it was no use; though they pinched up their mouths, and frowned, and did their best to look like a company of highly respectable owls, in two minutes they all burst out laughing, so nearly together that nobody could tell who had begun. as soon as the broad faces had come back to their proper length, there was a general cry for a story; and as peter had instituted the new regulation, he undertook to carry it out; so, drawing a long breath to start with, he commenced: "once upon a time, there lived a family of bears in a thick wood. grumpy-growly, the father, was a jolly, cross old fellow--oh! i guess he was! and the little ones didn't dare so much as to snap at a fly without permission, when he was around. "one day grumpy-growly went out to take a walk, bidding the young ones to be very good while he was away; for he was a widower, poor fellow! and had to see after his family himself. "as soon as he was fairly gone, longclawse, the eldest, said, 'seems to me, brothers, we have stood this long enough. all the other cubs in the wood can run about as they please, and why should we be kept in this poky old cave? suppose we try to get away the big log before the door?' for this was what grumpy-growly put up to keep them at home. "'good! i go in for that!' cried bushyball, titehugge, and stubtail, the other cubs. "so first they tried to poke their noses under the log, but the plaguy old thing wouldn't stir. then they turned their backs against it, and all kicked together with their hind legs, and presently away it went, to the great delight of the four bears, who didn't trouble themselves to put it back again, but just packed up their carpet bags, and cut stick, i tell you." here peter opened his eyes and mouth very wide, and ran out his tongue for a moment to get an airing, a proceeding which he frequently repeated during the story. then he went on: "they had a jolly time climbing trees, rolling on the soft grass, and playing with the other bears they met; but at last titehugge and stubtail, the youngest, declared they were too tired to go another step, and must take a little nap. longclawse and bushyball thought they would go off to see the election, which they had been told was to take place that very day, and the others, promising not to stir from the spot without them, curled themselves up into tight round balls, and went to sleep. "while they were dreaming away, a fox came along. he was a cunning old codger, and hated grumpy-growly like mustard, because the old fellow had once treated him, in a fit of rage, to a hug that nearly put an end to him. when he saw the sons of his enemy asleep, he made up his mind to fool them in revenge; and after he had rummaged both their carpet bags, to see if there was anything worth taking, he went up to titehugge and pulled his ear a little to waken him. titehugge, who was as cross as two sticks, and always fighting his brothers, opened his eyes, and for a moment looked so very like giving the fox a gentle squeeze, that foxy was rather startled. however, he took courage, and laying his paw on his heart, he made the bear such an elegant bow that he nearly cracked his spine. 'ah, my d-e-a-r titehugge! so glad to see you. you know i have always been a great friend of your dear papa's, and now, i should be overjoyed to do you a little favor. do you happen to know that there is a tree near here, which is hollow from root to branches, and filled with wild bees' combs and honey?' "'no! cried titehugge, 'is there? show it to me directly, master fox, and don't stand there gaping at me!' you see, bears were never celebrated for being polite, and titehugge had no more manners than any of 'em. "'come along, then,' said the fox, 'but take care to make no noise, or you will waken your brother, and then he'll be wanting to have half the honey.' "titehugge was a selfish little pig--bear, i mean--and though he felt rather shy of going off alone for the first time in his life, he was too greedy after the honey to let that trouble him much. however, he said, 'you had better be careful not to play any tricks, master fox, for if you do, i'll give you a hug that will settle _you_--if you are such a dear friend of mine.' "'my d-e-a-r friend!' exclaimed the fox, 'd-o-n't say so! how can you suppose i would do such a shabby thing? come, we shall soon be at the tree.' "titehugge waited for nothing more, but started off with master fox, who kept on flattering him all the way until titehugge thought him the first-_ratest_ fellow in the whole world. presently they came to the hollow tree, and titehugge, without waiting to ask any questions, shinned up like a streak of lightning, and began smelling down the hole. 'but, it looks very dark down here,' cried he at last 'and i don't see any honey'. "'oh, you must poke your nose further in,' said the fox, 'and you'll soon come to it.' "titehugge accordingly rammed and jammed his head with great difficulty into the hole, which proved such an uncommonly tight fit, that, not finding any honey, he began trying to pull it back double quick; but lo and behold! pull and tug, scratch and swear as he might, he was caught in a mouse trap not intended for bears, while the fox stood below giggling. after he had amused himself enough with titehugge's struggles, he scampered off to find stubtail; bawling out, 'good-by, my d-e-a-r friend, i hope you'll find the honey answer your expectations.' "meanwhile, master stubtail was snoring away like a catamount, when the fox trotted up, and seating himself beside him, began to sing a popular fox ballad, beginning, 'oh? don't i love to cheat 'em!' "this soon awoke stubtail, and opening his eyes, he saw the fox sitting, singing away, as if he never dreamed of such a person as stubtail being near. "'well, master fox!' he said, in a dandified way, 'whawt business have you, i should like to know, in the--aw company of a bearah of fashion? make your mannahs, sir, and don't sit down before your bettahs! how horrid vulgah you are--aw!' "up jumped the fox, and made such a beautiful bow this time, that he fell over on his nose, and nearly stuck his tail in the bear's face, as he exclaimed, 'oh, my d-e-a-r friend! d-o-n'-t say that! i didn't mean to be uncivil. i only came to ask you to a little fox party that is coming off this afternoon, if your highness will favor us with your honorable company. only ten of my cousins and seven of my brothers and sisters are coming--just a nice little family party; but then they are all such beauties! particularly my cousin, miss slygo brighteyes! she is perfectly lovely; as slender as a bean pole, and smooth as a young rabbit; and then such sharp teeth, such a fine bushy tail! oh my! and _such_ a dancer, too, as she is!' "now, stubtail was as fond of dancing and flirting as his brother of eating, and tried to be a great dandy and beau; so when master fox gave such a glowing description of miss slygo brighteyes, his charming cousin, stubtail's whiskers curled up tighter than ever; and he could hardly manage to _drawl_ out, 'aw--yaas, i think i _will_ dwop in for harf an 'ouah!' "when the fox heard that, he was ready to stand on his head for joy; and could scarcely wait while stubtail opened his carpet bag, and took out his all-rounder collar, his lemon-colored kid gloves, and his pork pie hat, to wear at the fox's party. "but what has become of titehugge?' he asked, suddenly noticing that his brother was not there. "'oh, never mind _him_,' said the fox, 'i saw the selfish little wretch gobbling away at some honey as i came along, and you see he was too greedy to ask you to share it.' "this was enough for stubtail, who was too hard at work drawing on his tight gloves to think of anything else, and away he trotted with the fox; who took him to a lonely hollow in the wood, where, sure enough, there were about fifty other foxes clustered together, but who looked at stubtail as he came among them, in anything but a pleasant manner. "'now, my friends!' exclaimed master fox himself, in a furious tone, 'you see before you the son of that old scoundrel grumpy-growly, who nearly killed me last year. at him, my dear cousins! scratch his eyes out! ahaaa!' and with a long growl of rage the fox made a sudden jump at poor stubtail before he had time to run away, followed by all the others. "stubtail fought like a perfect zouave, hugging, scratching, and biting his enemies with might and main; but after all, one poor little cub could not do very much against a whole army of foxes, and stubtail would have been killed outright before long, when suddenly a tremendous growling was heard! and up dashed grumpy-growly himself, who most fortunately happened to be passing, and came to see what the row was, followed by longclawse and bushyball, full tilt! they didn't stop to inquire whether this was a free fight or not, but pitched in like a thousand of bricks, and demolished the foxes in a way which astonished them considerable. "as to master fox, he was making off first of anybody, leaving his friends in the lurch; but grumpy-growly saw him, and catching him by the ear, made him confess all the mischief he had been about that morning; and as soon as he had finished, grumpy-growly gave him one good hug, which killed him as dead as a coffin nail. "after the grand battle was over, grumpy-growly marshalled the three cubs before him, hanging their heads, and looking perfectly miserable with shame and fatigue, and started off to find titehugge; scolding and beating them all the way for their naughty conduct, though they were punished enough already; for longclawse and bushyball had gone to the election, where they had been well pummelled by a shoulder-hitting baboon, because they insisted on voting for douglas as the beariest fellow on the ticket, and afterward met by their father, who gave them another thrashing for daring to come out without leave, and dragged them howling away. stubtails ears were torn into ribbons, his head bleeding in twenty places, and unfortunately no 'balm of the blooming blossoms of gilead' to put on it, and, in short, the whole party looked as if they had been at an irish funeral and nearly been made 'cold corpuses' themselves. after a long hunt, they at last found titehugge stuck fast where the fox had left him, and now the puzzle was to get him out. the three brothers all tried in vain, and at last grumpy-growly caught hold of titehugge's tail, longclawse of grumpy-growly's, stubtail of longclawse's, and bushyball of stubtail's, and they all pulled and tugged together; ouf! ouf! altogether now! one, two, three, pop! out came titehugge, and out came his tail, too! and the five bears rolled head over heels together in such a hurley-burley, that it was a long time before they could get straight enough to start for home; and when they _did_ get there, grumpy-growly put up the big log again, and put a big stone on top of that, and a hundred pound weight on top of that, and _one_ of those home-made pies we used to have at boarding school on top of _that_, which proved the heaviest of the lot, and if they ever happened to get out of prison again, it is more than i know." thus ended the wonderful story of the five bears, which gave great amusement to the hearers, and was pronounced "first rate." pretty soon after, they had a scrambling sort of tea, not quite as orderly as dinner, for they were all tired out with the day's adventures; and about seven o'clock, george, who, as i told you, was the oldest of the party, sensibly proposed that the regiment should go "early to bed," on the principle of the old maxim, and in order to be "early to rise," after the example of real soldiers. as they were not quite certain what were the usual ceremonies attendant upon soldiers' retiring, freddy undertook to "do the thing up brown," as he said, in a novel and delightfully military manner. so, taking his place about a dozen yards in advance of the camp, and standing as stiff as a ramrod, just as he had seen the officers do at west point, he called out "battalion, attention!" at these words, the regiment strung themselves in a long line, like so many kibobs on a straw, with their captains standing in front. "now, captain livingston, dismiss your company to quarters," and off marched the first company, four "men" strong, toward the tents; then the next four, and so on, until all had gone, and then came posting back again without the smallest delay. colonel freddy was obediently following his own orders by dismissing himself, with a sublime disregard of rank, when peter suddenly called out, "i say, fred, there's one thing you've forgotten!" "what is that?" asked freddy, stopping short. "why, we ought to have a guard. you know they always do in camps." "to be sure! i never thought of that. come, fellows, the safety of camp mcclellan must be looked out for." "very well, suppose you begin!" laughed jimmy. "hum, i'm the colonel; colonels can't be sentinels." "but i want to go to bed!" objected will costar. "well, i love my country, but i think the country had better turn in too!" said harry. "what business has the country to be awake and getting into mischief in the middle of the night?" "voted," cried peter, "that the guard be mounted, but that it shall go to bed as soon as it gets sleepy!" "good for you! that's the way to fix it!" said colonel freddy. "now then, boys, who'll turn out?" and two of the gallant zouaves being posted, one on each side of the camp, the others produced their nightgowns (which, by their special entreaty, had been crammed into the little knapsacks), and with several hair breadth escapes from having one or two of the tents pitched over, as the occupants incautiously ran against the poles, the regiment after, i am glad to say, a most sincere and earnest repetition of their prayers, fell into the sweet sound sleep of happy childhood; while the guard, after prancing up and down about ten minutes, concluded to follow their example, as there was nothing particular in the way of an enemy to look out for. ah! how charming looked now the little encampment, with the full radiance of the harvest moon streaming over the white tents, standing gleamingly out from the dark background of trees. no sound but the chirpings of insects could be heard; nothing moved about the spot but the flag, stirring dreamily in the summer breeze. and now the wind springs fresher up; it catches the bright folds, and they flash out in full view. god bless you, glorious old banner! floating there over as loyal, though boyish hearts, as ever beat in the midnight camp of the army of freedom. end of vol. i. * * * * * transcriber's notes: obvious punctuation errors repaired. page 18, "contined" changed to "continued" (then she continued) [illustration: bull run.] the sock stories, by "aunt fanny's" daughter. red, white, and blue socks. part second. being the second book of the series. by "aunt fanny's" daughter, the author of "the little white angel." new york: leavitt & allen, 21 & 23 mercer st. 1863. entered, according to act of congress, in the year 1862, by s. l. barrow, in the clerk's office of the district court of the united states for the southern district of new york. john f. trow, printer, stereotyper, and electrotyper, 50 greene street, new york. contents of vol. ii. page colonel freddy; or, the march and encampment of the dashahed zouaves, chap. i.--belligerent powers, 5 ii.--bull run, 30 iii.--before monterey, 50 iv.--a grand review, 87 v.--"home! sweet home!" 111 conclusion, 125 colonel freddy; or, the march and encampment of the dashahed zouaves. part ii. chapter i. belligerent powers. tuesday morning dawned "as clear as a bell," as an old lady once said, and the dashahed zouaves, if not exactly up with the sun, were awake and stirring at a much earlier hour than usual; and after a rather more careful washing and brushing than soldiers usually indulge in, assembled on the lawn, looking as bright as their own buttons. "what fun it is to be soldiers!" cried a little lisping fellow, one of the privates. "i only wish thome southerners would come along now, and you'd thee how i'd _thmash_ 'em." "bravo, louie!" said harry, laughing; "i dare say, if we were to go to the wars, you'd keep on fighting the battles of your country till you were chopped into inch bits!" "and pickled! i expect to be made lieutenant-general, commander-in-chief, colonel, major, captain, lieutenant, sergeant hamilton at the very least!" "pooh! that's nothing to the feats of bravery i intend to perform!" cried peter. "in my first battle i shall capture a 2,000-pound columbiad with one hand tied behind me, and carry it home for a paper weight!" "while i'm charging a regiment of mounted infantry single handed, and making them throw away their swords, and pistols, and things, and run for that 'last ditch' of theirs double quick!" said will costar, laughing; "but here comes breakfast, i'm happy to say. it strikes me camping out makes a fellow awful hungry, as well as no end of brave." a servant who had been sent from the house with breakfast materials, now approached, and the table being laid, the soldiers drew their camp stools around it; colonel freddy sitting at the head and pouring out coffee with great gravity. everything was going on smoothly enough, when harry tilted the tray on one side, and charley knocked his elbow on the other, and away went the coffee to the very end of the table! "charley," exclaimed the colonel, severely, "what do you mean, sir? i'll have you put in arrest if you don't look out!" "who'll put me there?" "me!" shouted peter. "i'm the boy to manage refractories. you'll see how i will come after you with a sharp stick--bayonet, i mean--and put you in arrest like that!" snapping his fingers. "by the way, when we've caught our rebels, where is the prison to be?" asked jimmy. "why, in the smoke house. there's a patent spring bolt on the door--father had it fixed the last time we had hams made; and if anybody was once in there, they'd never get out in the world, unless they could draw themselves fine like a wire and squeeze through the chimney." "we'll take care to keep out of it, then!" said charley; "so, colonel, i beg pardon for tilting the biggin--i didn't mean to do it so much--really!" "i, too!" cried harry; "shake hands, old chap!" good-tempered freddy, always ready to "make up," caught a hand of each of his comrades, and breakfast went on amicably. now, there lived in the house an old english man servant named jerry pike. he had formerly been a groom and attendant on peter's uncle, major schermerhorn, and volunteered in the army at the time of the war with mexico, that he might follow his dear master, whom he had served and loved ever since the major was a mere boy. he had fought bravely beside him in many a hard battle, and, for his gallant conduct, been promoted to the rank of sergeant. when the hand of death removed that kind master, mr. schermerhorn had gladly taken jerry to his own house, and promised him that should be his home as long as he lived. so now, like a gallant old war horse, who has a fresh green paddock, and lives in clover in his infirm age, jerry not only stood at ease, but lived at ease; and worked or not as he felt disposed. when breakfast was over, peter suddenly cried out, "i say, fellows, suppose we employ ourselves by having a drill! you know old jerry that i told you about? i'll ask him to give us a lesson!" "yes! that will be grand fun!" said freddy. "do go and find him, peter; i should really like to learn how to drill as the soldiers do; so when general mcclellan comes along, he'll admire us as much as the english general, old sir goutby slogo, did the seventh regiment when they paraded before the prince. 'really, most extraordinary style of marching these american troops have,' said he, 'most hequal to the 'orse guards and the hoxford blues coming down regent street!'" meanwhile, peter had scampered off to the house, and in a short time returned with a comical-looking little old man, dressed in faded regimentals. he touched his cap to the boys as he approached, in military style, and then drew himself up so very stiff and straight, awaiting their orders, that, as freddy whispered to tom, it was a perfect wonder he didn't snap short off at the waist. "now, jerry," began the colonel, "we want you to give us a _real_ drill, you know, just as you used to learn." "yes, a regular one!" chimed in the rest; "we'll run for our guns." "not fur your fust drill, i reckon, genl'men. you'll do bad enough without 'em, hech, hech!" cackled jerry. "very well--come begin then, jerry!" cried impatient will. "are ye all ready?" "yes, and waiting." "then, genl'men, fall in!" exclaimed the sergeant, the first two words being uttered in his natural voice, but the last in an awful sepulchral tone, like two raps on the base kettle drum. off duty, jerry rather resembled a toy soldier, but when in giving his orders he stiffened his body, threw up his head, and stuck out his hands, he looked so like the wooden figures out of noah's ark, that the boys burst into a shout of laughter. "now, genl'men," exclaimed jerry in a severe tone, "this won't do. silence in the ranks. squad! 'shun. the fust manoover i shel teach you, genl'men, is the manoover of 'parade rest.' now look at me, and do as i do." anybody would have supposed, naturally enough, that to stand at rest meant to put your hands in your pockets and lean against a tree; but what jerry did, was to slap his right hand against his left, like a torpedo going off, and fold them together; stick out his left foot, lean heavily upon his right, and look more like a dutch doll than ever. the boys accordingly endeavored to imitate this performance; but when they came to try it, a difficulty arose. whatever might be their usual ideas on the subject, there was a diversity of opinion now as to the proper foot to be advanced, and a wild uncertainty which was the left foot. the new soldiers shuffled backward and forward as if they were dancing hornpipes; while jerry shouted, "now, then, genl'men, i can't hear them hands come together smartly as i'd wished, not like a row of jarsey cider bottles a poppin' one arter the other, but all at once. now, then, squad! 'shun!" in a voice of thunder, "stan' at parade rest! no--no--them _lef futs_ adwanced! well if ever!" and jerry in his indignation gave himself such a thump on his chest that he knocked all the breath out of his body, and had to wait some moments before he could go on; while the boys, bubbling over with fun, took his scoldings in high good humor, and shrieked with laughter at their own ridiculous blunders, to the high wrath of their ancient instructor; who was so deeply interested and in earnest about his pursuit, that he didn't fail to lecture them well for their "insubornation;" which, indeed, nobody minded, except tom pringle, who, by the by, was from maryland, and many of whose relations were down south. he had been looking rather sulky from the beginning of the drill, and now suddenly stepped from his place in the ranks, exclaiming, "i won't play! now i vow i won't!" "why, tom, what is the matter? are you mad at us?" cried half a dozen voices at once. "humm--" grumbled sulky tom. "what say? i can't hear you," said freddy. "nonsense, tom, don't be poky, come back and drill." "i won't! let us alone, will you?" "all we want is, let us alone!" chanted peter. "there, fred, let him be cross if he wants to, we can play without him;" and the boys ran back to their places in the ranks, freddy calling out, "come fellows, let's try that old parade rest once more;" and on jerry's giving the command, they really _did_ do it this time, and were pronounced capable of passing to grander evolutions. the first of these was the turn about so as to fall in ranks; something the dashahed zouaves hadn't dreamt of before. get into ranks? nothing could be easier than to stand four in a row, as they had done before; but when it came to "right face," most of the soldiers were found to have opposite views on the subject, and faced each other, to their mutual astonishment. the natural consequence was, that in three seconds the regiment was in such a snarl and huddle, that no one could tell which rank he belonged to or anything else; so jerry, perfectly purple in the face with shouting, by way of helping them out of the scrape, gave them the following remarkable advice: "squad, 'shun! at th' wud 'foz' the rer-rank will stepsmartly off wi' th' leffut, tekkinapesstoth' rare--fo-o-o-res!" "w-h-a-t!" was the unanimous exclamation. jerry repeated his mandate, which, after infinite puzzling (the honest sergeant being no assistance whatever), was discovered to mean, "at the word 'fours,' the rear rank will step smartly off with the left foot, taking a pace to the rear. fours!" this difficulty solved, the next "article on the programme," as peter said, was the command march! or "harch!" according to jerry. out stepped freddy, confident that he knew this much at any rate, followed by the others; but here again that celebrated left foot got them into trouble. the right foot _would_ pop out here and there, and as sure as it did, at the third step the unlucky zouave found his leg firmly stuck between the ankles of the boy in front; and the "man" behind him treading on his heels in a way calculated to aggravate a saint; while meantime, the fellows in the rear rank, who were forever falling behind while they were staring at their feet to make sure which was the left one, _would_ endeavor to make up for it by taking a wide straddling step all of a sudden, and encircled the legs of people in front; a proceeding which, not being in accordance with "hardee's tactics," was not received with approbation by jerry; who, looking at them with a sort of deprecating pity, hoarsely said, "now, company d! wot--wrong agin? fowod squad! wun, too, three, foore; hup! hup! hup! hold your head up, mr. fred; turn out your toes, master william, and keep steady!" "goody!" exclaimed freddy at last, stopping short in the middle of his marching, "i can't stand this any longer! there, jerry, we've had drill enough, thank you; i am knocked into a cocked hat, for my part!" "very well, sir; it _is_ powerful hot; an' i must say you young genl'men have kep' at it steadier nor i expected, a gred deal." "thank you, jerry," said george, laughing, "we shall not forget our first drill in a hurry. i can't tell, for my part, which has been most bothered, you or we." "allers glad to give you a little practice," grinned jerry, "though you'd rive the gizzard out of an army drill sergeant, i'd wenture to say, if he hed the teachin' of you. hech! hech! hech! mornin', genl'men, your sarvent," and jerry touched his cap to colonel freddy and marched off chuckling. as soon as he had made his exit, the boys clustered around tom, as he sat turning his back on as many of the company as possible, and all began in a breath, "now, tom, do tell us what you're mad at; what have we done? please speak!" "well, then," shouted tom, springing up, "i'll tell you what, frederic jourdain! i won't be ordered around by any old monkey like that,"--pointing toward jerry--"and as for _you_ and _your_ ordering about, i won't stand that either! fine as you think yourself; the colonel, indeed!" "why, tom, how can you talk so? can't you play like the rest of us? i'm sure i haven't taken advantage of being colonel to be domineering; have i, boys?" "no, no! not a bit, fred--never mind what he says!" "oh _do_--_don't_ appeal to them! you do that because you daren't say outright you mean to have everything your own way. that may be very well for them--you're all a parcel of yankee shopkeepers together--but, i can tell you, no southern _gentleman_ will stand it!" "north or south, tom," began will costar, pretty sharply, "every regiment must have a head--and obey the head. we've chosen fred our colonel, and you must mind him. when he tells you to drill you've _got to do it_!" tom wheeled round perfectly furious. "you say that again," he shouted, "and i'll leave the regiment! i will. i won't be told by any northerner that i'm his subordinate, and if my state hadn't thought so too, she'd never have left the union." "what! you dare to say anything against the union!" cried george, turning white with rage; "do you mean to say that you _admire_ the south for seceding?" "yes! i've a great mind to secede myself, what's more!" freddy, as i said, was as sweet-tempered a little fellow as ever lived; but he was fairly aroused now. his blue eyes flashed fire; he crimsoned to the temples; his fists were clenched--and shouting, "you traitor!" like a flash, he sent tom flying over on his back, with the camp stool about his ears. up jumped tom, kicked away the stool, and rushed toward fred. but the others were too quick for him; they seized his arms and dragged him back; peter calling out "no, don't fight him, colonel; he's not worth it; let's have a court martial--that's the way to serve traitors!" amid a perfect uproar of rage and contempt for this shameful attack on their colonel, the zouaves hastily arranged some camp stools for judge and jury; and george being chosen judge, the oldest members of the regiment took their places around him, and tom was hauled up before the court. "oh stop, pray stop!" cried freddy at this stage of affairs. "indeed, i forgive him for what he said to me, if he will take back his language about the union. i can't stand _that_." "you hear what the colonel says," said george, sternly; "will you retract?" "no, never! if you think i'm going to be frightened into submission to a northerner you're very much mistaken! no southerner will ever be that! and as for your precious union, i don't care if i say i hope there never will be a union any more." "then, by george!" shouted the judge, fairly springing from his seat, "you're a traitor, sir! fellows, whoever is in favor of having this secessionist put under arrest, say aye!" "aye! aye! aye!" in a perfect roar. "does any one object?" nobody spoke. "then i sentence him to be confined in the guard house till he begs pardon; livingston, costar, and boorman to take him there." his captors pounced upon their prisoner with very little ceremony when this sentence was pronounced; when tom, without attempting to escape, suddenly commenced striking out at every one he could reach. a grand hurley-burley ensued; but before long tom was overpowered and dragged to the smoke, _alias_ guard house; heaping insults and taunts on the union and the regiment all the way. harry flung open the door of the prison, a picturesque little hut built of rough gray stone, and covered with virginia creepers and wild honeysuckles. the others pushed tom in, and peter, dashing forward, slammed the door on him with a bang. snap! went the bolt, and now nothing earthly could open it again but a bramah key or a gunpowder explosion. young secession was fast, and the north triumphant. hurrah! chapter ii. bull run. their first excitement over, the gallant zouaves couldn't help looking at each other in rather a comical way. to be sure, it was very aggravating to have their country run down, and themselves assailed without leave or license; but they were by no means certain, now they came to think of it, that they had acted rightly in doing justice to the little rebel in such a summary manner. peter especially, who had proposed the court martial, had an instinctive feeling that if his father were to learn the action they had taken, he would scarcely consider it to tally with the exercise of strict politeness to company. in short, without a word said, there was a tacit understanding in the corps that this was an affair to be kept profoundly secret. while they were still silently revolving this delicate question, little louie hamilton suddenly started violently, exclaiming, "only listen a moment, felloth! what a strange noithe! it sounds like thome wild beast!" "noise? i don't hear any," said freddy; "yes i do, though--like something trampling the bushes!" "there's nothing worse than four cows and a house dog about our place," said peter; "but what that is i don't know--hush!" the boys listened with all their ears and elbows, and nearly stared themselves blind looking around to see what was the matter. they had not long to wait, however, for the trampling increased in the wood, a curious, low growling was heard, which presently swelled to a roar, and in a moment more, an immense brindled bull was seen dashing through the locusts, his head down and heels in the air, looking not unlike a great wheel-barrow, bellowing at a prodigious rate, and making straight toward the place where they stood! "murder, what _shall_ we do?" cried louie, turning deadly pale with terror, while the zouaves, for an instant, appeared perfectly paralyzed. "why run! run for your lives!" shouted george, who was the first to recover himself. "peter, you lead the way; take us the shortest cut to the house, and--oh!" not another word did george utter. he was saving his breath for the race. and now, indeed, began a most prodigious "skedaddle;" the boys almost flying on ahead, running nearly abreast, and their terrible enemy close behind, tearing up the ground with his horns, and galloping like an express! on sped the gallant zouaves, making off as rapidly from the scene of action as their namesakes from manassas, without pausing to remark which way the wind blew, until, at last, they had skirted the grove, and were on the straight road for the house. here peter stopped a moment, "because some of the men will be near here, perhaps," he pantingly said, "and master bull will be caught if he ventures after us." scarcely had he spoken, when the furious animal was once more seen, dashing on faster than ever, and flaming with rage, till he might have exploded a powder mill! now for a last effort! one determined burst over the smooth road, and they are safe in the house! little louie, who was only nine years old, and the youngest of the party, had grasped hold of freddy's hand when they first started; and been half pulled along by him so far; but now that safety was close at hand, he suddenly sank to the ground, moaning out, "oh fred, you must go on and leave me; i can't run any more. oh mamma!" "no, no, louie! don't do so!" cried freddy. "get up, little man! why, you can't think i would leave you, surely?" and, stooping down, the brave little fellow caught louie up in his arms, and, thus burdened, tried to run on toward the house. the rest of the boys were now far beyond them; and had just placed their feet upon the doorstone, when a loud shout of "help!" made them turn round; and there was freddy, with louie in his arms, staggering up the road, the horns of the bull within a yard of his side! like a flash of lightning, will snatched up a large rake which one of the men had left lying on the grass, and dashed down the road. there is one minute to spare, just one! but in that minute will has reached the spot, and launching his weapon, the iron points descend heavily on the animal's head. the bull, rather aghast at this reception, which did not appear to be at all to his taste, seemed to hesitate a moment whether to charge his adversary or not; then, with a low growl of baffled fury, he slowly turned away, and trotted off toward the wood. the help had not come a minute too soon; for freddy, his sensitive organization completely overwrought by the events of the morning and his narrow escape from death, had fallen fainting to the ground; his hands still clenched in the folds of little louie's jacket. will instantly raised him, when he saw that all danger was over, and he and some of the others, who had come crowding down the road, very gently and quickly carried the insensible boy to the house, and laid him on the lounge in the library; while peter ran for the housekeeper to aid in bringing him to life. good mrs. lockitt hurried up stairs as fast as she could with camphor, ice water, and everything else she could think of good for fainting. "mrs. lockitt, where is papa?" asked peter, as he ran on beside her. "gone to new york, master peter," she replied; "i don't think he will be home before dinner time." our little scapegrace breathed more freely; at least there were a few hours' safety from detection, and he reentered the library feeling considerably relieved. there lay colonel freddy, his face white as death; one little hand hanging lax and pulseless over the side of the lounge, and the ruffled shirt thrust aside from the broad, snowy chest. harry stood over him, fanning his forehead; while poor louie was crouched in a corner, sobbing as though his heart would break, and the others stood looking on as if they did not know what to do with themselves. mrs. lockitt hastened to apply her remedies; and soon a faint color came back to the cheek, and with a long sigh, the great blue eyes opened once more, and the little patient murmured, "where am i?" "oh, then he's not killed, after all!" cried louie, running to his side. "dear, dear freddy! how glad i am you have come to life again!" this funny little speech made even freddy laugh, and then mrs. lockitt said, "but, master peter, you have not told me yet how it happened that master frederic got in such a way." the eyes of the whole party became round and saucer-y at once; as, all talking together, they began the history of their fearful adventure. mrs. lockitt's wiry false curls would certainly have dropped off with astonishment if they hadn't been sewed fast to her cap, and she fairly wiped her eyes on her spectacle case, which she had taken out of her pocket instead of her handkerchief, as they described freddy's noble effort to save his helpless companion without thinking of himself. when the narrative was brought to a close, she could only exclaim, "well, master freddy, you are a little angel, sure enough! and master william is as brave as a lion. to think of his stopping that great creetur, to be sure! wherever in the world it came from is the mystery." so saying, mrs. lockitt bustled out of the room, and after she had gone, there was a very serious and grateful talk among the elder boys about the escape they had had, and a sincere thankfulness to god for having preserved their lives. the puzzle now was, how they were to return to the camp, where poor tom had been in captivity all this time. it was certainly necessary to get back--but then the bull! while they were yet deliberating on the horns of this dilemma, the library door suddenly opened, and in walked--mr. schermerhorn! "why, boys!" he exclaimed, "how do you come to be here? fred, what's the matter? you look as pale as a ghost!" there was general silence for a moment; but these boys had been taught by pious parents to speak the truth always, whatever came of it. ah! that is the right principle to go on, dear children; tell the truth when you have done anything wrong, even if you are sure of being punished when that truth is known. so george, as the eldest, with one brave look at his comrades, frankly related everything that had happened; beginning at the quarrel with tom, down to the escape from the bull. to describe the varied expression of his auditor's face between delight and vexation, would require a painter; and when george at last said, "do you think we deserve to be punished, sir? or have we paid well enough already for our court martial?" mr. schermerhorn exclaimed, trying to appear highly incensed, yet scarcely able to help smiling: "i declare i hardly know! i certainly am terribly angry with you. how dare you treat a young gentleman so on my place? answer me that, you scapegraces! it is pretty plain who is at the bottom of all this--peter dares not look at me, i perceive. at the same time, i am rather glad that master tom has been taught what to expect if he runs down the union--it will probably save him from turning traitor any more, though you were not the proper persons to pass sentence on him. as for our plucky little colonel here--shake hands, freddy! you have acted like a hero! and for your sake i excuse the court martial. now, let us see what has become of the bull, and then go to the release of our friend tom. he must be thoroughly repentant for his misdeeds by this time." mr. schermerhorn accordingly gave orders that the bull should be hunted up and secured, until his master should be discovered; so that the zouaves might be safe from his attacks hereafter. if any of our readers feel an interest in the fate of this charming animal, they are informed that he was, with great difficulty, hunted into the stables; and before evening taken away by his master, the farmer from whom he had strayed. leaving the others to await his capture, let us return to tom. he had not been ten minutes in the smoke house before his wrath began to cool, and he would have given sixpence for any way of getting out but by begging pardon. that was a little too much just yet, and tom stamped with rage and shook the door; which resisted his utmost efforts to burst. then came the sounds without, the rushing, trampling steps, the furious bellow, and the shout, "run! run for your lives!" run! why on earth must they? what had happened? and especially what would become of him left alone there, with this unseen enemy perhaps coming at him next. he hunted in vain in every direction for some cranny to peep through; and if it had been possible, would have squeezed his head up the chimney. he shouted for help, but nobody heard him; they were all too frightened for that. he could hear them crunching along the road, presently; another cry, and then all was still. "what shall i do?" thought poor tom. "oh, where have they gone to? please let me out, freddy! do forgive me, boys! i'll f-fight for the union as m-much as you like! oh! oh!" and at last--must it be confessed?--the gallant secesh finished by bursting out crying! time passed on--of course seeming doubly long to the prisoner--and still the boys did not return. tom cried till he could cry no more; sniffling desperately, and rubbing his nose violently up in the air--a proceeding which did not ameliorate its natural bent in that direction. he really felt thoroughly sorry, and quite ready to beg pardon as soon as the boys should return; particularly as they had forgotten to provide the captive with even the traditional bread and water, and dinner-time was close at hand. while he was yet struggling between repentance and stomachache, the welcome sound of their voices was heard. they came nearer, and then a key was hastily applied to the fastenings of the door, and it flew open, disclosing the zouaves, with freddy at the head, and mr. schermerhorn bringing up the rear. tom hung back a moment yet; then with a sudden impulse he walked toward freddy, saying, "i beg your pardon, colonel; please forgive me for insulting you; and as for the flag"--and without another word, tom ran toward the flag staff, and catching the long folds of the banner in both hands, pressed them to his lips. "the chivalry forever!" said mr. schermerhorn, smiling. "that's right, tom! bless the old banner! it is your safeguard, and your countrymen's too, if they would only believe it. go and shake hands with him, boys; he is in his right place now, and if ever you are tempted to quarrel again, i am sure north and south will both remember "bull run!" chapter iii. before monterey. it is not necessary to describe the particular proceedings of the dashahed zouaves during every day of their camp life. they chattered, played, drilled, quarrelled a little once in a while, and made it up again, eat and slept considerably, and grew sunburnt to an astonishing degree. it was thursday morning, the fourth of their delightful days in camp. jerry had been teaching them how to handle a musket and charge bayonets, until they were quite excited, and rather put out that there was no enemy to practise on but the grasshoppers. at length, when they had tried everything that was to be done, harry exclaimed, "i wish, jerry, you would tell us a story about the wars! something real splendid, now; perfectly crammed with indians and scalps and awful battles and elegant mexican palaces full of diamonds and gold saucepans and lovely spanish girls carried off by the hair of their heads!" this flourishing rigmarole, which harry delivered regardless of stops, made the boys shout with laughter. "you'd better tell the story yourself, since you know so much about it!" said tom. "i allow you've never been in mexico, sir," said jerry, grinning. "i doubt but thar's palisses somewhar in mexico, but i and my mates hev been thar, an' _we_ never seed none o' 'em. no, master harry, i can't tell ye sich stories as that, but i do mind a thing what happened on the field afore monterey." the boys, delightedly exclaiming, "a story! a story! hurrah!" drew their camp stools around him; and jerry, after slowly rubbing his hand round and round over his bristling chin, while he considered what to say first, began his story as follows: jerry's story. "it wor a sunday night, young genl'men, the 21st of september, and powerful hot. we had been fightin' like mad, wi' not a moment's rest, all day, an' now at last wor under the canwas, they of us as wor left alive, a tryin' to sleep. the skeeters buzzed aroun' wonderful thick, and the groun' aneath our feet wor like red-hot tin plates, wi' the sun burnin' an blisterin' down. at last my mate bill says, says he, 'jerry, my mate, hang me ef i can stan' this any longer. let you an' me get up an' see ef it be cooler out-o'-doors.' "i wor tired enough wi' the day's fight, an' worrited, too, wi' a wound in my shoulder; but the tent wor no better nor the open field, an' we got up an' went out. thar wor no moon, but the sky was wonderful full o' stars, so we could see how we wor stannin' wi' our feet among the bodies o' the poor fellows as had fired their last shot that day. it wor a sight, young genl'men, what would make sich as you sick an' faint to look on; but sogers must larn not to min' it; an' we stood thar, not thinkin' how awful it wor, and yet still an' quiet, too. "'ah, jerry,' says bill--he wor a young lad, an' brought up by a pious mother, i allow--'i dunnot like this fightin' on the sabba' day. the lord will not bless our arms, i'm afeard, if we go agin his will so.' "i laughed--more shame to me--an' said, 'i'm a sight older nor you, mate, an' i've seed a sight o' wictories got on a sunday. the better the day, the better the deed, i reckon.' "'well, i don't know,' he says; 'mebbe things is allers mixed in time o' war, an' right an' wrong change sides a' purpose to suit them as wants battle an' tumult to be ragin'; but it don't go wi' my grain, noways.' "i hadn't experienced a change o' heart then, as i did arterward, bless the lord! an' i hardly unnerstood what he said. while we wor a stannin' there, all to onct too dark figgers kim a creepin' over the field to'ard the major's tent. 'look thar, jerry,' whispered bill, kind o' startin' like, 'thar's some of them rascally mexicans.' i looked at 'em wi'out sayin' a wured, an' then i went back to the tent fur my six-shooter--bill arter me;--fur ef it ain't the dooty o' every christian to extarminate them warmints o' mexicans, i'll be drummed out of the army to-morrer. "wall, young genl'men--we tuck our pistols, and slow and quiet we moved to whar we seed the two greasers, as they call 'em. on they kim, creepin' to'ard my major's tent, an' at las' one o' 'em raised the canwas a bit. bill levelled his rewolver in a wink, an' fired. you shud ha' seed how they tuck to their heels! yelling all the way, till wun o' em' dropped. the other didn't stop, but just pulled ahead. i fired arter him wi'out touching him; but the noise woke the major, an' when he hearn wot the matter wor, he ordered the alarm to be sounded an' the men turned out. 'it's a 'buscade to catch us,' he says, 'an' i'm fur being fust on the field.' "bill an' i buckled on our cartridge boxes, caught up our muskets, an' were soon in the ranks. on we marched, stiddy an' swift, to the enemy's fortifications; an' wen we were six hundred yards distant, kim the command, 'double quick.' the sky hed clouded up all of a suddent, an' we couldn't see well where we wor, but thar was suthin' afore us like a low, black wall. as we kim nearer, it moved kind o' cautious like, an' when we wor within musket range, wi' a roar like ten thousand divils, they charged forred! thar wor the flash and crack o' powder, and the ring! ping! o' the bullets, as we power'd our shot on them an' they on us; but not another soun'; cr-r-r-ack went the muskets on every side agin, an' the rascals wor driven back a minnit. 'charge bayonets!' shouted the major, wen he seed that. thar wos a pause; a rush forred; we wor met by the innimy half way; an' then i hearn the awfullest o' created soun's--a man's scream. i looked roun', an' there wos bill, lying on his face, struck through an' through. thar wos no time to see to him then, fur the men wor fur ahead o' me, an' i hed to run an' jine the rest. "we hed a sharp, quick skirmish o' it--for ef thar is a cowardly critter on the created airth it's a greaser--an' in less nor half an' hour wor beatin' back to quarters. when all wor quiet agin, i left my tent, an' away to look fur bill. i sarched an' sarched till my heart were almost broke, an at last i cried out, 'oh bill, my mate, whar be you?' an' i hearn a fibble v'ice say, 'here i be, jerry!' "i swon! i wor gladder nor anything wen i hearn that. i hugged him to my heart, i wor moved so powerful, an' then i tuck him on my back, an' off to camp; werry slow an' patient, fur he were sore wownded, an' the life in him wery low. "wall, young genl'men, i'll not weary you wi' the long hours as dragged by afore mornin'. i med him as snug as i could, and at daybreak we hed him took to the sugeon's tent. "i wor on guard all that mornin' an' could not get to my lad; but at last the relief kim roun', an' the man as was to take my place says, says he, 'jerry, my mate, ef i was you i'd go right to the hosp'tl an' stay by poor bill' (fur they all knew as i sot gret store by him); 'he is werry wild in his head, i hearn, an' the sugeon says as how he can't last long.' "ye may b'lieve how my hairt jumped wen i hearn that. i laid down my gun, an' ran fur the wooden shed, which were all the place they hed fur them as was wownded. an' thar wor bill--my mate bill--laying on a blanket spred on the floore, wi' his clothes all on (fur it's a hard bed, an' his own bloody uniform, that a sojer must die in), wi' the corpse o' another poor fellow as had died all alone in the night a'most touching him, an' slopped wi' blood. i moved it fur away all in a trimble o' sorrer, an' kivered it decent like, so as bill mightn't see it an' get downhearted fur hisself. then i went an' sot down aside my mate. he didn't know me, no more nor if i wor a stranger; but kept throwin' his arms about, an' moanin' out continual, 'oh mother! mother! why don't you come to your boy?' "i bust right out crying, i do own, wen i hearn that, an' takin' his han' in mine, i tried to quiet him down a bit; telling him it wor bad fur his wownd to be so res'less (fur every time he tossed, thar kim a little leap o' blood from his breast); an' at last, about foore o'clock in the day, he opened his eyes quite sensible like, an' says to me, he says, 'dear matey, is that you? thank you fur coming to see me afore i die.' "'no, bill, don't talk so,' i says, a strivin' to be cheerful like, tho' i seed death in his face, 'you'll be well afore long.' "'aye, well in heaven,' he says; and then, arter a minnit, 'jerry,' he says, 'thar's a little bounty money as belongs to me in my knapsack, an' my month's wages. i want you, wen i am gone, to take it to my mother, an' tell her--'(he wor gaspin' fearful)--'as i died--fightin' fur my country--an' the flag. god bless you, jerry--you hev been a good frien' to me, an' i knows as you'll do this--an' bid the boys good-by--fur me.' "i promised, wi' the tears streamin' down my cheeks; an' then we wor quiet a bit, fur it hurt bill's breast to talk, an' i could not say a wured fur the choke in my throat. arter a while he says, 'jerry, won't you sing me the hymn as i taught you aboard the transport? about the lord our captin?' "i could hardly find v'ice to begin, but it wor bill's dying wish, an' i made shift to sing as well as i could- "'we air marchin' on together to our etarnal rest; niver askin' why we're ordered- for the lord he knoweth best. christ is our captain! 'forred!' is his word; ranks all steady, muskets ready, in the army o' the lord! "'satan's hosts are all aroun' us, an' strive to enter in; but our outworks they are stronger nor the dark brigades o' sin! christ is our fortress! righteousness our sword; truth the standard--in the vanguard- o' the army o' the lord! "'comrads, we air ever fightin' a battle fur the right; ever on the on'ard movement fur our home o' peace an' light. christ is our leader! heaven our reward, comin' nearer, shinin' clearer- in the army o' the lord!' "arter i hed sung the hymn--an' it wor all i could do to get through--bill seemed to be a sight easier. he lay still, smilin' like a child on the mother's breast. pretty soon arter, the major kim in; an' wen he seed bill lookin' so peaceful, he says, says he, 'why, cheer up, my lad! the sugeon sayd as how you wor in a bad way; but you look finely now;'--fur he didn't know it wor the death look coming over him. 'you'll be about soon,' says the major, 'an' fightin' fur the flag as brave as ever,' "bill didn't say nothing--he seemed to be getting wild agin;--an' looked stupid like at our major till he hearn the wureds about the flag. then he caught his breath suddint like, an', afore we could stop him, he had sprang to his feet--shakin' to an' fro like a reed--but as straight as he ever wor on parade; an', his v'ice all hoarse an' full o' death, an' his arm in the air, he shouted, 'aye! god--bless--the--flag! we'll fight fur it till--' an' then we hearn a sort o' snap, an' he fell forred--dead! "we buried him that night, i an' my mates. i cut off a lock o' his hair fur his poor mother, afore we put the airth over him; an' giv it to her, wi' poor bill's money, faithful an' true, wen we kim home. i've lived to be an old man since then, an' see the major go afore me, as i hoped to sarve till my dyin' day; but lord willing i shel go next, to win the salwation as i've fitten for, by bill's side, a sojer in christ's army, in the etarnal jerusalem!" the boys took a long breath when jerry had finished his story, and more than one bright eye was filled with tears. the rough words, and plain, unpolished manner of the old soldier, only heightened the impression made by his story; and as he rose to go away, evidently much moved by the painful recollections it excited, there was a hearty, "thank you, sergeant, for your story--it was real good!" jerry only touched his cap to the young soldiers, and marched off hastily, while the boys looked after him in respectful silence. but young spirits soon recover from gloomy influences, and in a few moments they were all chattering merrily again. "what a pity we must go home monday!" cried louie; "i wish we could camp out forever! oh, freddy, do write a letter to general mcclellan, and ask him to let us join the army right away! tell him we'll buy some new india-rubber back-bones and stretch ourselves out big directly, if he'll only send right on for us!" "perhaps he would, if he knew how jolly we can drill already!" said peter, laughing. "i tell you what, boys, the very thing! let's have a review before we go home. i'll ask all the boys and girls i know to come and look on, and we might have quite a grand entertainment. won't that be splendid? we can march about all over, and fire off the cannons and everything! i'm sure father will let us." "yes, but how's general mcclellan to hear anything about it?" inquired practical louie. "why--i don't know," said peter, rather taken aback by this view of the subject. "well, somehow--never mind, it will be grand fun, and i mean to ask my father right away." "take me with you?" called a dozen fellows directly. finally it was concluded that it might make more impression on mr. schermerhorn's mind, if the application came from the regiment in a body; so, running for their swords and guns, officers and men found their places in the battalion, and the grand procession started on its way--chattering all the time, in utter defiance of that "article of war" which forbids "talking in the ranks." just as they were passing the lake, they heard carriage wheels crunching on the gravel, and drew up in a long line on the other side of the road to let the vehicle pass them; much to the astonishment of two pretty young ladies and a sweet little girl, about freddy's age, who were leaning comfortably back in the handsome barouche. "why, peter!" exclaimed one of the ladies, "what in the world is all this?" "this!" cried peter, running up to the carriage, "why, these are the dashahed zouaves, miss carlton. we have been in camp ever since monday. good morning, miss jessie," to the little girl on the front seat, who was looking on with deep interest. "oh, to be sure, i remember," said miss carlton, laughing; "come, introduce the zouaves, peter; we are wild to know them!" the boys clustered eagerly about the carriage and a lively chat took place. the zouaves, some blushing and bashful, others frank and confident, and all desperately in love already with pretty little jessie, related in high glee their adventures--except the celebrated court martial--and enlarged glowingly upon the all-important subject of the grand review. colonel freddy, of course, played a prominent part in all this, and with his handsome face, bright eyes, and frank, gentlemanly ways, needed only those poor lost curls to be a perfect picture of a soldier. he chattered away with miss lucy, the second sister, and obtained her special promise that she would plead their cause with mr. schermerhorn in case the united petitions of the corps should fail. the young ladies did not know of mrs. schermerhorn's departure, but freddy and peter together coaxed them to come up to the house "anyhow." the carriage was accordingly taken into the procession, and followed it meekly to the house; the zouaves insisting on being escort, much to the terror of the young ladies; who were in constant apprehension that the rear rank and the horses might come to kicks--not to say blows--and the embarrassment of the coachman; who, as they were constantly stopping unexpectedly to turn round and talk, didn't know "where to have them," as the saying is. however, they reached their destination in safety before long, and found mr. schermerhorn seated on the piazza. he hastened forward to meet them, with the cordial greeting of an old friend. "well, old bachelor," said miss carlton, gayly, as the young ladies ascended the steps, "you see we have come to visit you in state, with the military escort befitting patriotic young ladies who have four brothers on the potomac. what has become of madame, please?" "gone to niagara and left me a 'lone lorn creetur;'" said mr. schermerhorn, laughing. "basely deserted me when my farming couldn't be left. but how am i to account for the presence of the military, mademoiselle?" "really, i beg their pardons," exclaimed miss carlton. "they have come on a special deputation to you, mr. schermerhorn, so pray don't let us interrupt business." thus apostrophised, the boys scampered eagerly up the steps; and freddy, a little bashful, but looking as bright as a button, delivered the following brief oration: "mr. schermerhorn: i want--that is, the boys want--i mean we all want--to have a grand review on saturday, and ask our friends to look on. will you let us do it, please?" "certainly, with the greatest pleasure!" replied mr. schermerhorn, smiling; "but what will become of you good people when i tell you that i have just received a letter from mrs. schermerhorn, asking me to join her this week instead of next, and bring peter with me." "oh! father, please let me stay!" interrupted peter; "can't you tell ma i've joined the army for the war? we all want to stay like everything!" "and forage for yourselves?" said his father, laughing. "no, the army must give you up, and lose a valuable member, master peter; but just have the goodness to listen a moment. the review shall take place, but as the camp will have to break up on saturday instead of monday, as i had intended, the performances must come off to-morrow. does that suit your ideas?" the boys gave a delighted consent to this arrangement, and now the only thing which dampened their enjoyment was the prospect of such a speedy end being put to their camp life. "confound it! what was the fun for a fellow to be poked into a stupid watering place, where he must bother to keep his hair parted down the middle, and a clean collar stiff enough to choke him on from morning till night?" as tom indignantly remarked to george and will the same evening. "the fact is, this sort of thing is _the_ thing for a _man_ after all!" an opinion in which the other _men_ fully concurred. but let us return to the piazza, where we have left the party. after a few moments more spent in chatting with mr. schermerhorn, it was decided to accept colonel freddy's polite invitation, which he gave with such a bright little bow, to inspect the camp. you may be sure it was in apple-pie order, for jerry, who had taken the zouaves under his special charge, insisted on their keeping it in such a state of neatness as only a soldier ever achieved. the party made an extremely picturesque group--the gay uniforms of the zouaves, and light summer dresses of the ladies, charmingly relieved against the background of trees; while mr. schermerhorn's stately six feet, and somewhat portly proportions, quite reminded one of general scott; especially among such a small army; in which george alone quite came up to the regulation "63 inches." little jessie ran hither and thither, surrounded by a crowd of adorers, who would have given their brightest buttons, every "man" of them, to be the most entertaining fellow of the corps. they showed her the battery and the stacks of shining guns--made to stand up by jerry in a wonderful fashion that the boys never could hope to attain--the inside of all the tents, and the smoke guard house (tom couldn't help a blush as he looked in); and finally, as a parting compliment (which, let me tell you, is the greatest, in a boy's estimation, that can possibly be paid), freddy made her a present of his very largest and most gorgeous "glass agates;" one of which was all the colors of the rainbow, and the other patriotically adorned with the stars and stripes in enamel. peter climbed to the top of the tallest cherry tree, and brought her down a bough at least a yard and a half long, crammed with "ox hearts;" harry eagerly offered to make any number of "stunning baskets" out of the stones, and in short there never was such a belle seen before. "oh, a'int she jolly!" was the ruling opinion among the zouaves. a private remark was also circulated to the effect that "miss jessie was stunningly pretty." the young ladies at last said good-by to the camp; promising faithfully to send all the visitors they could to the grand review, and drove off highly entertained with their visit. mr. schermerhorn decided to take the afternoon boat for the city and return early friday morning, and the boys, left to themselves, began to think of dinner, as it was two o'clock. a brisk discussion was kept up all dinner time you may be sure, concerning the event to come off on the morrow. "i should like to know, for my part, what we do in a review," said jimmy, balancing his fork artistically on the end of his finger, and looking solemnly round the table. "why, show off everything we know!" said charley spicer. "march about, and form into ranks and columns, and all that first, then do charming "parade rest," "'der humps!" and the rest of it; and finish off by firing off our guns, and showing how we can't hit anything by any possibility!" "but these guns won't fire off!" objected jimmy. "well, the cannon then!" "but i'm sure father won't let us have any powder," said peter disconsolately. "you can't think how i burnt the end of my nose last fourth with powder! it was so sore i couldn't blow it for a week!" the boys all burst out laughing at this dreadful disaster, and george said, "you weren't lighting it with the end of your nose, were you?" "no; but i was stooping over, charging one of my cannon, and i dropped the 'punk' right in the muzzle somehow, and, would you believe it, the nasty thing went off and burnt my nose! and father said i shouldn't play with powder any more, because i might have put out my eyes." "well, we must take it out in marching, then," said freddy, with a tremendous sigh. "no, hold on; i'll tell you what we can do!" cried tom, eagerly. "i have some 'double headers' left from the fourth; we might fire them out of the cannon; they make noise enough, i'm sure. i'll write to my mother this afternoon and get them." the boys couldn't help being struck with the generosity of this offer, coming from tom after their late rather unkind treatment of him; and the older ones especially were very particular to thank him for his present. as soon as dinner was over, he started for the house to ask mr. schermerhorn to carry his message. as he hurried along the road, his bright black eyes sparkling with the happiness of doing a good action, he heard trotting steps behind him, felt an arm stealing round his neck, schoolboy fashion, and there was freddy. "i ran after you all the way," he pantingly said. "i want to tell you, dear tom, how much we are obliged to you for giving us your crackers, and how sorry we are that we acted so rudely to you the other day. please forgive us; we all like you so much, and we would feel as mean as anything to take your present without begging pardon. george, peter, and i feel truly ashamed of ourselves every time we think of that abominable court martial." "there, old fellow, don't say a word more about it!" was the hearty response; and tom threw his arm affectionately about his companion. "it was my fault, freddy, and all because i was mad at poor old jerry; how silly! i was sorry for what i said right afterward." "then we are friends again?" cried freddy, joyfully. "yes; i'll like you as long as i live! and ever so much longer." and so we will leave the two on their walk to the house, and close this abominably long chapter. chapter iv. a grand review. there are really scarcely words enough in the dictionary properly to describe the immense amount of drill got through with by the dashahed zouaves between three o'clock that afternoon and twelve, noon, of the following day. this friday afternoon was going to be memorable in history for one of the most splendid reviews on record. they almost ran poor old jerry off his legs in their eagerness to go over every possible variety of exercise known to "hardee's tactics," and nearly dislocated their shoulder blades trying to waggle their elbows backward and forward all at once when they went at "double quick;" at the same time keeping the other arm immovably pinioned to their sides. then that wonderful operation of stacking the rebellious guns, which obstinately clattered down nine times and a half out of ten, had to be gone through with, and a special understanding promulgated in the corps as to when jerry's "'der arms!" meant "shoulder arms," and when "order arms" (or bringing all the muskets down together with a bang); and, in short, there never was such a busy time seen in camp before. friday morning dawned, if possible, still more splendidly than any of the preceding days, with a cool, refreshing breeze, just enough snowy clouds in the sky to keep off the fiery summer heat in a measure, and not a headache nor a heartache among the zouaves to mar the pleasure of the day. the review was to come off at four o'clock, when the july sun would be somewhat diminished in warmth, and from some hints that jerry let fall, mrs. lockitt, and the fat cook, mrs. mincemeat, were holding high council up at the house, over a certain collation to be partaken of at the end of the entertainments. as the day wore on the excitement of our friends the zouaves increased. they could hardly either eat their dinners, or sit down for more than a moment at a time; and when, about three o'clock, mr. schermerhorn entered the busy little camp, he was surrounded directly with a crowd of eager questioners, all talking at once, and making as much noise as a colony of rooks. "patience, patience, my good friends!" laughed mr. schermerhorn, holding up a finger for silence. "every one in turn. tom, here are your 'double headers,' with love from your mother. fred, i saw your father to-day, and they are all coming down to the review. george, here is a note left for you in my box at the post office, and dashahed zouaves in general--i have one piece of advice to give you. get dressed quietly, and then sit down and rest yourselves. you will be tired out by the end of the afternoon, at all events; so don't frisk about more than you can help at present;" and mr. schermerhorn left the camp; while the boys, under strong pressure of jerry, and the distant notes of a band which suddenly began to make itself heard, dressed themselves as nicely as they could, and sat down with heroic determination to wait for four o'clock. presently, carriages began to crunch over the gravel road one after another, filled with merry children, and not a few grown people besides. mr. and mrs. jourdain, with bella, were among the first to arrive; and soon after the carltons' barouche drove up. jessie, for some unknown reason, was full of half nervous glee, and broke into innumerable little trilling laughs when any one spoke to her. a sheet of lilac note paper, folded up tight, which she held in her hand, seemed to have something to do with it, and her soft brown curls and spreading muslin skirts were in equal danger of irremediable "mussing," as she fidgetted about on the carriage seat, fully as restless as any of the zouaves. mr. schermerhorn received his guests on the piazza, where all the chairs in the house, one would think, were placed for the company, as the best view of the lawn was from this point. to the extreme right were the white tents of the camp, half hidden by the immense trunk of a magnificent elm, the only tree that broke the smooth expanse of the lawn. on the left a thick hawthorne hedge separated the ornamental grounds from the cultivated fields of the place, while in front the view was bounded by the blue and sparkling waters of the sound. soon four o'clock struck; and, punctual to the moment, the zouaves could be seen in the distance, forming their ranks. jerry, in his newest suit of regimentals, bustled about here and there, and presently his voice was heard shouting, "are ye all ready now? squad, 'shun! harch!" and to the melodious notes of "dixie," performed by the band, which was stationed nearer the house, the regiment started up the lawn! jerry marching up beside them, and occasionally uttering such mysterious mandates as, "easy in the centre! keep your fours in the wheel! _steady_ now!" oh, what a burst of delighted applause greeted them as they neared the house! the boys hurrahed, the girls clapped their hands, ladies and gentlemen waved their hats and handkerchiefs; while the dashahed zouaves, too soldierly _now_ to grin, drew up in a long line, and stood like statues, without so much as winking. and now the music died away, and everybody was as still as a mouse, while jerry advanced to the front, and issued the preliminary order: "to the rear--open order!" and the rear rank straightway fell back; executing, in fact, that wonderful "tekkinapesstoth'rare" which had puzzled them so much on the first day of their drilling. then came those other wonderful orders: "p'_sent_ humps! "_der_ humps! "gr'_nd_ humps!" and so on, at which the muskets flew backward and forward, up and down, with such wonderful precision. the spectators were delighted beyond measure; an enthusiastic young gentleman, with about three hairs on each side of his mustache, who belonged to the twenty-second regiment, declared "it was the best drill he had seen out of his company room!" a celebrated artist, whose name i dare not tell for the world, sharpened his pencil, and broke the point off three times in his hurry, and at last produced the beautiful sketch which appears at the front of this volume; while all the little boys who were looking on, felt as if they would give every one of their new boots and glass agates to belong to the gallant dashahed zouaves. [illustration: "double-quick."] after the guns had been put in every possible variety of position, the regiment went through their marching. they broke into companies, formed the line again, divided in two equal parts, called "breaking into platoons," showed how to "wheel on the right flank," and all manner of other mysteries. finally, they returned to their companies, and on jerry's giving the order, they started at "double quick" (which is the most comical tritty-trot movement you can think of), dashed down the slope of the lawn, round the great elm, up hill again full speed, and in a moment more were drawn up in unbroken lines before the house, and standing once again like so many statues. it was really splendid! round after round of applause greeted the zouaves, who kept their positions for a moment, then snatching off their saucy little fez caps, they gave the company three cheers in return, of the most tremendous description; which quite took away the little remaining breath they had after the "double quick." thus ended the first part of the review; and now, with the assistance of their rather lilliputian battery, and tom's double headers, they went through some firing quite loud enough to make the little girls start and jump uncomfortably; so this part of the entertainment was brought to rather a sudden conclusion. jerry had just issued the order, "close up in ranks to dismiss," when mr. schermerhorn, who, with miss carlton and jessie, had left the piazza a few minutes before, came forward, saying, "have the goodness to wait a moment, colonel; there is one more ceremony to go through with." the boys looked at each other in silent curiosity, wondering what could be coming; when, all at once, the chairs on the piazza huddled back in a great hurry, to make a lane for a beautiful little figure, which came tripping from the open door. it was jessie; but a great change had been made in her appearance. over her snowy muslin skirts she had a short classic tunic of red, white, and blue silk; a wreath of red and white roses and bright blue jonquils encircled her curls, and in her hand she carried a superb banner. it was made of dark blue silk, trimmed with gold fringe; on one side was painted an american eagle, and on the other the words "dashahed zouaves," surrounded with a blaze of glory and gold stars. she advanced to the edge of the piazza, and in a clear, sweet voice, a little tremulous, but very distinct, she said: "colonel and brave soldiers: "i congratulate you, in the name of our friends, on the success you have achieved. you have shown us to-day what young america can do; and as a testimonial of our high admiration, i present you the colors of your regiment! "take them, as the assurance that our hearts are with you; bear them as the symbol of the cause you have enlisted under; and should you fall beneath them on the field of battle, i bid you lay down your lives cheerfully for the flag of your country, and breathe with your last sigh the name of the union! colonel, take your colors!" freddy's cheeks grew crimson, and the great tears swelled to his eyes as he advanced to take the flag which jessie held toward him. and now our little colonel came out bright, sure enough. perhaps not another member of the regiment, called upon to make a speech in this way, could have thought of a word to reply; but freddy's quick wit supplied him with the right ideas; and it was with a proud, happy face, and clear voice that he responded: "ladies and gentlemen: "i thank you, in the name of my regiment, for the honor you have done us. inspired by your praises, proud to belong to the army of the republic, we hope to go on as we have begun. to your kindness we owe the distinguishing colors under which we march hereafter; and by the union for which we fight, they shall never float over a retreating battalion!" oh! the cheers and clapping of hands which followed this little speech! everybody was looking at freddy as he stood there, the colors in his hand, and the bright flush on his cheek, with the greatest admiration. of course, his parents weren't proud of him; certainly not! but the wonders were not at an end yet; for suddenly the band began playing a new air, and to this accompaniment, the sweet voice of some lady unseen, but which sounded to those who knew, wonderfully like miss lucy carlton's, sang the following patriotic ballad: "we will stand by our flag--let it lead where it will- our hearts and our hopes fondly cling to it still; through battle and danger our cause must be won- yet forward! undaunted we'll follow it on! 'tis the flag! the old flag! still unsullied and bright, as when first its fair stars lit oppression's dark night and the standard that guides us forever shall be the star-spangled banner, the flag of the free! "a handful of living--an army of dead, the last charge been made and the last prayer been said; what is it--as sad we retreat from the plain that cheers us, and nerves us to rally again? 'tis the flag! the old flag! to our country god-given, that gleams through our ranks like a glory from heaven! and the foe, as they fly, in our vanguard shall see the star-spangled banner, the flag of the free! "we will fight for the flag, by the love that we bear in the union and freedom, we'll baffle despair; trust on in our country, strike home for the right, and treason shall vanish like mists of the night. then cheer the old flag! every star in it glows, the terror of traitors! the curse of our foes! and the victory that crowns us shall glorified be, 'neath the star-spangled banner, the flag of the free!" as the song ended, there was another tumult of applause; and then the band struck up a lively quickstep, and the company, with the zouaves marching ahead, poured out on the lawn toward the camp, where a bountiful collation was awaiting them, spread on the regimental table. two splendid pyramids of flowers ornamented the centre, and all manner of "goodies," as the children call them, occupied every inch of space on the sides. at the head of the table jerry had contrived a canopy from a large flag, and underneath this, miss jessie, colonel freddy, with the other officers, and some favored young ladies of their own age, took their seats. the other children found places around the table, and a merrier fã©te champãªtre never was seen. the band continued to play lively airs from time to time, and i really can give you my word as an author, that nobody looked cross for a single minute! between you and me, little reader, there had been a secret arrangement among the grown folks interested in the regiment, to get all this up in such fine style. every one had contributed something to give the zouaves their flag and music, while to mr. schermerhorn it fell to supply the supper; and arrangements had been made and invitations issued since the beginning of the week. the regiment, certainly, had the credit, however, of getting up the review, it only having been the idea of their good friends to have the entertainment and flag presentation. so there was a pleasant surprise on both sides; and each party in the transaction, was quite as much astonished and delighted as the other could wish. the long sunset shadows were rapidly stealing over the velvet sward as the company rose from table, adding a new charm to the beauty of the scene. everywhere the grass was dotted with groups of elegant ladies and gentlemen, and merry children, in light summer dresses and quaintly pretty uniforms. the little camp, with the stacks of guns down its centre, the bayonets flashing in the last rays of the sun, was all crowded and brilliant with happy people; looking into the tents and admiring their exquisite order, inspecting the bright muskets, and listening eagerly or good-humoredly, as they happened to be children or grown people, to the explanations and comments of the zouaves. and on the little grassy knoll, where the flag staff was planted, central figure of the scene, stood colonel freddy, silent and thoughtful for the first time to-day, with jerry beside him. the old man had scarcely left his side since the boy took the flag; he would permit no one else to wait upon him at table, and his eyes followed him as he moved among the gay crowd, with a glance of the utmost pride and affection. the old volunteer seemed to feel that the heart of a soldier beat beneath the little dandy ruffled shirt and gold-laced jacket of the young colonel. suddenly, the boy snatches up again the regimental colors; the stars and stripes, and little jessie's flag, and shakes them out to the evening breeze; and as they flash into view and once more the cheers of the zouaves greet their colors, he says, with quivering lip and flashing eye, "jerry, if god spares me to be a man, i'll live and die a soldier!" the soft evening light was deepening into night, and the beautiful planet venus rising in the west, when the visitors bade adieu to the camp; the zouaves were shaken hands with until their wrists fairly ached; and then they all shook hands with "dear" jessie, as charley was heard to call her before the end of the day, and heard her say in her soft little voice how sorry she was they must go to-morrow (though she certainly couldn't have been sorrier than _they_ were), and then the good people all got into their carriages again, and drove off; waving their handkerchiefs for good-by as long as the camp could be seen; and so, with the sound of the last wheels dying away in the distance, ended the very end of the grand review. chapter v.--and last. "home, sweet home." and now, at last, had come that "day of disaster," when camp mcclellan must be deserted. the very sun didn't shine so brilliantly as usual, thought the zouaves; and it was positively certain that the past five days, although they had occurred in the middle of summer, were the very shortest ever known! eleven o'clock was the hour appointed for the breaking up of the camp, in order that they might return to the city by the early afternoon boat. "is it possible we have been here a week?" exclaimed jimmy, as he sat down to breakfast. "it seems as if we had only come yesterday." "what a jolly time it has been!" chimed in charley spicer. "i don't want to go to newport a bit. where are you going, tom?" "to baltimore--but i don't mean to secesh!" added tom, with a little blush. "i have a cousin in the palmetto guards at charleston, and that's one too many rebels in the family." "never mind!" cried george chadwick; "the pringles are a first rate family; the rest of you are loyal enough, i'm sure!" and george gave tom such a slap on the back, in token of his good will, that it quite brought the tears into his eyes. when breakfast was over, the zouaves repaired to their tents, and proceeded to pack their clothes away out of the lockers. they were not very scientific packers, and, in fact, the usual mode of doing the business was to ram everything higgledy-piggledy into their valises, and then jump on them until they consented to come together and be locked. presently jerry came trotting down with a donkey cart used on the farm, and under his directions the boys folded their blankets neatly up, and placed them in the vehicle, which then drove off with its load, leaving them to get out and pile together the other furnishings of the tents; for, of course, as soldiers, they were expected to wind up their own affairs, and we all know that boys will do considerable _hard work_ when it comes in the form of _play_. just as the cart, with its vicious little wrong-headed steed, had tugged, and jerked, and worried itself out of sight, a light basket carriage, drawn by two dashing black canadian ponies, drew up opposite the camp, and the reins were let fall by a young lady in a saucy "pork pie" straw hat, who was driving--no other than miss carlton, with jessie beside her. the boys eagerly surrounded the little carriage, and miss carlton said, laughing, "jessie begged so hard for a last look at the camp, that i had to bring her. so you are really going away?" "really," repeated freddy; "but i am so glad you came, miss jessie, just in time to see us off." "you know soldiers take themselves away houses and all," said george; "you will see the tents come down with a run presently." "and here comes jerry to help us!" added harry. as he spoke, the donkey cart rattled up, and jerry, touching his cap to the ladies, got out, and prepared to superintend the downfall of the tents. by his directions, two of the zouaves went to each tent, and pulled the stakes first from one corner, then the other; then they grasped firmly the pole which supported the centre, and when the sergeant ejaculated "now!" like a flash! the tents slid smoothly to the ground all at the same moment, just as you may have made a row of blocks fall down by upsetting the first one. and now came the last ceremony, the hauling down of the flag. "stand by to fire a salute!" shouted jerry, and instantly a company was detached, who brought the six little cannon under the flagstaff, and charged them with the last of the double headers, saved for this purpose; freddy stood close to the flagstaff, with the halyards ready in his hands. crack! fizz! went six matches for the cannon. "make ready! apply light, fire!" bang! and the folds of the flag stream out proudly in the breeze, as it rapidly descends the halyards, and flutters softly to the greensward. there was perfectly dead silence for a moment; then the voice of mr. schermerhorn was heard calling, "come, boys, are you ready? jump in, then, it is time to start for the boat." the boys turned and saw the carriages which had brought them so merrily to the camp waiting to convey them once more to the wharf; while a man belonging to the farm was rapidly piling the regimental luggage into a wagon. with sorrowful faces the zouaves clustered around the pretty pony chaise; shaking hands once more with jessie, and internally vowing to adore her as long as they lived. then they got into the carriages, and old jerry grasped freddy's hand with an affectionate "good-by, my little colonel, god bless ye! old jerry won't never forget your noble face as long as he lives." it would have seemed like insulting the old man to offer him money in return for his loving admiration, but the handsome gilt-edged bible that found its way to him soon after the departure of the regiment, was inscribed with the irregular schoolboy signature of "freddy jourdain, with love to his old friend jeremiah pike." as for the regimental standards, they were found to be rather beyond the capacity of a rockaway crammed full of zouaves, so tom insisted on riding on top of the baggage, that he might have the pleasure of carrying them all the way. up he mounted, as brisk as a lamplighter, with that monkey, peter, after him, the flags were handed up, and with three ringing cheers, the vehicles started at a rapid trot, and the regiment was fairly off. they almost broke their necks leaning back to see the last of "dear jessie," until the locusts hid them from sight, when they relapsed into somewhat dismal silence for full five minutes. as peter was going on to niagara with his father, mr. schermerhorn accompanied the regiment to the city, which looked dustier and red brickier (what a word!) than ever, now that they were fresh from the lovely green of the country. by mr. schermerhorn's advice, the party took possession of two empty fifth avenue stages which happened to be waiting at the fulton ferry, and rode slowly up broadway to chambers street, where peter and his father bid them good-by, and went off to the dã©pã´t. as peter had declined changing his clothes before he left, they had to travel all the way to buffalo with our young friend in this unusual guise; but, as people had become used to seeing soldiers parading about in uniform, they didn't seem particularly surprised, whereat master peter was rather disappointed. to go back to the zouaves, however. when the stages turned into fifth avenue, they decided to get out; and after forming their ranks in fine style, they marched up the avenue, on the sidewalk this time, stopping at the various houses or street corners where they must bid adieu to one and another of their number, promising to see each other again as soon as possible. at last only tom and freddy were left to go home by themselves. as they marched along, keeping faultless step, freddy exclaimed, "i tell you what, tom! i mean to ask my father, the minute he comes home, to let me go to west point as soon as i leave school! i must be a soldier--i can't think of anything else!" "that's just what i mean to do!" cried tom, with sparkling eyes; "and, fred, if you get promoted before me, promise you will have me in your regiment, won't you?" "yes i will, certainly!" answered freddy; "but you're the oldest, tom, and, you know, the oldest gets promoted first; so mind you don't forget me when you come to your command!" as he spoke, they reached his own home; and our hero, glad after all to come back to father, mother, and sister, bounded up the steps, and rang the bell good and _hard_, just to let joseph know that a personage of eminence had arrived. as the door opened, he turned gayly round, cap in hand, saying, "good-by, maryland; you've left the regiment, but you'll never leave the union!" and the last words he heard tom say were, "no, by george, _never_!" * * * * * and now, dear little readers, my boy friends in particular, the history of freddy jourdain must close. he still lives in new york, and attends dr. larned's school, where he is at the head of all his classes. the dashahed zouaves have met very often since the encampment, and had many a good drill in their room--the large attic floor which mr. jourdain allowed them for their special accommodation, and where the beautiful regimental colors are carefully kept, to be proudly displayed in every parade of the zouaves. when he is sixteen, the boy colonel is to enter west point academy, and learn to be a real soldier; while tom--poor tom, who went down to baltimore that pleasant july month, promising so faithfully to join freddy in the cadet corps, may never see the north again. and in conclusion let me say, that should our country again be in danger in after years, which god forbid, we may be sure that first in the field, and foremost in the van of the grand army, will be our gallant young friend, colonel freddy. conclusion. it took a great many saturday afternoons to finish the story of "colonel freddy," and the children returned to it at each reading with renewed and breathless interest. george and helen couldn't help jumping up off their seats once or twice and clapping their hands with delight when anything specially exciting took place in the pages of the wonderful story that was seen "before it was printed," and a great many "oh's" and "ah's" testified to their appreciation of the gallant "dashahed zouaves." they laughed over the captive tom, and cried over the true story of the old sergeant; and when at length the very last word had been read, and their mother had laid down the manuscript, george sprang up once more, exclaiming; "oh, i wish i could be a boy soldier! mamma, mayn't i recruit a regiment and camp out too?" "and oh! if i could only present a flag!" cried his sister; "i wish i had been jessie; what a pity it wasn't all true!" "and what if i should tell you," said their mother, laughing, "that a little bird has whispered in my ear that 'colonel freddy' was wonderfully like your little long island friend hilton r----?" "oh, mamma! why, what makes you think so?" "oh, something funny i heard about him last summer; never mind what!" the children wisely concluded that it was no use to ask any more questions; at the same moment solemnly resolving that the very next time they paid a visit to their aunt, who lived at astoria, they would beg her to let them drive over to mr. r----'s place, and find out all about it. after this, there were no more readings for several saturdays; but at last one morning when the children had almost given up all hopes of more stories, george opened his eyes on the sock hanging against the door, which looked more bulgy than ever. "hurrah!" he shouted; "aunt fanny's daughter hasn't forgotten us, after all!" and dressing himself in a double quick, helter-skelter fashion, george dashed out into the entry, forgot his good resolution, and slid down the banisters like a streak of lightning and began pummelling on his sister's door with both fists; shouting, "come, get up! get up, nelly! here's another sock story for us!" this delightful announcement was quite sufficient to make helen's stockings, which she was just drawing on in a lazy fashion, fly up to their places in a hurry; then she popped her button-over boots on the wrong feet, and had to take them off and try again; and, in short, the whole of her dressing was an excellent illustration of that time-honored maxim, "the more _haste_, the worse _speed_;" george, meanwhile, performing a distracted indian war dance in the entry outside, until his father opened his door and wanted to know what the racket was all about. "socks! socks! father!" cried george, joyfully. at this moment helen came out, and the two children scampered down stairs, and sitting down side by side on the sofa, they proceeded to examine this second instalment of the sock stories. they found it was again a whole book; and the title, on a little page by itself, read "german socks." "oh, i am so glad!" said helen. "these must be more stories like that dear 'little white angel.'" and so they proved to be; for, on their mother's commencing to read the first story, it was found to be called, "god's pensioners;" and commenced, "it was a cold--" but stop! halt! this book was to be devoted to "colonel freddy;" but if you will only go to mr. leavitt's, the publishers, you will there discover what was the rest of the second sock stories. the end. * * * * * transcriber's notes: obvious punctuation errors repaired. page 41, "dilemna" changed to "dilemma" (horns of this dilemma) page 81, "arttisically" changed to "artistically" (his fork artistically) http://www.archive.org/details/somelittlepeople00kriniala some little people by george kringle illustrated [illustration] new york dodd, mead & company publishers copyright, 1881, by dodd, mead & company. some little people. chapter i. 'lisbeth lillibun lived a hundred miles from london. if she had not lived a hundred miles from london, it is likely you would never have heard of her. she would have liked it better had somebody else lived where she did instead of herself. 'lisbeth was a very little girl when she found out that she lived a hundred miles from london. so was dickon, her brother, very little when he found it out, but he did not care so much about it; indeed i think he did not care at all. 'lisbeth always remembered the day upon which she found it out. she could not quite count a hundred herself at the time; she could count ten, but had not learned to count a hundred. she had heard gorham count a hundred, and knew that it was a great many more than ten. she thought that ten was a great many. she knew that ten miles must be a great way; she had several times walked a mile. she had walked a mile the day she discovered that it was a hundred miles to london. a hundred miles, she knew, was a very great way. 'lisbeth had concluded that she would like to live in london; that she would live in london; that london was the only proper place for any body to live. this was why she did not like to discover that london was a hundred miles away. but how she came to know anything about london, or to think it was the only proper place to live, i shall not pretend to say. she had gone a long way from home, that day, with dickon; as i said, she had gone a mile. it was a pleasant mile, straight across the fields, but they should not have gone so far. mother was at the mill; gorham had gone to school; trotty was asleep. dickon and 'lisbeth wanted to do something, or see something, so they wandered over the fields for a mile. if they had not gone so far, 'lisbeth would not have heard about the distance to london; she would have been more happy had she not gone so far; she would not have heard the men, with the packs on their backs, reading the mile-stone. she should not have gone so far from home; we generally come to some grief when we do something which is not quite right. 'lisbeth did. dickon wished to show her the flowers blooming by the way; he wished to show her the bees buzzing in the flowers; he wished to show her the bird warbling on the post, but she was looking at the two men with the packs on their backs; she was looking at them plodding along the way. they grew smaller and smaller to her eyes. they became but specks. they disappeared. she thought she would see them again in london. she would ask them how they got there, and how they liked it. so dickon watched the bees, a long while, by himself, and looked at the pretty flower-hearts; and the bird warbled on the post, but 'lisbeth knew not a thing about it. everything looked more happy than 'lisbeth; the grass that grew under foot, and the contented little weeds that nodded and dozed in the sun, and the flowers that hung just where they grew, with the most comfortable little faces, and the bird that warbled on the post. indeed, as to the bird, it might have been thought that he did not admire 'lisbeth's serious face, that he was too happy himself to be looking at any one who was not as happy as he was, for, though at first, with head turned toward her, he ruffled his throat, and swayed from side to side as he sung and sung, he suddenly grew mute, eyed 'lisbeth with one eye and then with the other, and like a bird who had made up his mind, turned his back upon her, still standing on the post, and lifted his head, and ruffled his throat, and filled the air with his sweet notes, without so much as turning an eye toward 'lisbeth as she stood. everything looked more comfortable than 'lisbeth. do you know why 'lisbeth did not look comfortable? if you cannot think why it was to-day, perhaps you may be able to do so to-morrow. if you cannot think why it was this morning, perhaps you may be able to do so by this evening. indeed, i think you will know without waiting to think a minute. dickon filled her hands with flowers--they were such sweet flowers, with such pretty tender faces; every one had something on its lips to say as it looked up. did you ever guess what the flowers were trying to say loud enough for you to hear? i think they all say something to us; some of us cannot hear what they say, some of us cannot guess what they say. the flowers looked brightly up at 'lisbeth; they did not look discontented, even though they were broken; they did not complain as she carried them away; they did not even turn to look reproachfully at dickon who had broken them from their stems. they were very bright flowers. 'lisbeth wished many times to know if dickon thought the men with the packs had reached london. she asked him so many times, that at length he laughed quite aloud, and yet she knew well enough that the men had to walk a hundred miles; she and dickon had walked but one. so she laughed too, when dickon laughed, and they both began chasing the butterflies that waved their beautiful wings over the field, their wings beautiful as the faces of the flowers; the wings which changed colors as they fanned them in the sun; the pretty wings which changed color every moment and which shone like flower petals sprinkled with gold. when they were tired of chasing butterflies they remembered that trotty might be awake; that gorham might have come home; that mother might have come from the mill, and have been looking for them; so they began chasing each other instead of chasing the butterflies, and it seemed to be much the best thing to do, for as they chased each other they came nearer to the door at home. indeed they should have thought of this before, for as they came bounding around the house, startling the swallows under the eaves, trotty was tumbling from the cradle, and mother was hastening toward the door. chapter ii. 'lisbeth did not forget that it was a hundred miles to london; she never forgot it. she did not forget the two men with the packs on their backs. at the same time she could not forget that a hundred was a great many. 'lisbeth told her mother that they could all put packs on their backs and go to london, that she wanted to live in london; but her mother only laughed, she did not want to go to london to live at that time; she did not want to walk a hundred miles with a pack on her back. after this 'lisbeth felt very much discouraged; she had believed that everybody would like to live in london; she did not know how to manage. if 'lisbeth had been more like the flowers she would have been contented to grow just where she found herself; but she was not like the flowers; she was not like them at all. she thought a great deal about getting to london. i am not sure that 'lisbeth thought enough about it to find out how she would like getting to london if mother did not go along; that is a part which i am almost sure that 'lisbeth did not think about, but she was very determined about getting there. she invited gorham to go with her, but gorham knew better than to try to do that; he knew that london was a great way off; that he could not go unless mother went too; he knew that 'lisbeth was very silly indeed. but 'lisbeth did not believe gorham when he told her all this; she had an opinion of her own. she and dickon used to play "going to london" every day, but this did not suit 'lisbeth. there were five mothers who went to the mill every day. 'lisbeth concluded to ask the little boys and girls belonging to these mothers to go to london with her. then she concluded she would only ask the boys; boys would not get frightened and run away; they would not let anybody pick her up and put her in a bag; dickon was a boy; she knew all about boys; she was afraid the girls would get put in bags. she told the girls they should not go. she stamped her foot at them; they should not go. indeed i do not believe they wanted to go, but the boys did; they liked it. they all concluded to start at once. [illustration] there were seven of them beside dickon. dickon carried a basket, as well as a stick with a rag upon it which they called a flag. 'lisbeth carried a flag too and walked in front. nobody was ever so proud in starting for london; nobody was ever so well pleased, or so little afraid of what might happen on the way, nor at the end of the way, nor at the end of the whole affair. nobody who thought so much of going to london, ever forgot so entirely to think about what was to be done when they got there; what was to be done for a supper, for a penny, for a roof, for a bed, for a second dress or pair of trousers, for a mother! nobody remembered anything but that they were on the way to london. they went a mile. they went across the fields, between clover tops and sweet grasses, and flowers with pleasant faces; they marched, and then forgot to march. 'lisbeth knew the way to the mile-stone, she knew which way the men had turned when they came to the forked road beyond. she remembered watching them out of sight. 'lisbeth was sure she knew the way to london. they went beyond the forks of the road; they went a great way. the little boys began to find out that they had gone a great way. they began to look back for the church steeple, but it was gone; they began to look back for the mill; but there was none. they began to be afraid. 'lisbeth was not afraid. she did not expect to see the church steeple. she did not expect to see the mill; she did not want to see them. she did want to see london. 'lisbeth looked so happy that the little boys forgot to march, and all drew up closer, and closer to 'lisbeth; they were sure she must have something to be happy about. nobody liked to say he did not feel happy, yet nobody was happy but 'lisbeth. all these boys usually were very happy, can you tell me why they did not feel happy now? dickon was the first to find out that everybody was keeping very close to 'lisbeth; that nobody looked pleased but 'lisbeth. "it's a dreadful way to london," said dickon. "i s'pose it is, dickon; but don't be 'scouraged," said 'lisbeth, striding on faster and faster. if she had seen a church spire ahead she would have believed she saw a london spire. "s'pose we don't go to london," said dickon, coming to a halt. "well, s'pose we don't!" said almost all the voices, some high and some low; but 'lisbeth almost gasped, "we will! we must! we've gone a dreadful way, we cannot go back any more." but the little boys were bigger than 'lisbeth; they knew now that she had made a mistake; they thought she might make a mistake about getting to london; they began to think they had made a mistake themselves. 'lisbeth stood stamping in the road; she stood stamping and crying as hard as she could, but even dickon began running toward the mile-stone, and what could she do but turn around and run too? she could do nothing else. she ran as fast as her feet would take her, but her feet were tired. the boys' feet were not as tired; the most of them were bigger than hers; they were bigger and not so tired, so they ran faster. 'lisbeth was left somewhere, i do not know where; left away off on the road carrying her flag, and trotting along at a great rate by herself. this was what she got by taking the boys. she sighed over her mistake, and she concluded that even dickon would not have cared had she been packed in a bag, and, indeed, it seemed he did not. to be sure dickon remembered her after a while, and ran as fast as he could to find her, and see that she was all safe and give her a kiss under her funny little hat to make it all right. but 'lisbeth felt herself hurt beyond measure, as well she might; only, if people will make mistakes they must take the consequences. if people will choose the boys when they should choose the girls, what can they expect; and if they will want to grow in london instead of wanting to grow where god put them, what can they expect? if we want to be very comfortable we must be contented where we find ourselves. chapter iii. the boys did not run very, very long before they saw the mill, and the steeple; they chased along the path in high glee after that, and did a great many things beside chasing along the path. but they all got home so long before the mothers came from the mill, that the mothers never knew that they had ever started for london until they were told. you may be sure they were glad that their boys had at length remembered what a naughty, foolish thing they were doing. but how the girls laughed! you may well know that the girls were pleased enough to see the boys come back. they laughed because the boys had been silly enough to start, and they laughed because they pretended to be amused at their coming back after they had started, but you and i know that they were glad enough that they did come back. as to 'lisbeth, she held her head very high when the girls met her. she did not like being laughed at. they asked her a great many questions about london, and asked her why she did not stay, and how she liked the boys for company. it was very trying. anybody but 'lisbeth would have cried, or flown in a passion, but 'lisbeth did not do either. so then the girls stopped laughing at her, and talked of something else. 'lisbeth would not talk of anything else. she was not contented enough in the place where she grew to talk of anything else yet. she believed the girls would have done better than the boys; that she had made a mistake. everybody liked 'lisbeth. she was not always doing naughty, foolish things like going to london, so the girls were ready to listen to her. she told them how the boys had behaved, and what she thought of them, and how determined she was to go to london, and how she believed that the girls would have behaved better, and invited them to start with her the very next day; and if there ever was a silly little girl in all the world, it was 'lisbeth. [illustration] the girls talked to their mothers that night about 'lisbeth's invitation, which was just the proper thing to do. the mothers were sorry that 'lisbeth was not better contented in the place where she found herself; they were so sorry that they concluded to try to make her better contented, so they told the big girls that they might go, but the very little ones must stay at home. a couple of little ones stole away with the rest and came to great trouble afterward, but the larger girls went with 'lisbeth. 'lisbeth was delighted the next day when the girls said that they would go; she had been thinking so much about it that she was unhappy. you should have seen them the next day when they started. they were a pretty party. 'lisbeth carried no stick this time, but a little basket, and generally managed to keep in front. there were ten of them. i think the old mile-stone would have laughed if it could, when it saw so many sweet faces bend over it to read about the miles, but then, of course, it could not. 'lisbeth had walked so far, and run so much the day before, that she was tired a little soon; she was even very tired indeed, by the time she reached the mile-stone. no one else thought of being tired, they had been quietly playing at home the day before. 'lisbeth did not say that she was tired, yet she really was. the girls' hands were full of flowers, their baskets and arms were full of flowers; they made balls of flowers and played with them as they walked. they left the mile-stone far away; they left the mill and the steeple far out of sight; they came to fields which were new to them. 'lisbeth grew more tired at every step. "we must hurry and get there," said 'lisbeth, and they all hurried; but they could every one hurry faster than 'lisbeth without getting so tired; all except the little naughty ones who stole away, but even they were not as tired as 'lisbeth, they had not walked so far and been so tired the day before. "i know we've come a dreadful long way," said 'lisbeth; but nobody seemed to think so, they all went on as fast as they could. 'lisbeth went on as fast as she could. "i 'most think we've come a hundred miles," said 'lisbeth. "oh no, we have not come many miles at all; it will take us all to-night, and to-morrow, and the next night, and more days and nights besides," said one of the girls, and the rest were all sure it would. "a hundred miles won't take that many days." "yes they will; they will take longer," said one girl, and the rest said so too. "but we will want supper." "we cannot have any." 'lisbeth was not pleased. "we must have some." "we cannot have any till we get to london." 'lisbeth was sure they must have some, but could not think in such a minute how to get it. "we will fish some up," said 'lisbeth, looking at the water. but nobody had any fish-hooks, though there was the water and perhaps the fish. "we will flim in and catch some," but nobody would allow 'lisbeth to swim in and catch some. "we will get some supper from a house." "we have no money." 'lisbeth looked down as she walked. she was perplexed. "we cannot have supper to-night, nor to-morrow night, nor the next night; nor breakfast, nor dinner." 'lisbeth looked up and smiled; she thought they were making sport about it, but the girls' faces were quite serious; besides, she began to wonder herself where supper and dinner would come from. "we must hurry most dreadful; the sun is skimming down low," said 'lisbeth; indeed it began to look late. "oh we will walk all night, and all day, and to-morrow night, and the next day and night and--" "i won't," said 'lisbeth, very decidedly. "you must." "i won't; i'm most dreadful tired now." "there's no house to sleep in; no, not even in london." 'lisbeth looked up at the girl in distress, then off in the distance. "not even in london!" repeated 'lisbeth; "not even in london." 'lisbeth wanted to stand still. "come along!" said several voices; but 'lisbeth did not wish to come along, and the little girls who were naughty and stole away were crying as hard as they could cry. "you must; you wanted to go, and we started, and you must go." "but i'm tired; i want to think a minute." "the sun is almost down." "i want to go home," said 'lisbeth. "we want to go to london, and if you do not go now you can never go." 'lisbeth stood up very tall. she was very grave. she looked straight ahead of her. "i will go back; i will never go," said 'lisbeth. then they all went back, and 'lisbeth never knew how pleasant home was, how good supper was, how dear mother was, how long a hundred miles must be, till she had managed to get back and fly into mother's arms, and eat mother's supper, and go to bed in the nice comfortable place where she belonged. 'lisbeth was very sick and very sore, and very uncomfortable for many days after trying to get to london, and did not forget very soon how far a hundred miles must be. chapter iv. 'lisbeth did not talk any more about london for a great while after that. she may have thought about it, but she did not do any more. she talked about other things. and she grew tall much faster, i have no doubt, than she would have done in london. the country air was good, and made her grow fast. you will see in the picture that she looks taller than she did when she stood thinking by the mile-stone. as she stood there, that day, she was listening to philip mcgreagor, a little boy who lived down the road, and dickon was listening too. dickon and 'lisbeth were dressed in their very best clothes. 'lisbeth's dress was quite new. a very pretty blue with dark speckles. dickon was sorry they had on their best clothes after listening to philip. philip was going to be rich. he had found a pearl in a mussel in a brook; why should he not find a million? why could not 'lisbeth find a million? 'lisbeth thought she could find a million; she thought she might be as rich as philip; then she could go to london. [illustration] 'lisbeth and dickon had been told not to go beyond the roller which laid on the pathway at a little distance from the house. mother was home. it was a holiday. she wanted her children under her eyes. besides, she had dressed them in their very best clothes. she bought those clothes; she had made them; she was a little bit proud of them. 'lisbeth forgot the roller; forgot the mother home from the mill; forgot the very best clothes; forgot everything but the mussels and the brook, and dickon forgot them too. there must be mussels in the brook, and pearls in the mussels. they would wade for them; they could see them at the bottom of the stream. they ran along the road to the woods; along the wood's path to the brook. dickon took off his shoes. 'lisbeth forgot to take off her shoes. they waded along in the water. 'lisbeth at first held the blue dress out of the water; then she forgot to hold it out of the water; then she slipped on a stone, and fell in, and dickon slipped, and splashed in the water in trying to keep her up; and the water, which had been clear as crystal, threw up its mud in indignation. they climbed out of the mud upon the grass, and looked at each other. 'lisbeth had lost her shoes. dickon looked at his own. they were all he had of his very best rig. how could they ever get home? dickon tried to wipe the mud off, to wring it out, but 'lisbeth would not be wrung out; she said she did not mind. but she did mind, because she would not walk or sit down, or do anything for a few minutes but stand and look. then she told dickon to come with her. he came, and they went down to dillon's cottage. "please, mr. dillon, put me in the wheelbarrow," said 'lisbeth. but dillon only stopped smoking his pipe to laugh. "please, mr. dillon, very fast put me in a wheelbarrow," said 'lisbeth, growing excited, "and roll me home." and mr. dillon did. 'lisbeth's mother looked from the door. she saw the wheelbarrow; she saw dillon's coat over something in the wheelbarrow. and other people looked from their doors and saw them too. 'lisbeth's mother was not pleased when she saw what was in the wheelbarrow, and 'lisbeth was no nearer getting to london than she had been before, because they were poorer instead of richer. 'lisbeth's mother cried over the spoiled clothes. 'lisbeth felt very badly about them, so did dickon, but feeling badly did not bring them back. they were nothing, from that time, but stained, and washed, and faded clothes instead of brand new ones. 'lisbeth thought about the clothes so much that she concluded she should try to do something to buy more. she began to think she was getting big enough. she contrived a great many ways, but she could not seem to decide upon anything. there was an old hogshead under the walnut tree, very high and old. when she had anything very important to think about she liked to climb up and sit on the top of the hogshead. she never allowed anybody to sit there with her. she climbed up on the hogshead and sat very still, thinking how to manage about the new clothes. suddenly she had a pleasant thought; she believed she had a thought that would answer. she jumped up and down so suddenly and so hard that the hogshead tried to move its head out of the way. it was scarcely polite for 'lisbeth to jump so hard on its head. it did move its head--or a part of it--and 'lisbeth sat inside the hogshead instead of outside of it. the mother found her there when she came home. had 'lisbeth picked the beans, as mother had told her to do, instead of trying to think about doing something else, she would not have been obliged to sit in the hogshead's mouth, nor to have eaten her porridge without beans. chapter v. 'lisbeth was awake bright and early next day; she had business to attend to. mother told her to be a good girl and take care of trotty. 'lisbeth said she would. i suppose she thought she would, but she forgot trotty very soon, for she saw neighbor gilham across the hill driving his sheep. away she went running and skipping. she could scarcely wait to get to neighbor gilham; but she was obliged to wait, for the path across the field and up to the hill was quite winding; she was obliged to follow the path. "good morning," said 'lisbeth, at length coming near neighbor gilham. "good morning," said he; "what brought you so far from home?" "i came on business," said 'lisbeth; "very important." "indeed! where are you going?" "nowhere. i'm going to be a sheep-boy. i made up my mind to 't yesterday, only i got in the hogshead." "and whose sheep are you going to mind?" "yours. i want to get money to buy a new dress, because i tumbled in the mud and spoiled my blue speckled, and i want to get rich to go to london." "hi! hi! that is it; and you are going to be a sheep-boy?" "yes, sir, please go home." "i cannot have a sheep-boy with skirts, he must have pants; the sheep would not like a sheep-boy with skirts." 'lisbeth hung down her head; she began pulling some berries which grew among the brambles. she did not say another word to mr. gilham; she only ran down the path. mr. gilham giggled a little to see her go. mr. gilham fell asleep; fell, rather into a doze. it did not seem to him many minutes from the time when he saw her run down the path, till he heard her say: "please go home, sir." "who are you?" said mr. gilham, rousing up. "i'm the sheep-boy 'lisbeth lillibun." [illustration] "i cannot have a sheep-boy in borrowed trousers," said mr. gilham, very decidedly; "it would not do." "yes it would! dickon said i might borrow 'm; yes it would do very much indeed." mr. gilham was so positive that it would not do that 'lisbeth began to cry. "sheep-boys never cry, never," said mr. gilham, and 'lisbeth wiped her eyes as fast as she could. "please to go home very fast," said 'lisbeth, but mr. gilham only laughed, which made 'lisbeth very uncomfortable. "please to don't laugh so much," said 'lisbeth; "more people 'n me tend to business." "sheep-boys must keep big dogs away; they would kill the sheep." "yes, when i see 'm coming." "sheep-boys must drive away men; they would steal the sheep." "yes; of course," said 'lisbeth, trying to look very tall. "sheep-boys must keep away lions, and tigers, and bears." "did you ever drive away any tigers and lions and bears, mr. gilham?" inquired 'lisbeth, looking straight in his eyes. "i never did, but my sheep-boy must; that is what i want a sheep-boy for." "he can't if there are none," said 'lisbeth, looking very wise. "but there might be." "i don't think there might be." "but if there should be?" "i'll--run and tell you," said 'lisbeth. neighbor gilham decided that this would never do, and 'lisbeth thought him unreasonable enough, but she felt half inclined to stamp her foot at him, and tell him to go home, but he looked so big and idle; he looked too big and idle to get home. she thought it was a pretty business, and so it was. she concluded that she had gone into the hogshead's mouth for nothing, and so she had. she had much better been picking beans that afternoon, to put in her own mouth, but people who are not contented with doing the right thing in the right place, often fall into worse places than the hogshead's mouth, and get into more business than they care to find. "please to tell me what i'm going to do?" inquired 'lisbeth. "you are going to run home and mind trotty," replied neighbor gilham. 'lisbeth was indignant enough. "dickon can mind trotty; he's mind'n her now. i'm not a minder." "i thought you did not look like a minder. sheep-boys are all minders, every one of them, so run home." 'lisbeth stood looking at him over her shoulder. she was too indignant for words. "if you want to grow rich," said neighbor gilham, a little bit sorry for her--a little bit sorry not to help her in getting into business--"if you want to get rich, go hunt in all the flowers between here and home; maybe you'll find one with a gold heart." 'lisbeth looked over her shoulder at him again very fiercely, and did not say a word; then she walked down the path. she would not let neighbor gilham see her hold up the flower cups and look in, or unroll the buds to peep toward the heart; she would not let him see her, but she did it for all that. when she began she did not know when to stop. she hunted and hunted and looked and looked. she found the sweetest bells among the grass, but she never knew that they were sweet at all, she was only looking in every bell for gold. she found the brightest flower faces looking up at her, but never knew that they were bright. she tossed them away from her. she found neither pence nor pounds. she found the prettiest flower-lips trying to speak to her, as she bent over them, but she heard nothing that they said, she heard not a breath; she scarcely saw that the lips were pretty at all. had she heard they would have told her to be content with the flower hearts, just as she found them; that they would give her themselves with their bright faces and patient hearts, which were better than hard hearts of gold. they would have told her to be content with growing where she was, and never to think about the world beyond the mile-stone, for contentment is better than gold itself. they would have told her to mind trotty, and pick beans, and help mother, which was the dearest, best, and happiest work she could ever find; but 'lisbeth would not hear, she would not hear at all. she did not know that neighbor gilham could see her from the hill. she forgot all about gilham; she forgot all about mother and trotty; forgot everything which she should have remembered, though she found no gold. neighbor gilham should never have sent her hunting for what he knew she could not find, he should not have told her to hunt for gold in the flower-hearts; he should have rather told her to listen to the lesson of the flowers and be content. but neighbor gilham did not tell her this, and she did not think of it, and though she came home no richer, she was hustled to bed before twilight and for her supper had neither porridge with nor porridge without the beans. chapter vi. when 'lisbeth's mother came home from the mill and found out how matters were going; when 'lisbeth came home in dickon's suit, from hunting for gold, she felt very certain that 'lisbeth was not as good as many little girls were, and this made her sigh very deeply. then she tried to think how to make her better; she scarcely knew how to begin, but she thought the best way, perhaps, would be to send her to school with gorham, and let dickon, who was a better "minder" than 'lisbeth, take care of trotty. 'lisbeth was not pleased at all. she did not think she would like to go to school, but her mother did not ask her opinion; it was not worth while. 'lisbeth went to school the next morning. the school teacher smiled at 'lisbeth when she came in. 'lisbeth did not smile; she looked very serious indeed. "how do you do, my dear?" said the teacher. "i do what i like, ma'am, most times," said 'lisbeth. this was very improper, but 'lisbeth did not know it; she believed she had answered correctly. [illustration] miss pritchet was not pleased, she only said, "sit down, my dear," and 'lisbeth sat down. by and by miss pritchet told 'lisbeth to come stand by her, and 'lisbeth came. "what have you been learning, little girl?" inquired miss pritchet. "i've been learning the way all around the country, and how to spike minnows in the mill race, and--" "tut, tut!" said miss pritchet. "i mean have you been learning to read and write and spell?" "no 'm, i never learned those at all, only to spell." "then you will like to learn i know; you will like to learn lessons." "is there anything about london in 'm?" "about london?" "yes 'm. london is a hundred miles away. i learned that a time ago." "when you can read you can learn more about london if you wish to; you will find it in the books." "yes 'm i want to," said lisbeth. "i wish to live there." "you must learn to be satisfied where you are," said miss pritchet; "you must not want to go to london." "i mean to." "i thought you were a good little girl; good little girls are satisfied here." "are they?" "yes, they are; you must be satisfied here." "but i don't mean to be." "oh!" said miss pritchet. "i mean to get to london very fast," continued 'lisbeth. "little girls who do not like to live where they find themselves often come to great trouble," said miss pritchet, with the corners of her mouth all drawn down. "maybe i may like to grow where i find myself when i get to london," said 'lisbeth a little despairingly. "you are not a very good little girl, i am afraid," said miss pritchet, but 'lisbeth could not think why miss pritchet said such a thing. "get your book now and come spell." "yes 'm," said 'lisbeth, like the best little girl that ever was. "can you spell?" "yes 'm. is london in this book? it begins with an l." "tut! tut!" said miss pritchet, "let me hear you spell that line." 'lisbeth spelled, she spelled better than miss pritchet had imagined. "that is a nice little girl. now take your book and go learn this next line." 'lisbeth took the book and sat down to spell. she got along nicely for a little way; then she came to the word aisle. she did not like the appearance of it. she did not like it at all. she ran up to miss pritchet's desk. "what does this spell?" she inquired. "that is aisle," said miss pritchet. "aisle!" repeated 'lisbeth; "i do not like spelling aisle with a i s l e; i like i l e." "hush, my dear." "but i don't like it," persisted 'lisbeth. "if i don't like it i don't." "go and sit down at once," commanded miss pritchet. 'lisbeth went and sat down. she learned every word but aisle. 'lisbeth was a very foolish little girl not to learn aisle. "come here, my dear," said miss pritchet; she gave 'lisbeth the words. 'lisbeth spelled them very well. then said miss pritchet, "aisle--" "i did not learn it," said 'lisbeth. "i said i did not like it and i don't." "but you must learn it, if you like it or not." "i must?" said 'lisbeth, in astonishment. "of course you must; we all must do a great many things which we do not like." "i don't mean to," said 'lisbeth. miss pritchet was astonished. "you must." "what must i do beside learning to spell aisle?" "nothing now!" "oh," said 'lisbeth, reassured; "i thought you said we must all do a great many things." "go sit down this minute," commanded miss pritchet, and 'lisbeth sat down, and she learned aisle, but she did not get home until very late, because miss pritchet said that such a very improperly behaved child should never go home at a proper time, from her school; but 'lisbeth could not see, with all her trying, what she had been improper about. had she learned aisle, though she did not want to? certainly she had. besides being perplexed about this, she was a little vexed with miss pritchet about something else. she had been given to understand that there was something about london in the books. she had been spelling words half the day and had not come to london. she spelled and spelled, but did not come to london. she felt herself imposed upon; she felt herself very much imposed upon. "please find london," asked 'lisbeth at length of miss pritchet. "london indeed? not for such an improper little girl. you must stop thinking about london, i say. you will be sorry if you do not stop. you must." "i must?" said 'lisbeth, a little meekly. "i must, must i?" but as she said it her voice sounded very much as though it said, "if i cannot, how can i?" "yes, you must;" and 'lisbeth went and sat down to think about it. this was 'lisbeth's first day at school and she had a great many more days at school, and learned a great many things every day, but one thing she did not manage to learn at all--to stop thinking about london. chapter vii. 'lisbeth did not find any word in her lesson the next day which she did not like. she spelled them over, and concluded that she liked them all pretty well. one word she looked at quite hard before she concluded that she liked them all, but she found out that she did not object to it. she spelled them so nicely that miss pritchet was quite pleased, and 'lisbeth had a little more time than she had the day before, to look around and find out what next was to be done. jemmy jenkins sat next to her; he was older than 'lisbeth, but that did not make any matter; he whispered to 'lisbeth behind his slate. she thought after this that she knew jemmy jenkins better than anybody else. at recess she and jemmy jenkins had a great deal of fun and jumped over miss pritchet's garden plot seventeen times each, without getting in the middle of it more than twice. "say, jemmy," said 'lisbeth, "i think this flower plot would look nice with its roots stuck up." "how?" inquired jemmy, ready for anything new and agreeable. "this way," replied 'lisbeth, and she seized a pretty marguerite in bloom, dug it up with a stick, and planted it upside down; the stick to which it was tied for support she propped under it to keep the roots in the air, for the marguerites have little tender stems. nobody happened to see. jemmy thought this would be very nice. he ran and got the spade, and took out his knife to cut sticks, and they soon turned miss pritchet's plants upside down, with the flowers in the ground, and the roots in the air, and nobody caught them at it. they washed off the mud at the pump, and then the bell rang and they all went in to school. [illustration] miss pritchet looked from the window; she caught a glimpse of the garden plot; she caught a glimpse of the roots in the air; she gave a little cry and ran to the door. 'lisbeth had forgotten the marguerites. she was trying to squeeze a big knot through the little hole in her shoe. "who did this?" miss pritchet almost screamed. "i don't know 'm!" replied everybody in a minute, seeing something had happened. 'lisbeth called, "don't know 'm!" together with the rest, without knowing what the confusion was about. when she found out what it was about, she only said "oh!" miss pritchet looked at her. she looked at miss pritchet. "did you do that?" inquired miss pritchet, pointing to the marguerites. "do what?" inquired 'lisbeth as politely as she could. "uproot my flowers." "were they yours?" "did you do it?" "yes 'm," replied 'lisbeth, trying to look as though nothing had happened. "i didn't think anybody tended 'm." "what did you do it for?" "to give 'm air," replied 'lisbeth. "please 'm may susan jordan put this string in my shoe, it won't never go in?" "come here this moment, you improper child!" said miss pritchet. 'lisbeth dropped her shoe-string and cowered up to miss pritchet like a startled dove. "didn't you know better?" "no 'm, i never did." "you will!" "will i? i want to know as much as i can," said 'lisbeth. need i say that miss pritchet taught her at once what it was to put the roots of marguerites to air? i need not tell you, i know. but one thing i will tell you, 'lisbeth bore her punishment by herself, and never told on jemmy jenkins; but jemmy jenkins was man enough to tell on himself, which was much the best way, and pleased miss pritchet so much that she broke off both punishments clear in the middle, and told 'lisbeth and jemmy jenkins that she would try not to remember about the marguerites at all, if they would try never to do so any more. yet when 'lisbeth, upon starting for home, told her that she had learned one thing that day, she had learned not to put the roots of marguerites to air, miss pritchet looked very stern, for which 'lisbeth could not account at all. gorham felt very much ashamed in having his sister treat miss pritchet's marguerites in such an unfeeling manner; he felt very much ashamed indeed. gorham was a very proper boy; he did not like to have his sister called an improper child. he would like to have told miss pritchet so, only that would have been improper. he was not pleased with miss pritchet; he was not pleased with 'lisbeth; he was not pleased with jemmy jenkins. after school he told jemmy jenkins what he thought of it; that it was not proper to treat anybody's marguerites in such a manner; that he was older and bigger and wiser than 'lisbeth, and should have told her better; and jemmy jenkins sat on a log rubbing his fingers together and thinking that gorham was not making any mistakes at all, though he, himself, had made a great mistake when he helped 'lisbeth plant the marguerites with the roots up. jemmy jenkins felt very much ashamed of himself, very much ashamed indeed, which was the very best way for him to feel, as he would not be likely, after feeling so much ashamed of himself, to do so again. 'lisbeth told her mother that she was learning a great deal at school; then the mother smiled, but when she heard about the marguerites she did not smile, she looked as stern as she could, and 'lisbeth thought this was beyond bearing, for everybody to look stern when she was learning and improving. but 'lisbeth did improve, she improved a great deal, only after she had been at school with miss pritchet a couple of years it turned out that 'lisbeth could not stay any longer with miss pritchet, could not stay any longer where she grew, but must go to a new place, and go a great way to get to it; in fact, after a great deal of talking, and a great deal of thinking, and a great deal of planning, 'lisbeth's mother found that she must--she could not help it, she could do nothing better--she must go to live in london. chapter viii. now 'lisbeth had never given up counting the miles to london. she had counted them up by tens many a time; she had counted them up by twenties; she had counted them up every way there was to count them, but they continued to be a great many miles. when she learned that she was going to grow in a new place, she believed that nothing would ever trouble her any more; that the world would be made over new. 'lisbeth could not help in getting ready; if she had done less in getting ready she might have helped her mother more. but mother helped herself. she sold a great many things, and she left a great many things to be sent after her, and she carried a great many things with her. mother cried when she left the old house, but 'lisbeth did not cry, she danced about on the points of her toes, till she laughed herself quite red in the face. 'lisbeth had always been a little foolish about london. 'lisbeth had wished a great while to go to london. she might have been a great deal happier in the beautiful place where she grew if she had not wished so hard; she had wished very hard and she got there. she had always believed that london was delightful; now she knew it was. she had lived in a dear little mite of a house, now she would live in a tall one. she had lived next and near to a great many people, now she would live under the roof with a great many people. she had lived on a lane, now she would live on a--well, a street which was too little and short and narrow to be called a street. 'lisbeth knew she had come to london because she was poorer, instead of because she was richer, but that did not make any difference. at the end of the street too little to be called a street, was a real, true, broad street, with fine houses packed together from one end to the other end of it. 'lisbeth slipped down the stairs, and along the little street to the corner. she threw up her hands in admiration. she looked up and down in delight. it was a fine thing to live in london, a very great and fine thing indeed. she ran quite out of the little street to look up and down the greater one. she saw the windows in rows, blazing with lights. she clapped her hands; she was delighted. she heard children's voices from an open window. she climbed stealthily up to the window and looked in. six children appeared before her, with very sweet faces, and pretty clothes, and the lights flashed down upon them from overhead. they were playing with dolls. they were playing so hard that they did not see 'lisbeth clinging to the sill. they were pretending that the dolls were talking to each other, that the one was the man and the other the mistress. the mistress was telling the man to take off his hat; but he was a stubborn man, he would not take off his hat. then the children all laughed, and 'lisbeth laughed so much harder than anybody else, that they all looked up and saw her hanging to the sill; then she dropped suddenly, and forgot that she had to drop so far, and had she not caught by her skirt and hung to the iron railing of the area, nobody knows how she might have been broken and battered and bruised by falling down the area before she had been in london over night. but she caught to the spikes and her dress was strong; and the children all ran and saw her hanging to the spikes, and somebody lifted her over and stood her on her feet and turned her around to see what she looked like, and then she ran home as soon as she could find out which way to run. she found out that the big street was nicer than the little one; that the people on the big street were different from the people on the little one. she found out that all the houses and streets in london were not just alike, and she found this out before she had gone to sleep the first night, in the little black room, in the big dirty house, in the little black street. but she was not sorry she had come to london. she wondered if everybody who lived in london had such lovely dolls as the mistress, such wonderful dolls as the man she had seen. she wondered if there were many children in london who wore such pretty clothes, and who played under such flashing lights, and who had such shining glasses, and tables, and chairs, and wonderful furniture of all kinds in the rooms where they played, and she concluded there must be; this time she did not make a mistake, for there were. [illustration] 'lisbeth noticed that her mother, and gorham, and dickon, and trotty did not go in any rooms of the tall house but two; she found that these two were at the top of the house, and that they had nothing to do with those underneath; she found out that there was a great clatter in the house, and in the next houses, as though the whole town were talking; she wondered how she liked it; but she concluded that she liked it very much; she was living in london, how could she help liking it? mother looked solemn, and the rooms looked black, and the things were tumbled upside down, and the air was hot, and the noise kept everybody awake, and everybody was half tired to death, and nothing was as bright as it might have been--not even the tallow candle--but they were in london, a hundred miles from the mile-stone; a hundred miles from the church steeple, and the mill, and the dear bit of a house where they had all grown, and rolled, and tumbled; and from the meadows with the flowers sleeping side by side; but they were in london, what did it matter? yet if they really were in london, while they slept they dreamed they were playing, and walking and talking under the shadow of the church steeple, and by the mill, and chasing butterflies over the meadows where the flowers were fast asleep, and forgot that the rooms were black, and the air hot, and that things were not as they had been. chapter ix. 'lisbeth learned a great many things very soon, though she was not at school. a very great many things indeed; and they were not always pleasant things. she learned, for one thing, that they grew poorer every day, instead of growing richer. she learned that the dirty little street, too little to be a real street, was not as pleasant to look upon as the garden plot at home, and the green of the fields over the way. she learned that mother grew thinner, and that the boys grew dirtier and crosser, and the people down stairs, she found out, were not like the mill hands at home, the mill hands and the little children. she saw a great many fine sights; she saw shops which made her open her eyes; and houses which astonished her to behold, and carriages which took her breath away, and people who overcame her altogether. she saw sights and shows such as she had never dreamed of; she saw a wax figure at the corner, with a fine curled wig, a figure which turned from side to side; she saw sights on every side to please her fancy, to delight her eyes, but only to make her remember afterward that she lived among a lot of dirty people, in two miserable old rooms, in a dirty little street; that she was really happier in the place where she grew first than in the place where she grew last; that made her wonder why she had ever sighed, and sighed, and wished to get a hundred miles away from that precious old mile-stone. she was not contented in london a bit more than she had been contented playing in the shadow of the steeple and of the mill. she was not contented at all. had she learned to be contented under the shadow of the mill and the steeple, under the walnut tree, and among the flowers around the mile-stone, she might have smiled brighter smiles in the dark little room in the dirty old house, in the dirty little street in london. a bright, contented flower says the same sweet words in the fresh green fields, and in a little flower pot up in a london window; a contented little flower always wears a bright face. a contented heart is always cheerful. 'lisbeth had never been contented. she was always wishing to be somewhere else. she was not contented before she went to london, that was the reason why she was not contented when she reached there. 'lisbeth tried to find some nice little london girl to talk to; she tried first to find a great many, then she tried to find one; she tried to find some nice little london boys; then she tried to find one nice little london boy; but the boys and the girls had not been taught to be very nice, in the dirty old house in the dirty little street, and though some of them had good enough faces, they had not pleasant ways, nor pleasant words. when gorham and dickon wanted to play they found nobody but boys who were not comfortable boys to play with; at first they did not play with those uncomfortable boys at all; then they played with them a little, and then they played with them more, so that dickon and gorham became after a time not as good and pleasant themselves as they once were. one day there were some new people came to live in a room down stairs; a mother and father and three little boys. they looked as though they had never lived in such a dirty street before. they were good little boys, with pleasant ways, and pleasant words, and very pleasant faces. 'lisbeth liked to peep in and help them play; she liked to play with them very much; they made her feel happier. 'lisbeth had come to london, but she was not very happy; she did not say so, but it was true just the same. these little boys had no toys to play with, but they were good and contented just the same. they played with whatever came in their way; they were as happy in playing with the old chairs as many boys are with their rocking-horses. they were contented little boys. but they were very poor; 'lisbeth knew they were; she was very sorry that they were so poor, but they were not. they did not care at all. she was sorry that the mother and father had to leave them so much alone; perhaps they may have been sorry themselves about this, i do not know. how 'lisbeth laughed when she saw them playing with the brooms. they made a procession, that is they all walked in a line; the tallest at the head, and the little one coming last, and each one carried a brush or broom with a long handle, and if soldiers were ever proud of their guns, so were these little boys proud. perhaps they were more proud than soldiers with guns. [illustration] 'lisbeth knew that these little boys were alone a great deal, because their mother and father were so poor, and were obliged to go and earn all they could, and she used to run in very often to see how they managed. but these were contented little boys; they were contented where they found themselves, and that was the reason why they got along so well. if they had been discontented they would have gone out of their mother's rooms into other rooms in the house, and then into the street, and into the gutter. then they would have become soiled and spoiled, and changed altogether, but they were contented with their mother's rooms, and her chairs and tables, and frying pans, and brooms, and all the things which they found there; so they did not get soiled or spoiled or changed, but kept good and bright, pleasant little pictures as you would find in a day's walk. 'lisbeth found, after she came to london, that there was a great deal to be done besides play; she had to learn to sew and help mother earn some money, but she was not very big and could not do much, only try. at first 'lisbeth believed she could make a great deal of money. she knew people must make money in london; she had heard so. besides, people seemed to spend so much that there must be some way of getting it. 'lisbeth was sure there was. she tried to make money in several ways. this was a mistake; she should have been content with trying to help all she could at home, and then mother would have had more time, and so could have made more money, which would have helped them all. but this was not 'lisbeth's way of doing. she tried to make a way of her own. one day 'lisbeth saw a little boy sweeping a street crossing; she had seen boys do this before, but had never thought anything about it. this time she thought about it because she saw some gentleman drop a little coin in the little boy's hand. this was a revelation to 'lisbeth; it taught her something which she did not know before. in another hour 'lisbeth was sweeping a very dirty crossing, and she swept it and swept it over again; she swept until there really was not another speck to sweep, and the people, by the dozens and scores and hundreds walked over that crossing, and carried to it more mud for 'lisbeth to sweep away, but nobody put an atom of anything in 'lisbeth's hand for sweeping it, though she stood there the whole long day; and she found out still another time that money was hard to pick up even in london, and if she stopped that day, in passing, as she generally did to look at the wax figure in the curled wig, at the corner of the street, she did not care a fig about it. chapter x. 'lisbeth was quite down-hearted that day after sweeping the crossing; she was discouraged enough, especially as her mother was greatly grieved at her going away and staying so long, and reproved her very severely. she felt very much discouraged indeed, but could not help believing in spite of it all that something would turn up, which would be bright and pleasant in such a fine city; she could not believe anything else. as she came home that day she popped her head in the door of the room on the lower floor, to see how matters were getting on there. she shut the door again carefully, without saying a word. on the floor were scattered many things, and in the corner, like so many leaves blown together, were the three little boys fast asleep. how tired they must have been; how hard they had played; indeed they had played too hard, for near them on the floor lay the remnants of mother's good sweeping brush which they had played quite to destruction. they were tired completely, and never knew that 'lisbeth had looked in upon them to find out how they were getting along. [illustration] i wonder what they were dreaming of as they slept; i believe they must have been pleasant dreams, unless they were dreaming about the broken brush--they were such comfortable-looking little faces, and they had such comfortable hearts, because they were good, and comfortable hearts help bring bright dreams. when the mother came home i think she must have smiled to see them heaped in the corner fast asleep, but i suppose she had found them heaped in a corner asleep many a time. i hope she did not scold very hard about the broken brush, and i am almost sure she did not. 'lisbeth, as i said before, felt very much discouraged that evening. she even felt dull the next morning, and the next afternoon. the mother had gone out that afternoon to take home some sewing; the boys were playing outside. 'lisbeth had nobody to talk to. she concluded to talk to herself. she got up on a high three-legged stool in the corner, and sat with her face to the wall; she wanted to think. she could not think if she was looking out of the window, or around the room, or if she sat in every-day fashion on a chair or on the floor. she sat in the darkest corner she could find. "'lisbeth lillibun," she said to herself, "you have done nothing for yourself yet by coming to london; you have done nothing for yourself yet;" and it seemed that all the glasses and crockery on the table, and on the shelf, and even the coffee pot turned up on the stove to dry, jingled and rattled and laughed; but, of course, they did not. "you must be up and a-doing, 'lisbeth; it is time;" then the tin tea pot, and the coffee pot, and the candlestick turned up on the stove to melt the old candle out, and the spider and the skillet and the dipper seemed, every one of them, to be giggling, and 'lisbeth looked around at them; but of course it was only a fancy. "you have been making a goose of yourself, and most of all in sweeping a crossing dry for people to spatter with mud; you should be ashamed of yourself to be such a silly, and sitting where you are instead of being sitting somewhere else," and the tongs did clap together, and the poker did roll over, and the gridiron did give a clink against the wall, but i think the wind must have blown down the chimney. 'lisbeth was insulted, however; she did not believe in the tins and tongs making fun of her. she got down from the stool, and put her bonnet on, and then changed it for her hat with a ribbon tied around it, and then she went out where there were no tongs to clap at her; but of course it was only a fancy of 'lisbeth's about the tongs, for how could a tongs clap unless it was clapped? it was wrong for 'lisbeth to go out; her place was in the house. but she thought that it happened just as well that she did go out, for as she went down stairs she thought a thought, which she might never have thought had she remained sitting upon the stool. she went down stairs and along the little street to the corner, and opened the door of the store in the window of which stood the wax figure with its wig, which was standing still just then, instead of turning gracefully from side to side. she opened the door and went in. "what do you want, sissy?" inquired a pleasant little man. "i want to stay, sir, and make wigs." "you want to stay and make wigs!" "yes, sir, i do," replied 'lisbeth. "bless me!" exclaimed the pleasant little man, "this will not do." "oh, yes, it will, sir," replied 'lisbeth, untying the knot in the strings of her hat, "it will do very well. i have not been able to think of any thing that would do before." "but bless me!" "indeed i will, sir, if that is all," said 'lisbeth, wondering how to do it, but taking off her hat. "i don't want any wigs!" "you don't?" replied 'lisbeth, filled with astonishment. "no, i don't; i really don't!" 'lisbeth saw that he had plenty of hair, and as he rubbed his head she supposed he was remembering this. "other people do," said 'lisbeth, reassured; "i see a good many of 'm every day who do; you can sell 'm." "sell 'm? i do sell 'm. i sell 'm when i can; but bless me!" "where shall i get the hair to make 'm of?" inquired 'lisbeth, preparing to go to work. "but i don't want 'm!" "oh!" replied 'lisbeth, not a word else; but the pleasant little man snapped his fingers at her and beckoned her around the counter, and under the shelf of the beautiful big window, and made her screw herself up into a button which nobody could see, and pulled a curtain down over her, and showed her, before he pulled the curtain down, how to pull a wire very gently and tenderly to make the wax figure in the curled wig turn from side to side, and she did it. she pulled it this way, and she pulled it that way. she heard the people outside tramping up to the window and tramping away; she remembered how she had tramped up and tramped away. she laughed to hear them tramping, because she knew that a great many of them had their mouths open as well as their eyes, as they saw the wax figure, in a wig, turning from side to side. she would never open her mouth as well as her eyes again, when she saw a wax figure turning from side to side. she was certain she never would. chapter xi. how long 'lisbeth might have sat under the shelf, and under the curtain, earning pence and pulling wires, and forgetting that her mother was looking for her, had she not fallen into a doze, i cannot say. she might have been there till now; she might have been there ten years to come; but she did doze and she did wake up; she had swept the crossing hard enough the day before to be tired, and she was; she was tired, and it was coming night, and she did doze, and she did wake up, and she did wake up with a start which broke the wire, and twisted the head of the wax figure clear out of place, so that it looked in the shop instead of out of it, and made a confusion inside, and outside, and on all sides, seldom made by any wax figure in any wig since the beginning of time. 'lisbeth told the pleasant little man that she could not help it, and he told her that he could not help it, and 'lisbeth went home--to be sure seven pence richer, but a good deal flustered and disappointed, and with the determination never again, while she lived and breathed, to have anything to do with, or even so much as to look at any wax figures or any wigs. 'lisbeth's mother told her that had she waited, and asked her advice, instead of leaving her to such distress in looking for her, she would have told her, in the beginning, to have nothing to do in the matter of wigs, with which she was not acquainted, and reproved her for staying away till the candle was lighted on the shelf; and 'lisbeth, if she was no more unhappy than she had been when she stood by the mile-stone, was certainly no more happy. to be sure she was richer. though she had broken the wire, the pleasant little man had given her seven pence, though she had gained nothing more; but the bother, now, was to know what to do with it. had it been seven thousand pence she might, perhaps, have known better what to do with it; but seven pence were of so much more consequence; being a little it had to go a great way. there was no trifling to be done about it. she knew the importance of it. she was awake half the night considering how to spend it, and the other half she was dreaming of losing and finding it, until by morning her head was almost split in two. had 'lisbeth run home and given the seven pence to her mother to buy a nice platted loaf or a piece of bacon, her head had not almost split in two; but 'lisbeth was always making trouble for herself. though the thoughts and worry about the pence almost split her head, she was not in a condition in the morning to know what to do with the pence. she had her own pence and her own plan, had she had less of her own she would have been more comfortable. but 'lisbeth was 'lisbeth, and if her mother sighed about it, she could not see any way of making her anybody else. when breakfast was over that morning the mother went to carry some sewing home, and while she was gone 'lisbeth thought she would go out too. this was very wrong; very wrong indeed, but 'lisbeth did not wait to think about that. she took a basket when she went out, and she took her seven pence. she felt herself very important indeed, though really she was nobody but a disobedient little girl. she came to a cake shop where all kinds of cakes were to be bought. "i'm going to keep store," said 'lisbeth to the shopman, "and i want some wonderful nice cakes." "you do, do you?" said the shopman; "let me see your money." "seven pence," said 'lisbeth, displaying it on the counter; "i want to spend it all." "you do, do you? where's your store?" "in my basket," said 'lisbeth, but there was nothing in her basket but a bit of brown paper. "what would you like to buy with your seven pence?" asked the shopman. "a great many things," said 'lisbeth; "but i think i will buy some of these cakes." "humph," said the shopman; "pick out nine of 'm." 'lisbeth picked them out. they were cakes of different shapes; quite a stock for seven pence, and no mistake. 'lisbeth arranged the cakes along the bottom of the basket in two rows; four in one row and five in the other. then she started off. she never was more pleased in her life. she was more sure than ever that she was somebody, that she was somebody important. she expected that every one of those cakes would be gone before she had time to look around. she was surprised to find that instead of everybody stopping to look at them, nobody stopped to look at them at all. she was surprised to find everybody going by as though there was a pot of gold, at the other end of the street, which they were hurrying on to get, while they did not so much as glance at her, or at the cakes in her basket. this would never do. she would walk up and ask them to buy. so she walked up and asked them, but they did not hear her, or did not want to hear her, and did not stop walking as fast as they could, except one lady with two little girls who bought two for two pence. 'lisbeth thought these were nice little girls; she wished afterward she had asked them to buy four for four pence. nobody else bought any. she walked and walked, and stood; and the mother came home and wondered where she was, and looked out of the window, and out of the door, and listened on the stairs, but could make nothing of it at all; and the fact was, that when the mother was listening on the stairs, and looking out of the doors, and sighing to herself about ever having come to london, 'lisbeth was sound asleep, at the corner of the street, seated on the sidewalk with her back against the wall, and her basket standing beside her, and the mother might as well have listened for her feet as for the buzzing of a china bumble-bee with glass legs. [illustration] chapter xii. 'lisbeth was asleep. she was tired enough to sleep well. she was better off asleep than awake; had you asked her she would have told you so. as she slept she dreamed, and as she dreamed the forms in the basket became living things, and the pence in her pocket changed to pounds, and things which were not became to her as though they were. in fact 'lisbeth doubted that she was 'lisbeth, and who knows but had she dreamed long enough she might have been the queen herself? the bird, in the basket, stood on its gingerbread legs, which were changed to real bird's legs, and it sung to her sweeter than the bird at the mile-stone sung on the post. the little dog forgot that it was gingerbread, and barked and sprung about, and shone like satin in its pretty black coat; it barked in a charming fashion. the cat? it was beautiful as only cats in dreams can be, as it sat on the handle of the basket; it was a beautiful picture to behold. but what amused and delighted her more than the bird or the cat or the dog, was the real live elephant which floated in the air without wings, and the two charming little angels, with little brass crowns, who sung sweeter than the bird itself, and blew about like thistle-down, and astonished her more than all the shows of london. but the most delightful gingerbread of all was the gingerbread parrot, which was no more a gingerbread, but a real, true, live, green and gold parrot which tapped at her hat and called, "come, lady 'lisbeth, here is a coach and four, to ride to your door." then 'lisbeth woke up, and when she saw that the parrot and the angels and the elephant, and the dog and cat, and even the bird, which had been singing on the bottom of the basket were all gingerbread, she flew up in a passion and threw them all to the ground, and had them all to pick up again. [illustration] when she went home she told her mother everything that had happened, and the mother told her something that was going to happen, and they had a great deal to say to each other. i think i would have said more to her than her mother did, but she said all she wanted to, which was possibly enough. but when she told 'lisbeth what was going to happen, she expected to see 'lisbeth fly up in a great passion; instead of this, however, 'lisbeth began laughing, and laughed so hard that her mother had to pat her on the back to make her stop. in fact, when the mother was living with her children in the old home, and suddenly grew poorer, she had concluded to go to london, where she might sew, she thought, for large prices, and so get rich faster, but when, after she got to london, she found the prices were little, and her money was growing less, and her boys were getting spoiled, and 'lisbeth was getting to do so many things she should not do, she wished she had never seen london. then she began thinking that it would be just as easy not to see it any more, as it had been to come a hundred miles to see it. then she concluded not to see it any more, and this was what she told 'lisbeth when they both had so much to say to each other. the next morning 'lisbeth awoke with the impression that something very pleasant had happened, or was about to happen. she forgot to help her mother clear away the breakfast dishes, and sat on the three-legged stool in the corner quite by herself, with her face to the wall. the mother saw her sitting there as she popped her head in the door, but she would not call her; she began to think she was grieving about leaving london, yet she might have known better by the delight of her morning embrace, if by nothing else. at any rate she would let her alone; she would let her think it out. so she cleared up the dishes and brushed up the floor, and put in the stitches, and packed her parcel and said "good-by" to 'lisbeth, for she was going to the shop. 'lisbeth was yet on the stool when her mother went out of the door. "bother!" she exclaimed, twirling about as she found herself alone. "'lisbeth lillibun you are a humbug, you are indeed. you are a humbug and no mistake; here you have been to london all this time and made only two pence, and seven gingerbreads, and here is your mother troubled for a bit of money to get back to the old place. why is it you cannot help her?" had 'lisbeth remained sitting on the stool she would have continued talking to herself, which might have resulted in no harm, and might have kept her quiet and good, like a pleasant, dutiful child till the mother came, but 'lisbeth leaped off of the stool as a thought came into her mind which might never have come there had she not leaped the moment she did. there was one trait in 'lisbeth which is not in everybody. when 'lisbeth concluded to do a thing she did it; she did not wait until the next week or the next month, she did not even wait until the next day. you will say this was very clever and nice of 'lisbeth to be so much in earnest; and so it might have been had she mixed the earnestness with the right kind of consideration for her mother's wishes. indeed, in that case she would have been such a very fine girl that ten chances to one there would never have been any story about her at all; but she did not mix her earnestness with anything but her own judgment, and she made just as real a mistake as you would make should you mix your lemonade with salt, instead of sugar--it was the wrong kind of mixture altogether. when i say of 'lisbeth that when she had a thing to do, she did it, that she did not wait until the next week, or next month, or next year, you will say: "how very delightful; how very much nicer and better 'lisbeth must have been than most other people;" but when i tell you that she thought she knew what was best to be done so much better than anybody else, that she did what she thought best without asking her mother, you will know in a minute that 'lisbeth was not as "nice" as a great many other people. how could she be? why, she could not be at all. well when 'lisbeth thought the thought as she leaped off the stool, she did not wait until the next day to do what she thought about doing, nor till the next hour. she did not wait to consult her mother. as usual, she mixed her own judgment with her earnestness, instead of making use of her mother's judgment, and that was the cause of the confusion. children's earnestness directed by the mother's judgment is a very different thing from children's earnestness directed by the children's judgment; there is as much difference between the two as there is between lemonade mixed with sugar and lemonade mixed with salt. 'lisbeth thought it would be pleasant to get everything pulled down, and turned inside out, and packed up ready to leave london; it would be that much done toward starting, it would be a great help, it would be delightful. had she waited for mother's judgment she would have learned that mother would not get off from london for two months at any rate, that the things must not be pulled down until it was time to pack them up, that it would not be time to pack them up until just before they started. but 'lisbeth mixed her earnestness with her own judgment. chapter xiii. 'lisbeth said to herself: "who knows but we shall go to-day or to-morrow, if mother gets the money; she said she would go when she got the money." 'lisbeth had found something to do at last. gorham had gone with the mother to help carry her parcel, and dickon was playing outside. dickon's two feet had come in, but they had gone out again. they so often went out after they had come in that this was nothing uncommon. at first 'lisbeth did not care about it; it made no difference to her that they had gone out, she began work by herself. she was a fast worker, an earnest worker, a worker who made things fly when she set about making them fly. i do not mean that she made them really fly up with wings, but she made them get from one place to another so fast that we may say she made them fly. she made the dishes fly out of the closets; the platters, the pots, and the patty pans; the stewpans, and spiders, and skillets; the boilers and broilers, and dippers; the glass jars, the stone jars, the basins; the boxes and bundles and baskets; a pretty job she was making of it, and, in the middle of it all, her face shone like a young sun, she was so delightfully busy. suddenly 'lisbeth remembered that she was working very hard, that dickon was not working hard, that he was doing nothing but playing on the stairs; this was not pleasant to remember. "do come here, dickon," called 'lisbeth, over the railing, and dickon came. "pull down everything very fast," commanded 'lisbeth; "mother is going from london dreadful quick, the minute she gets the money; i shall pack things and get ready." dickon did not like to pull them down; he did not approve of packing, he wanted to play. "you are a miserable boy, dickon, worse than most any boy to leave me here by my lone self." dickon looked around and began to think so too. "p'haps mother don't want to be packed." "yes, she does; she does very much indeed; bring the things here, dickon; pull'm all down here." dickon did not like to pull them down; he was not sure even yet that mother wanted to be packed. "pile'm down, dickon!" commanded 'lisbeth, and dickon piled them down. "hadn't you better fix some before you get more?" "i'll fix 'm when i get 'm all down here." "what? are you going to get all the dishes and--" "go on i tell you, dickon lillibun! will you go on?" dickon went on; so did 'lisbeth. there was no place to walk, there was no place to sit down, there was scarcely place to stand; there was no place to put anything, there was scarcely anything more to put. everything was pulled out, and heaped about, and 'lisbeth stood in the middle of them. "now, dickon, this does look like doing something, don't it?" dickon thought it did, dickon capered over everything and started for the door. "do not go!" commanded 'lisbeth. "do not go! do not dare to go!" but dickon was gone. "dickon!" called 'lisbeth over the railings, "dickon!" but dickon was out of sight and hearing. "oh that dreadful dickon!" moaned 'lisbeth, as she fluttered down the stairs to bring him back. had dickon never stopped work, had dickon never run away, had 'lisbeth never fluttered after him, things might have been different. i say they might have been, because, as i explained before, nobody could be quite sure as to what might or might not have been concerning 'lisbeth; i say therefore that they might have been different. as it was dickon did run away, and 'lisbeth did flutter after him, and, as she went, she thought of a plan she had not been able to think of while sitting on the three-legged stool with her face to the wall--she thought of a plan to get money. 'lisbeth forgot that she was fluttering after dickon; she forgot that dickon had gone at all; she forgot everything but that she had thought of a plan to get money. she forgot about dickon, but kept on running faster and faster until she was red in the face and out of breath. "please, sir," said 'lisbeth, gasping for breath, and rushing up to a little spare man in a little spare coat, who lived in the dirty old cellar of the sixth house from 'lisbeth's, and bought paper and rags; "please, sir, come dreadful quick!" "how?" screamed the little man; "how?" he meant to say "what for? please tell me what is the matter?" but he said "how?" "with your feet! fast, dreadful fast," gasped 'lisbeth. no wonder she gasped for breath, she had come faster and faster from the top of the house to the cellar of the sixth house below, without even taking time to think; she did not stop afterward to think. "my feet? my feet?" "please to come! oh, please to come!" pleaded 'lisbeth, fairly dancing up and down. "my hat, my hat! oh, my hat!" pleaded the little man, turning and twisting all about; "my hat! my hat!" "please to come! never mind no hat!" begged 'lisbeth, half going, half staying, and still trying to catch her breath. "oh, my head, my head!" almost sobbed the little man, holding his two hands over his head as he ran after 'lisbeth, going faster and faster with every step. "my! my! oh my!" gasped the poor little man, still holding his head with his two hands, and taking hard, short breaths, as he went up one flight of stairs after another, and bobbed himself forward to try to catch a glimpse of 'lisbeth and see that he was really following the right way and getting in the right door. "my! my! oh my!" he said it over again when he had bobbed his head in the right door. "vat has happened? vat has happened? oh my! my! vat has happened?" "it has not happened at all; it would a' happened if you had waited for a hat." "vat? vat?--my! my! my!--vat?" "mother would a' come, and then she mightn't let me sold her pots and kettles and dishes 'stead of packing 'm up," said 'lisbeth, puffing hard for breath. "please to buy 'm quicker 'n anything." the little man did not choke; he only looked as if he was going to. 'lisbeth flew toward him and gave him a crack on the back, she thought that might do him good, but it did not help the matter at all; he looked more like choking than ever. 'lisbeth seized a dipper; she did not mean to do anything unmannerly, she did not indeed, but she gave him a mouthful of water so suddenly and quickly that the little man choked, and perhaps it was best he should. i shall always think it was best he should, not that the little man was bad, or thinking about being bad, only that he was in danger of getting to be bad if he had never been so before; he was in danger of doing a wrong thing; in danger of buying a very great deal for a very little price. i did not say he was bad enough to do it, only it was best he choked, and kept choked long enough for 'lisbeth's mother to come tripping up stairs with a new bundle and a little money, and a light heart, considering all things--for was she not going to begin right away to save up and to get back to the old house, the old home, in a month or two? as the little man stayed choked until after 'lisbeth's mother had tripped to the door, and tossed away her bundle, and held up her hands, and implored to be told what was the matter, i shall never be able to say certainly that he was an honest little man, but i shall always believe that he was, and that it had been the thought of so much wickedness that almost choked him before he had the crack on the back or the mouthful from the dipper. you would have choked, or almost choked, of course you would. the astonishing part was that 'lisbeth did not choke herself, but she never thought of such a thing, she only said, when her mother asked her what was the matter, "nothing's the matter at all; but i'm most dreadful sorry you come just at this important minute; i was going to s'prise you with some cash straight off short, and the man must just fall to choking before i could get a living thing sold." another surprising thing is that the mother did not choke, but she did not. perhaps the reason was because she did not want to; the little man looked uncomfortable and he had been choking. at any rate she did not choke. if the little man had not looked so uncomfortable, and ready to get away, the mother might have fastened the door, and shouted fire, and armed with the tongs, and screamed for help, and startled the house, and frightened the street, and added confusion to confusion, but she only pulled the door open on a bigger crack to let him run out and down the stairs, holding his hands over his head and gasping, "my! my! my! my head!" chapter xiv. all that the mother did after the little man was gone i shall not pretend to say. i was not there at the time. had i been there i would have been obliged to stand with my feet outside and my head within; how could i have had both head and feet within when there was no room to stand? but i was not there, and never have been sorry that i was not. you are not sorry that you were not there? of course you are not. 'lisbeth would have been glad not to have been there, i suppose; the mother herself would have been more comfortable somewhere else, even if it had been in the street tugging home her bundle of clothes to be sewed. i was not there at the time, but i am certain that, by the next morning, the dishes stood in rows, the pans hung on the hooks; the jars and jams, and pots and kettles, and skillets, and spiders, and spoons, and dippers, and rollers, and beaters, and boilers, and broilers, and bundles, and boxes, and baskets, and things of all names and all sizes were sleeping as sweetly as such necessities ever sleep, in the cupboards and closets and dangling from the hooks, and the mother was putting in her needle and pulling it out, and nobody would have imagined that things had ever been otherwise. yet things had been otherwise; we all know they had. things might have been otherwise still had not 'lisbeth's mother been a very decided mother; a mother who knew how things should be and how they should not be, and how little children should do and how they should not do, and how to get disordered things back into order as they should be, and children who were doing as they should not, for a little while at least, to do as they should. she said to 'lisbeth, as she stood with her two feet on the two places where the little man had stood: "'lisbeth, you are a very hindering child!" had she said anything else, anything else at all, 'lisbeth would not have felt it so much, she would not have been so entirely lifted out of herself, out of her own opinion, and made to see herself where her mother put her, back in the right place where every naughty child should be put as soon as possible. 'lisbeth gasped for breath. she looked fiercely up at her mother, and down at the floor; she looked within herself, and at the ugly picture of herself which her mother had just showed her. she saw that the picture was like her, that she was "a hindering child." it was a blow she was not prepared for. had her mother said anything more immediately 'lisbeth would not have seen so well that the mother's words were true; but she did not say any more immediately. she stood perfectly still with her feet in the two places where the little man's feet had been. 'lisbeth was very uncomfortable when she heard those words repeated; indeed she was very angry; she looked just as naughty as naughty could be; she looked like a girl who was cross because somebody was doing something very wrong to her. then she did not look as naughty as naughty could be, she looked disappointed and sorry, and repentant, and humble, and this was because she saw that she was "a hindering child." at first she believed that she was a helping, comforting child, now she saw that she was not. she saw it as we sometimes see a flash of lightning. 'lisbeth did not mean to be "a hindering child," but she was one. "why am i a hindering child?" inquired 'lisbeth when she could catch her breath. "because you work by your own head instead of by mine," said the mother as she put one foot and then the other forward among the pots and kettles. but 'lisbeth stood still in the middle of the floor considering what her mother meant, and if what she said was true, and if she was always to work the wrong way instead of the right way, like an engine which will run back instead of forward; and how long she might have stood considering, and how long she might have worn such a troubled face, and how long she might have felt such a lump in her throat, had not her mother come and stood before her, clearing a place for her feet as she came, i shall never pretend to say. but the mother did come and stand before her, and 'lisbeth put her two hands in her mother's two hands, and looked up in her mother's face, into her mother's troubled eyes, and her mother knew that whatever else she might do, in days to come, she would never again try to move her before the time. the mother knew this as well as i do, but i know this and more beside. as i said before, i do not know exactly all that was done that afternoon, before the rooms and the mother and 'lisbeth all grew quiet, and in place and comfortable, but i know something more important than this; i know that 'lisbeth, after she had settled other matters began to settle her own mind as to the true meaning of her mother's words about her making use of the wrong head. she was obliged to think a great deal about it before she was able to settle it in her mind. it took a very great deal of thinking. how could she use her mother's head? how can you and i use our mothers' heads? of course you know we could do it, how 'lisbeth could have done it, but lisbeth had to think hard about it before she knew. when she had made it quite sure in her own mind how it was to be done, she came to another trouble, she was not quite sure that she would like to do it. she thought a great while as to what she was to do about it; she thought a great while about it while seated on the three-legged stool with her face to the wall, and when she had finished thinking about it she got down from the stool and went and stood before her mother, and her mother looked up to see what she was standing there for, and then 'lisbeth said: "i'm going to try most dreadful hard to use your head; i've made up my mind to it." when 'lisbeth made up her mind to a thing it was made up. 'lisbeth tried very hard from this time to use the mother's head; and though the mother used it too it did not get worn out half as fast as it had done before; it began to look newer--i mean younger--and to look as though use did it a great deal of good; and 'lisbeth's head looked the better for it too--i mean her face looked the better for it--it looked rested; perhaps i should say it looked better contented than it did before, it looked more comfortable. in fact, by using the mother's head very frequently instead of her own, 'lisbeth improved inside of a week, and in the two months while they yet remained in london she began to look like a helping child instead of a hindering one. when the time came for the packing up to be done 'lisbeth really helped. she did; nobody need be astonished. she helped a great deal, and everybody seemed so happy that the mother laughed a dozen times just in packing up. this was such a remarkable thing to happen that every one was astonished; they could not help being astonished. mother had not laughed for a great while. it seemed a very strange thing for her to do. nobody could quite tell what she was laughing at either by thinking over it or by inquiring. dickon inquired, but dickon could not understand it any better after he had inquired. gorham thought over it. he was older than dickon, and perhaps should have been able to understand by thinking over it, but he did not. gorham had been in london for some time, and had become accustomed to the two little rooms at the top of the house, where the walls were so black, and to the hubbub of voices above and below, and to the tatters on the little children, and to the dirt and tatters on the grown people; and had become accustomed to the little boys who were not very nice, or very comfortable to play with; gorham had become accustomed to all this and did not dislike it all as much as he did when he first came to london. indeed gorham was growing a little bit like these little boys; just a little like them, not very much; i am glad to be able to say that it was not very much. but at any rate, gorham could not see why his mother was laughing when she had not laughed for such a long time; laughing over her cracked crockery, broken-nosed teapots, and black old crocks. it never entered his mind that she was laughing because, though she seemed to be looking at the old crockery, she was looking over and past them with her mind's eye, to the clover tufts on the dear old fields, and to the paths winding about the mill, to the spire of the white wooden church; to the market-place where the mill-hands used to gather together and chat and talk. yet she was looking at these and at many things beside, and not at all at the broken-nosed pots. 'lisbeth knew better than gorham or dickon why it was the mother laughed. i think she knew a great deal better. i think when she would put her face down close beside her mother's, and they would both smile so pleasantly, glancing toward each other and looking away, i think they were then seeing the same things, the very same things, though they were both a hundred miles away from the things themselves. this was very comfortable; so comfortable that dickon and gorham smiled too, though only looking at their two faces and at the iron pots, and broken noses, and the rubbish which the mother had gathered up. and indeed, though they could not tell why, they laughed themselves when the mother laughed, and who knows but perhaps after all they did, without knowing it, catch glimpses of the far-away things which 'lisbeth and her mother were seeing. everything was very comfortable all this packing-up time, in fact much of the two months before it. now i do not intend you to suppose, when i say that everything was very comfortable, that everything was in order in those two rooms, that everything was fixed up; that the iron pots were full of cookies or of all kinds of cookeries; that the crockery was full of good things; that the black walls had been whitened; not a bit of it. things had changed; things had changed very much. the faces had changed. the mother's face and 'lisbeth's had altered more than dickon's and gorham's, but their being altered i think had changed dickon's and gorham's too. do you know what had changed them? why, 'lisbeth had made up her mind to try to be contented and to use her mother's head. she was so much more pleasant looking that you would have been surprised at the change. you have seen her before this, with your mind's eye, i know; that is, you have imagined how she might have looked, and you have always seen her looking as though she was dissatisfied; as though she was wishing for something she had not; as though she was trying to think of something to do, or somewhere to go, as though she was about to make use of her own head contrary to that of her mother. but now she looked more cheerful and comfortable; indeed like a different girl entirely. you see she made up her mind to be a different girl entirely, and to try to work by her mother's head, and when 'lisbeth made up her mind about anything we know that it was made up. 'lisbeth had improved very much. yet she was 'lisbeth; 'lisbeth working a great deal by her mother's head instead of by her own. beside this 'lisbeth had a pleasant prospect before her; a very pleasant prospect indeed. she did not very often lose sight of this prospect; i mean the prospect of going a hundred miles from london. she looked so much more pleasant than formerly that you would not think, at sight of her, "there is a girl who is not satisfied in the place where she is growing, or with the things she finds around her; she looks uncomfortable." i think that 'lisbeth was better contented the last weeks she lived in london than during any week of her life, except the week before she came to london. her contentment had changed everything very much; as i said, it had changed the faces; the faces were changed because everybody felt happier. things were very different in those two rooms because 'lisbeth was different. for two whole months they were getting ready to go away; they were working and saving and wondering and smiling and laughing and hoping before they left the dreadful old rooms, but then they were such different months from all the others spent there that they were short months; that is, they seemed short. the boys were happier when their mother and 'lisbeth were bright and happy; their mother was happy when her children were good and wore bright faces. 'lisbeth wore a bright face when she tried to be content with things as she found them, and did not run about the streets of london trying to sell gingerbread cats and dogs and doll-babies, trying to earn pence with sweeping streets or pulling wires, or making wigs. so as everybody was happier than they had been the months seemed short. who cared that the walls were black and the rooms little and the street too little to be called a street? nobody. all the difference came by 'lisbeth's having made up her mind to be contented to help mother in mother's way instead of her own way; by 'lisbeth's having made up her mind to mix her earnestness with her mother's judgment. they left the little dark rooms, in the dirty old house, and all the shows, and people, and carriages and houses of london, and went back where they first grew, back to the very house under the walnut tree where the bits of the hogshead still blew about--the hogshead which had once opened its mouth. the mother went again to work at the mill, and the children all went to miss pritchet's school, and 'lisbeth picked beans, and helped take care of trotty, and of the house, and helped mother so much, that mother began to look bright and happy and smiling like somebody else. in fact, 'lisbeth looked bright and happy, and smiling, herself, like somebody else, and when she would sit on the mile-stone she would smile more than ever in thinking what a little goose she had been ever to want to go so many miles away; and, indeed, so happy and contented did she become with the work she found to do in the place in which she grew, that you would never have known her to be 'lisbeth. * * * * * transcriber's note: obvious punctuation errors have been corrected. blank pages have been removed. on page 42 "unreasonble" has been changed to "unreasonable" (... thought him unreasonable enough, ...) on page 50 "disparingly" has been changed to "dispairingly" (... said 'lisbeth a little despairingly.) on page 84 "a doing" has been changed to "a-doing". (you must be up and a-doing, ..) on page 27 the word "flim" has been retained. [transcriber's note: bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and italic text is surrounded by _underscores_.] our little german cousin the little cousin series (trade mark) each volume illustrated with six or more full-page plates in tint. cloth, 12mo, with decorative cover, per volume, 60 cents list of titles by mary hazelton wade (unless otherwise indicated) =our little african cousin= =our little alaskan cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little arabian cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little armenian cousin= =our little brazilian cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little brown cousin= =our little canadian cousin= by elizabeth r. macdonald =our little chinese cousin= by isaac taylor headland =our little cuban cousin= =our little dutch cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little english cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little eskimo cousin= =our little french cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little german cousin= =our little hawaiian cousin= =our little hindu cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little indian cousin= =our little irish cousin= =our little italian cousin= =our little japanese cousin= =our little jewish cousin= =our little korean cousin= by h. lee m. pike =our little mexican cousin= by edward c. butler =our little norwegian cousin= =our little panama cousin= by h. lee m. pike =our little philippine cousin= =our little porto rican cousin= =our little russian cousin= =our little scotch cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little siamese cousin= =our little spanish cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little swedish cousin= by claire m. coburn =our little swiss cousin= (_in preparation_) =our little australian cousin= l. c. page & company new england building, boston, mass. [illustration: bertha.] our little german cousin by mary hazelton wade _illustrated, by_ l. j. bridgman [illustration] boston l. c. page & company _publishers_ _copyright, 1904_ by l. c. page & company (incorporated) _all rights reserved_ the little cousin series (_trade mark_) published june, 1904 fifth impression, october, 1907 colonial press electrotyped and printed by c. h. simonds & co. boston, mass., u. s. a. preface when the word germany comes to our minds, we think at once of ruined castles, fairies, music, and soldiers. why is it? first, as to the castles. here and there along the banks of the river rhine, as well as elsewhere throughout the country, the traveller is constantly finding himself near some massive stone ruin. it seems ever ready to tell stories of long ago,--of brave knights who defended its walls, of beautiful princesses saved from harm, of sturdy boys and sweet-faced girls who once played in its gardens. for germany is the home of an ancient and brave people, who have often been called upon to face powerful enemies. next, as to the fairies. it seems as though the dark forests of germany, the quiet valleys, and the banks of the beautiful rivers, were the natural homes of the fairy-folk, the gnomes and the elves, the water-sprites and the sylphs. our german cousins listen with wonder and delight to the legends of fearful giants and enchanted castles, and many of the stories they know so well have been translated into other languages for their cousins of distant lands, who are as fond of them as the blue-eyed children of germany. as to the music, it seems as though every boy and girl in the whole country drew in the spirit of song with the air they breathe. they sing with a love of what they are singing, they play as though the tune were a part of their very selves. some of the finest musicians have been germans, and their gifts to the world have been bountiful. as for soldiers, we know that every man in germany must stand ready to defend his country. he must serve his time in drilling and training for war. he is a necessary part of that fatherland he loves so dearly. our fair-haired german cousins are busy workers and hard students. they must learn quite early in life that they have duties as well as pleasures, and the duties cannot be set aside or forgotten. but they love games and holidays as dearly as the children of our own land. contents chapter page i. christmas 1 ii. toy-making 10 iii. the wicked bishop 23 iv. the coffee-party 40 v. the beautiful castle 48 vi. the great frederick 60 vii. the brave princess 71 viii. what the waves bring 83 ix. the magic sword 94 list of illustrations page bertha _frontispiece_ bertha's father and mother 11 the rats' tower 28 courtyard of heidelberg castle 52 statue of frederick the great 63 bertha's home 83 our little german cousin chapter i. christmas "don't look! there, now it's done!" cried bertha. it was two nights before christmas. bertha was in the big living-room with her mother and older sister. each sat as close as possible to the candle-light, and was busily working on something in her lap. but, strange to say, they did not face each other. they were sitting back to back. "what an unsociable way to work," we think. "is that the way germans spend the evenings together?" no, indeed. but christmas was near at hand, and the air was brimful of secrets. bertha would not let her mother discover what she was working for her, for all the world. and the little girl's mother was preparing surprises for each of the children. all together, the greatest fun of the year was getting ready for christmas. "mother, you will make some of those lovely cakes this year, won't you?" asked bertha's sister gretchen. "certainly, my child. it would not be christmas without them. early to-morrow morning, you and bertha must shell and chop the nuts. i will use the freshest eggs and will beat the dough as long as my arms will let me." "did you always know how to make those cakes, mamma?" asked bertha. "my good mother taught me when i was about your age, my dear. you may watch me to-morrow, and perhaps you will learn how to make them. it is never too early to begin to learn to cook." "when the city girls get through school, they go away from home and study housekeeping don't they?" asked gretchen. "yes, and many girls who don't live in cities. but i hardly think you will ever be sent away. we are busy people here in our little village, and you will have to be contented with learning what your mother can teach you. "i shall be satisfied with that, i know. but listen! i can hear father and hans coming." "then put up your work, children, and set the supper-table." the girls jumped up and hurriedly put the presents away. it did not take long to set the supper-table, for the meals in this little home were very simple, and supper was the simplest of all. a large plate of black bread and a pitcher of sour milk were brought by the mother, and the family gathered around the table. the bread wasn't really black, of course. it was dark brown and very coarse. it was made of rye meal. bertha and gretchen had never seen any white bread in their lives, for they had never yet been far away from their own little village. neither had their brother hans. they were happy, healthy children. they all had blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and fair hair, like their father and mother. "you don't know what i've got for you, hans," said bertha, laughing and showing a sweet little dimple in her chin. hans bent down and kissed her. he never could resist that dimple, and bertha was his favourite sister. "i don't know what it is, but i do know that it must be something nice," said her brother. when the supper-table had been cleared, the mother and girls took out their sewing again, while hans worked at some wood-carving. the father took an old violin from its case and began to play some of the beautiful airs of germany. when he came to the "watch on the rhine," the mother's work dropped from her hands as she and the children joined in the song that stirs every german heart. "oh, dear! it seems as though christmas eve never would come," sighed bertha, as she settled herself for sleep beside her sister. it was quite a cold night, but they were cosy and warm. why shouldn't they be? they were covered with a down feather bed. their mother had the same kind of cover on her own bed, and so had hans. but christmas eve did come at last, although it seemed so far off to bertha the night before. hans and his father brought in the bough of a yew-tree, and it was set up in the living-room. the decorating came next. tiny candles were fastened on all the twigs. sweetmeats and nuts were hung from the branches. "how beautiful! how beautiful!" exclaimed the children when it was all trimmed, and they walked around it with admiring eyes. none of the presents were placed on the tree, for that is not the fashion in germany. each little gift had been tied up in paper and marked with the name of the one for whom it was intended. when everything was ready, there was a moment of quiet while the candles were being lighted. then bertha's father began to give out the presents, and there was a great deal of laughing and joking as the bundles were opened. there was a new red skirt for bertha. her mother had made it, for she knew the child was fond of pretty dresses. besides this, she had a pair of warm woollen mittens which gretchen had knit for her. hans had made and carved a doll's cradle for each of the girls. everybody was happy and contented. they sang songs and cracked nuts and ate the christmas cakes to their hearts' content. "i think i like the ones shaped like gnomes the best," said hans. "they have such comical little faces. do you know, every time i go out in the forest, it seems as though i might meet a party of gnomes hunting for gold." "i like the animal cakes best," said bertha. "the deer are such graceful creatures, and i like to bite off the horns and legs, one at a time." "a long time ago," said their father, "they used to celebrate christmas a little different from the way we now do. the presents were all carried to a man in the village who dressed himself in a white robe, and a big wig made of flax. he covered his face with a mask, and then went from house to house. the grown people received him with great honours. he called for the children and gave them the presents their parents had brought to him. "but these presents were all given according to the way the children had behaved during the year. if they had been good and tried hard, they had the gifts they deserved. but if they had been naughty and disobedient, it was not a happy time for them." "i don't believe the children were very fond of him," cried hans. "they must have been too much afraid of him." "that is true," said his father. "but now, let us play some games. christmas comes but once a year, and you have all been good children." the room soon rang with the shouts of hans and his sisters. they played "blind man's buff" and other games. their father took part in all of them as though he were a boy again. the good mother looked on with pleasant smiles. bedtime came only too soon. but just before the children said good night, the father took hans one side and talked seriously yet lovingly with him. he told the boy of the faults he must still fight against. he spoke also of the improvement he had made during the year. at the same time the mother gave words of kind advice to her little daughters. she told them to keep up good courage; to be busy and patient in the year to come. "my dear little girls," she whispered, as she kissed them, "i love to see you happy in your play. but the good lord who cares for us has given us all some work to do in this world. be faithful in doing yours." chapter ii. toy-making "wake up, bertha. come, gretchen. you will have to hurry, for it is quite late," called their mother. it was one morning about a week after christmas. [illustration: bertha's father and mother.] "oh dear, i am so sleepy, and my bed is nice and warm," thought bertha. but she jumped up and rubbed her eyes and began to dress, without waiting to be called a second time. her mother was kind and loving, but she had taught her children to obey without a question. both little girls had long, thick hair. it must be combed and brushed and braided with great care. each one helped the other. they were soon dressed, and ran down-stairs. as soon as the breakfast was over and the room made tidy, every one in the family sat down to work. bertha's father was a toy-maker. he had made wooden images of santa claus all his life. his wife and children helped him. when bertha was only five years old, she began to carve the legs of these santa claus dolls. it was a queer sight to see the little girl's chubby fingers at their work. now that she was nine years old, she still carved legs for santa claus in her spare moments. gretchen always made arms, while hans worked on a still different part of the bodies. the father and mother carved the heads and finished the little images that afterward gave such delight to children in other lands. bertha lives in the black forest. that name makes you think at once of a dark and gloomy place. the woods on the hills are dark, to be sure, but the valleys nestling between are bright and cheerful when the sun shines down and pours its light upon them. bertha's village is in just such a valley. the church stands on the slope above the little homes. it seems to say, "look upward, my children, to the blue heavens, and do not fear, even when the mists fill the valley and the storm is raging over your heads." all the people in the village seem happy and contented. they work hard, and their pay is small, but there are no beggars among them. toys are made in almost every house. every one in a family works on the same kind of toy, just as it is in bertha's home. the people think: "it would be foolish to spend one's time in learning new things. the longer a person works at making one kind of toy, the faster he can make them, and he can earn more money." one of bertha's neighbours makes nothing but noah's arks. another makes toy tables, and still another dolls' chairs. bertha often visits a little friend who helps her father make cuckoo-clocks. did you ever see one of these curious clocks? as each hour comes around, a little bird comes outside the case. then it flaps its wings and sings "cuckoo" in a soft, sweet voice as many times as there are strokes to the hour. it is great fun to watch for the little bird and hear its soft notes. perhaps you wonder what makes the bird come out at just the right time. it is done by certain machinery inside the clock. but, however it is, old people as well as children seem to enjoy the cuckoo-clocks of germany. "some day, when you are older, you shall go to the fair at easter time," bertha's father has promised her. "is that at leipsic, where our santa claus images go?" asked his little daughter. "yes, my dear, and toys from many other parts of our country. there you will see music-boxes and dolls' pianos and carts and trumpets and engines and ships. these all come from the mining-towns. "but i know what my little bertha would care for most. she would best like to see the beautiful wax dolls that come from sonneberg." "yes, indeed," cried bertha. "the dear, lovely dollies with yellow hair like mine. i would love every one of them. i wish i could go to sonneberg just to see the dolls." "i wonder what makes the wax stick on," said gretchen, who came into the room while her father and bertha were talking. "after the heads have been moulded into shape, they are dipped into pans of boiling wax," her father told her. "the cheap dolls are dipped only once, but the expensive ones have several baths before they are finished. the more wax that is put on, the handsomer the dolls are. "then comes the painting. one girl does nothing but paint the lips. another one does the cheeks. still another, the eyebrows. even then miss dolly looks like a bald-headed baby till her wig is fastened in its place." "i like the yellow hair best," said bertha. "but it isn't real, is it, papa?" "i suppose you mean to ask, 'did it ever grow on people's heads?' my dear. no. it is the wool of a kind of goat. but the black hair is real hair. most dolls, however, wear light wigs. people usually prefer them." "do little girls in sonneberg help make the dolls, just as bertha and i help you on the santa claus images?" asked gretchen. "certainly. they fill the bodies with sawdust, and do other easy things. but they go to school, too, just as you and bertha do. lessons must not be slighted." "if i had to help make dolls, just as i do these images," said gretchen to her sister as their father went out and left the children together, "i don't believe i'd care for the handsomest one in the whole toy fair. i'd be sick of the very sight of them." "look at the time, bertha. see, we must stop our work and start for school," exclaimed gretchen. it was only seven o'clock in the morning, but school would begin in half an hour. these little german girls had to study longer and harder than their american cousins. they spent at least an hour a day more in their schoolrooms. as they trudged along the road, they passed a little stream which came trickling down the hillside. "i wonder if there is any story about that brook," said bertha. "there's a story about almost everything in our dear old country, i'm sure." "you have heard father tell about the stream flowing down the side of the kandel, haven't you?" asked gretchen. "yes, i think so. but i don't remember it very well. what is the story, gretchen?" "you know the kandel is one of the highest peaks in the black forest. you've seen it, bertha." "yes, of course, but tell the story, gretchen." "well, then, once upon a time there was a poor little boy who had no father or mother. he had to tend cattle on the side of the kandel. at that time there was a deep lake at the summit of the mountain. but the lake had no outlet. "the people who lived in the valley below often said, 'dear me! how glad we should be if we could only have plenty of fresh water. but no stream flows near us. if we could only bring some of the water down from the lake!' "they were afraid, however, to make a channel out of the lake. the water might rush down with such force as to destroy their village. they feared to disturb it. "now, it came to pass that the evil one had it in his heart to destroy these people. he thought he could do it very easily if the rocky wall on the side of the lake could be broken down. there was only one way in which this could be done. an innocent boy must be found and got to do it. "it was a long time before such an one could be found. but at last the evil one came across an orphan boy who tended cattle on the mountainside. the poor little fellow was on his way home. he was feeling very sad, for he was thinking of his ragged clothes and his scant food. "'ah ha!' cried the evil one to himself, 'here is the very boy.' "he changed himself at once so he had the form and dress of a hunter, and stepped up to the lad with a pleasant smile. "'poor little fellow! what is the matter? and what can i do for you?' he said, in his most winning manner. "the boy thought he had found a friend, and told his story. "'do not grieve any longer. there is plenty of gold and silver in these very mountains. i will show you how to become rich,' said the evil one. 'meet me here early to-morrow morning and bring a good strong team with you. i will help you get the gold.' "the boy went home with a glad heart. you may be sure he did not oversleep the next morning. before it was light, he had harnessed four oxen belonging to his master, and started for the summit of the mountain. "the hunter, who was waiting for him, had already fastened a metal ring around the wall that held in the waters of the lake. "'fasten the oxen to that ring,' commanded the hunter, 'and the rock will split open.' "somehow or other, the boy did not feel pleased at what he was told to do. yet he obeyed, and started the oxen. but as he did so, he cried, 'do this in the name of god!' "at that very instant the sky grew black as night, the thunder rolled and the lightning flashed. and not only this, for at the same time the mountain shook and rumbled as though a mighty force were tearing it apart." "what became of the poor boy?" asked bertha. "he fell senseless to the ground, while the oxen in their fright rushed headlong down the mountainside. but you needn't get excited, bertha, no harm was done. the boy was saved as well as the village, because he had pulled in the name of god. "the rock did not split entirely. it broke apart just enough to let out a tiny stream of water, which began to flow down the mountainside. "when the boy came to his senses, the sky was clear and beautiful once more. the sun was shining brightly, and the hunter was nowhere to be seen. but the stream of water was running down the mountainside. "a few minutes afterward, the boy's master came hurrying up the slope. he was frightened by the dreadful sounds he had heard. but when he saw the waterfall, he was filled with delight. "'every one in the village will rejoice,' he exclaimed, 'for now we shall never want for water.' "then the little boy took courage and told the story of his meeting the hunter and what he had done. "'it is well you did it in the name of the lord,' cried his master. 'if you had not, our village would have been destroyed, and every one of us would have been drowned.'" "see! the children are going into the schoolhouse, gretchen. we must not be late. let's run," said bertha. the two little girls stopped talking, and hurried so fast that they entered the schoolhouse and were sitting in their seats in good order before the schoolmaster struck his bell. chapter iii. the wicked bishop "the rhine is the loveliest river in the world. i know it must be," said bertha. "of course it is," answered her brother. "i've seen it, and i ought to know. and father thinks so, too. he says it is not only beautiful, but it is also bound into the whole history of our country. think of the battles that have been fought on its shores, and the great generals who have crossed it!" "yes, and the castles, hans! think of the legends father and mother have told us about the beautiful princesses who have lived in the castles, and the brave knights who have fought for them! i shall be perfectly happy if i can ever sail down the rhine and see the noted places on its shores." "the schoolmaster has taught you all about the war with france, hasn't he, bertha?" "of course. and it really seemed at one time as if france would make us germans agree to have the rhine divide the two countries. just as if we would be willing to let the french own one shore of our beautiful river. i should say not!" bertha's cheeks grew rosier than usual at the thought of such a thing. she talked faster than german children usually do, for they are rather slow in their speech. "we do not own all of the river, little sister, as it is. the baby rhine sleeps in an icy cradle in the mountains of switzerland. then it makes its way through our country, but before it reaches the sea it flows through the low lands of holland." "i know all that, hans. but we own the best of the rhine, anyway. i am perfectly satisfied." "i wish i knew all the legends about the river. there are enough of them to fill many books. did you ever hear about the rats' tower opposite the town of bingen, bertha?" "what a funny name for a tower! no. is there a story about it, hans?" "yes, one of the boys was telling it to me yesterday while we were getting wood in the forest. it is a good story, although my friend said he wasn't sure it is true." "what is the story?" "it is about a very wicked bishop who was a miser. it happened one time that the harvests were poor and grain was scarce. the cruel bishop bought all the grain he could get and locked it up. he intended to sell it for a high price, and in this way to become very rich. "as the days went by, the food became scarcer and scarcer. the people began to sicken and die of hunger. they had but one thought: they must get something to eat for their children and themselves. "they knew of the stores of grain held by the bishop. they went to him and begged for some of it, but he paid no attention to their prayers. then they demanded that he open the doors of the storehouse and let them have the grain. it was of no use. "at last, they gathered together, and said: "'we will break down the door if you do not give it to us.' "'come to-morrow,' answered the bishop. 'bring your friends with you. you shall have all the grain you desire.' "the morrow came. crowds gathered in front of the granary. the bishop unlocked the door, saying: "'go inside and help yourselves freely.' "the people rushed in. then what do you think the cruel bishop did? he ordered his servants to lock the door and set the place on fire! "the air was soon filled with the screams of the burning people. but the bishop only laughed and danced. he said to his servants: "'do you hear the rats squeaking inside the granary?' "the next day came. there were only ashes in place of the great storehouse. there seemed to be no life about the town, for the people were all dead. "suddenly there was a great scurrying, as a tremendous swarm of rats came rushing out of the ashes. on they came, more and more of them. they filled the streets, and even made their way into the palace. "the wicked bishop was filled with fear. he fled from the place and hurried away over the fields. but the swarm of rats came rushing after him. he came to bingen, where he hoped to be safe within its walls. somehow or other, the rats made their way inside. [illustration: the rats' tower.] "there was now only one hope of safety. the bishop fled to a tower standing in the middle of the rhine. but it was of no use! the rats swam the river and made their way up the sides of the tower. their sharp teeth gnawed holes through the doors and windows. they entered in and came to the room where the bishop was hiding." "wicked fellow! they killed and ate him as he deserved, didn't they?" asked bertha. "there wasn't much left of him in a few minutes. but the tower still stands, and you can see it if you ever go to bingen, although it is a crumbling old pile now." "rats' tower is a good name for it. but i would rather hear about enchanted princesses and brave knights than wicked old bishops. tell me another story, hans." "oh, i can't. listen! i hear some one coming. who can it be?" hans jumped up and ran to the door, just in time to meet his uncle fritz, who lived in strasburg. the children loved him dearly. he was a young man about twenty-one years old. he came home to this little village in the black forest only about once a year. he had so much to tell and was so kind and cheerful, every one was glad to see him. "uncle fritz! uncle fritz! we are so glad you've come," exclaimed bertha, putting her arms around his neck. "and we are going to have something that you like for dinner." "i can guess what it is. sauerkraut and boiled pork. there is no other sauerkraut in germany as good as that your mother makes, i do believe. i'm hungry enough to eat the whole dishful and not leave any for you children. now what do you say to my coming? don't you wish i had stayed in strasburg?" "oh, no, no, uncle fritz. we would rather see you than anybody else," cried hans. "and here comes mother. she will be just as glad as we are." that evening, after hans had shown his uncle around the village, and he had called on his old friends, he settled himself in the chimney-corner with the children about him. "talk to us about strasburg, uncle fritz," begged gretchen. "please tell us about the storks," said bertha. "are there great numbers of the birds in the city, and do they build their nests on the chimneys?" "yes, you can see plenty of storks flying overhead if you will come back with me," said uncle fritz, laughingly. "they seem to know the people love them. if a stork makes his home about any one's house, it is a sign of good fortune to the people who live there. "'it will surely come,' they say to themselves, 'and the storks will bring it.' do you wonder the people like the birds so much?" "i read a story about a mother stork," said bertha, thoughtfully. "she had a family of baby birds. they were not big enough to leave their nest, when a fire broke out in the chimney where it was built. poor mother bird! she could have saved herself. but she would not leave her babies. so she stayed with them and they were all burned to death together." "i know the story. that happened right in strasburg," said her uncle. "please tell us about the beautiful cathedral with its tall tower," said hans. "sometime, uncle, i am going to strasburg, if i have to walk there, and then i shall want to spend a whole day in front of the wonderful clock." "you'd better have a lunch with you, hans, and then you will not get hungry. but really, my dear little nephew, i hope the time will soon come when you can pay me a long visit. as for the clock, you will have to stay in front of it all night as well as all day, if you are to see all it can show you." "i know about cuckoo-clocks, of course," said gretchen, "but the little bird is the only figure that comes out on those. there are ever so many different figures on the strasburg clock, aren't there, uncle fritz?" "a great, great many. angels strike the hours. a different god or goddess appears for each day in the week. then, at noon and at midnight, jesus and his twelve apostles come out through a door and march about on a platform. "you can imagine what the size of the clock must be when i tell you that the figures are as large as people. when the procession of the apostles appears, a gilded cock on the top of the tower flaps its wings and crows. "i cannot begin to tell you all about it. it is as good as a play, and, as i told hans, he would have to stay many hours near it to see all the sights." "i should think a strong man would be needed to wind it up," said his nephew. "the best part of it is that it does not need to be wound every day," replied uncle fritz. "they say it will run for years without being touched. of course, travellers are coming to strasburg all the time. they wish to see the clock, but they also come to see the cathedral itself. it is a very grand building, and, as you know, the spire is the tallest one in all europe. "then there is so much beautiful carving! and there are such fine statues. oh, children, you must certainly come to strasburg before long and see the cathedral of which all germany is so proud." "strasburg was for a time the home of our greatest poet," said bertha. "i want to go there to see where he lived." the child was very fond of poetry, even though she was a little country girl. her father had a book containing some of goethe's ballads, and she loved to lie under the trees in the pleasant summer-time and repeat some of these poems. "they are just like music," she would say to herself. "a marble slab has been set up in the old fish market to mark the spot where goethe lived," said uncle fritz. "they say he loved the grand cathedral of the city, and it helped him to become a great writer when he was a young student there. i suppose its beauty awakened his own beautiful thoughts." the children became quiet as they thought of their country and the men who had made her so strong and great,--the poets, and the musicians, and the brave soldiers who had defended her from her enemies. uncle fritz was the first one to speak. "i will tell you a story of strasburg," he said. "it is about something that happened there a long time ago. you know, the city isn't on the rhine itself, but it is on a little stream flowing into the greater river. "well, once upon a time the people of zurich, in switzerland, asked the people of strasburg to join with them in a bond of friendship. each should help the other in times of danger. the people of strasburg did not think much of the idea. they said among themselves: 'what good can the little town of zurich do us? and, besides, it is too far away.' so they sent back word that they did not care to make such a bond. they were scarcely polite in their message, either. "when they heard the reply, the men of zurich were quite angry. they were almost ready to fight. but the youngest one of their councillors said: "'we will force them to eat their own words. indeed, they shall be made to give us a different answer. and it will come soon, too, if you will only leave the matter with me.' "'do as you please,' said the other councillors. they went back to their own houses, while the young man hurried home, rushed out into the kitchen and picked out the largest kettle there. "'wife, cook as much oatmeal as this pot will hold,' he commanded. "the woman wondered what in the world her husband could be thinking of. but she lost no time in guessing. she ordered her servants to make a big fire, while she herself stirred and cooked the great kettleful of oatmeal. "in the meanwhile, her husband hurried down to the pier, and got his swiftest boat ready for a trip down the river. then he gathered the best rowers in the town. "'come with me,' he said to two of them, when everything had been made ready for a trip. they hastened home with him, as he commanded. "'is the oatmeal ready?' he cried, rushing breathless into the kitchen. "his wife had just finished her work. the men lifted the kettle from the fire and ran with it to the waiting boat. it was placed in the stern and the oarsmen sprang to their places. "'pull, men! pull with all the strength you have, and we will go to strasburg in time to show those stupid people that, if it should be necessary, we live near enough to them to give them a hot supper.' "how the men worked! they rowed as they had never rowed before. "they passed one village after another. still they moved onward without stopping, till they found themselves at the pier of strasburg. "the councillor jumped out of the boat, telling two of his men to follow with the great pot of oatmeal. he led the way to the council-house, where he burst in with his strange present. "'i bring you a warm answer to your cold words,' he told the surprised councillors. he spoke truly, for the pot was still steaming. how amused they all were! "'what a clever fellow he is,' they said among themselves. 'surely we will agree to make the bond with zurich, if it holds many men like him.' "the bond was quickly signed and then, with laughter and good-will, the councillors gathered around the kettle with spoons and ate every bit of the oatmeal. "'it is excellent,' they all cried. and indeed it was still hot enough to burn the mouths of those who were not careful." "good! good!" cried the children, and they laughed heartily, even though it was a joke against their own people. their father and mother had also listened to the story and enjoyed it as much as the children. "another story, please, dear uncle fritz," they begged. but their father pointed to the clock. "too late, too late, my dears," he said. "if you sit up any longer, your mother will have to call you more than once in the morning. so, away to your beds, every one of you." chapter iv. the coffee-party "how would you like to be a wood-cutter, hans?" "i think it would be great sport. i like to hear the thud of the axe as it comes down on the trunk. then it is always an exciting time as the tree begins to bend and fall to the ground. somehow, it seems like a person. i can't help pitying it, either." hans had come over to the next village on an errand for his father. a big sawmill had been built on the side of the stream, and all the men in the place were kept busy cutting down trees in the black forest, or working in the sawmill. after the logs had been cut the right length, they were bound into rafts, and floated down the little stream to the rhine. "the rafts themselves seem alive," said hans to his friend. "you men know just how to bind the logs together with those willow bands, so they twist and turn about like living creatures as they move down the stream." "i have travelled on a raft all the way from here to cologne," answered the wood-cutter. "the one who steers must be skilful, for he needs to be very careful. you know the rafts grow larger all the time, don't you, hans?" "oh, yes. as the river becomes wider, the smaller ones are bound together. but is it true that the men sometimes take their families along with them?" "certainly. they set up tents, or little huts, on the rafts, so their wives and children can have a comfortable place to eat and sleep. then, too, if it rains, they can be sheltered from the storm." "i'd like to go with you sometime. you pass close to strasburg, and i could stop and visit uncle fritz. wouldn't it be fun!" "hans! hans!" called a girl's voice just then. "i don't see her, but i know that's bertha. she came over to the village with me this afternoon. one of her friends has a coffee-party and she invited us to it. so, good-bye." "good-bye, my lad. come and see me again. perhaps i can manage sometime to take you with me on a trip down the river." "thank you ever so much." hans hurried away, and was soon entering the house of a little friend who was celebrating her birthday with a coffee-party. there were several other children there. they were all dressed in their best clothes and looked very neat and nice. the boys wore long trousers and straight jackets. they looked like little old men. the girls had bright-coloured skirts and their white waists were fresh and stiff. their shoes were coarse and heavy, and made a good deal of noise as the children played the different games. but they were all so plump and rosy, it was good to look at them. "they are a pretty sight," said one of the neighbours, as she poured out the coffee. "they deserve to have a good time," said another woman with a kind, motherly face. "they will soon grow up, and then they will have to work hard to get a living." the coffee and cakes were a great treat to these village children. they did not get such a feast every day in the year. their mothers made cakes only for festivals and holidays, and coffee was seldom seen on their tables oftener than once a week. in the great cities and fine castles, where the rich people of germany had their homes, they could eat sweet dainties and drink coffee as often as they liked. but in the villages of the black forest, it was quite different. "good night, good night," said hans and bertha, as they left their friends and trudged off on a path through the woods. it was the shortest way home, and they knew their mother must be looking for them by this time. it was just sunset, but the children could not see the beautiful colours of the evening sky, after they had gone a short distance into the thick woods. "do you suppose there are any bears around?" whispered bertha. the trees looked very black. it seemed to the little girl as though she kept seeing the shadow of some big animal hiding behind them. "no, indeed," answered hans, quite scornfully. "too many people go along this path for bears to be willing to stay around here. you would have to go farther up into the forest to find them. but look quickly, bertha. do you see that rabbit jumping along? isn't he a big fellow?" "see! hans, he has noticed us. there he goes as fast as his legs can carry him." by this time, the children had reached the top of a hill. the trees grew very thick and close. on one side a torrent came rushing down over the rocks and stones. it seemed to say: "i cannot stop for any one. but come with me, come with me, and i will take you to the beautiful rhine. i will show you the way to pretty bridges, and great stone castles, and rare old cities. oh, this is a wonderful world, and you children of the black forest have a great deal to see yet." "i love to listen to running water," said bertha. "it always has a story to tell us." "do you see that light over there, away off in the distance?" asked hans. "it comes from a charcoal-pit. i can hear the voices of the men at their work." "i shouldn't like to stay out in the dark woods all the time and make charcoal," answered his sister. "i should get lonesome and long for the sunlight." "it isn't very easy work, either," said hans. "after the trees have been cut down, the pits have to be made with the greatest care, and the wood must be burned just so slowly to change it into charcoal. i once spent a day in the forest with some charcoal-burners. they told such good stories that night came before i had thought of it." "i can see the village ahead of us," said bertha, joyfully. a few minutes afterward, the children were running up the stone steps of their own home. "we had such a good time," hans told his mother, while bertha went to gretchen and gave her some cakes she had brought her from the coffee-party. "i'm so sorry you couldn't go," she told her sister. "perhaps i can next time," answered gretchen. "but, of course, we could not all leave mother when she had so much work to do. so i just kept busy and tried to forget all about it." "you dear, good gretchen! i'm going to try to be as patient and helpful as you are," said bertha, kissing her sister. chapter v. the beautiful castle "father's coming, father's coming," cried bertha, as she ran down the steps and out into the street. her father had been away for two days, and hans had gone with him. they had been to heidelberg. bertha and gretchen had never yet visited that city, although it was not more than twenty miles away. "oh, dear, i don't know where to begin," hans told the girls that evening. "of course, i liked to watch the students better than anything else. the town seems full of them. they all study in the university, of course, but they are on the streets a good deal. they seem to have a fine time of it. every one carries a small cane with a button on the end of it. they wear their little caps down over their foreheads on one side." "what colour do they have for their caps, hans?" asked gretchen. "all colours, i believe. some are red, some blue, some yellow, some green. oh, i can't tell you how many different kinds there are. but they were bright and pretty, and made the streets look as though it must be a festival day." "i have heard that the students fight a good many duels. is that so, hans?" "if you should see them, you would certainly think so. many of the fellows are real handsome, but their faces are scarred more often than not. "'the more scars i can show, the braver people will think i am.' that is what the students seem to think. they get up duels with each other on the smallest excuse. when they fight, they always try to strike the face. father says their duelling is good practice. it really helps to make them brave. if i were a student, i should want to fight duels, too." bertha shuddered. duelling was quite the fashion in german universities, but the little girl was very tender-hearted. she could not bear to think of her brother having his face cut up by the sword of any one in the world. "what do you think, girls?" hans went on. "father had to go to the part of the town nearest the castle. he said he should be busy for several hours, and i could do what i liked. so i climbed up the hill to the castle, and wandered all around it. i saw a number of english and american people there. i suppose they had come to heidelberg on purpose to see those buildings. "'isn't it beautiful!' i heard them exclaim again and again. and i saw a boy about my own age writing things about it in a note-book. he told his mother he was going to say it was the most beautiful ruin in germany. he was an american boy, but he spoke our language. i suppose he was just learning it, for he made ever so many mistakes. i could hardly tell what he was trying to say." "what did his mother answer?" asked bertha. "she nodded her head, and then pointed out some of the finest carvings and statues. but she and her son moved away from me before long, and then i found myself near some children of our country. they must have been rich, for they were dressed quite grandly. their governess was with them. she told them to notice how many different kinds of buildings there were, some of them richly carved, and some quite plain. 'you will find here palaces, towers, and fortresses, all together,' she said. 'for, in the old days, it was not only a grand home, but it was also a strong fortress.'" [illustration: courtyard of heidelberg castle.] "you know father told us it was not built all at once," said gretchen. "different parts were added during four hundred years." "yes, and he said it had been stormed by the enemy, and burned and plundered," added bertha. "it has been in the hands of those horrid frenchmen several different times. did you see the blown-up tower, hans?" "of course i did. half of it, you know, fell into the moat during one of the sieges, but linden-trees have grown about it, and it makes a shady nook in which to rest one's self." "you did not go inside of the castle, did you, hans?" asked gretchen. "no. it looked so big and gloomy, i stayed outside in the pretty gardens. i climbed over some of the moss-grown stairs, though, and i kept discovering something i hadn't seen before. here and there were old fountains and marble statues, all gray with age." "they say that under the castle are great, dark dungeons," said bertha, shivering at the thought. "what would a castle be without dungeons?" replied her brother. "of course there are dungeons. and there are also hidden, underground passages through which the people inside could escape in times of war and siege." "oh, hans! did you see the heidelberg tun?" asked gretchen. now, the heidelberg tun is the largest wine-cask in the whole world. people say that it holds forty-nine thousand gallons. just think of it! but it has not been filled for more than a hundred years. "no, i didn't see it," replied hans. "it is down in the cellar, and i didn't want to go there without father. i heard some of the visitors telling about the marks of the frenchmen's hatchets on its sides. one of the times they captured the castle, they tried to break open the tun. they thought it was full of wine. but they did not succeed in hacking through its tough sides." "good! good!" cried his sisters. they had little love for france and her people. that evening, after hans had finished telling the girls about his visit, their father told them the legend of count frederick, a brave and daring man who once lived in heidelberg castle. count frederick was so brave and successful that he was called "frederick the victorious." once upon a time he was attacked by the knights and bishops of the rhine, who had banded together against him. when he found what great numbers of soldiers were attacking his castle, count frederick was not frightened in the least. he armed his men with sharp daggers, and marched boldly out against his foes. they attacked the horses first of all. the daggers made short work, and the knights were soon brought to the ground. their armour was so heavy that it was an easy matter then to make them prisoners and take them into the castle. but frederick treated them most kindly. he ordered a great banquet to be prepared, and invited his prisoners to gather around the board, where all sorts of good things were served. one thing only was lacking. there was no bread. the guests thought it was because the servants had forgotten it, and one of them dared to ask for a piece. count frederick at once turned toward his steward and ordered the bread to be brought. now his master had privately talked with the steward and had told him what words to use at this time. "i am very sorry," said the steward, "but there is no bread." "you must bake some at once," ordered his master. "but we have no flour," was the answer. "you must grind some, then," was the command. "we cannot do so, for we have no grain." "then see that some is threshed immediately." "that is impossible, for the harvests have been burned down," replied the steward. "you can at least sow grain, that we may have new harvests as soon as possible." "we cannot even do that, for our enemies have burned down all the buildings where the grain was stored for seed-time." frederick now turned to his visitors, and told them they must eat their meat without bread. but that was not all. he told them they must give him enough money to build new houses and barns to take the places of those they had destroyed, and also to buy new seed for grain. "it is wrong," he said, sternly, "to carry on war against those who are helpless, and to take away their seeds and tools from the poor peasants." it was a sensible speech. it made the knights ashamed of the way they had been carrying on war in the country, and they left the castle wiser and better men. all this happened long, long ago, before germany could be called one country, for the different parts of the land were ruled over by different people and in different ways. this same count frederick, their father told them, had great love for the poor. when he was still quite young, he made a vow. he said, "i will never marry a woman of noble family." not long after this, he fell in love with a princess. but he could not ask her to marry him on account of the vow he had made. he was so unhappy that he went into the army. he did not wish to live, and hoped he would soon meet death. but the fair princess loved frederick as deeply as he loved her, and as soon as she learned of the vow he had made, she made up her mind what to do. she put on the dress of a poor singing-girl, and left her grand home. she followed frederick from place to place. they met face to face one beautiful evening. then it was that the princess told her lover she had given up her rank and title for his sake. how joyful she made him as he listened to her story! you may be sure they were soon married, and the young couple went to live in heidelberg castle, where they were as happy and as merry as the day is long. chapter vi. the great frederick "i declare, hans, i should think you would get tired of playing war," said bertha. she was sitting under the trees rocking her doll. she was playing it was a baby. hans had just come home after an afternoon of sport with his boy friends. but all they had done, bertha declared, was to play war and soldiers. she had watched them from her own yard. "tired of it! what a silly idea, bertha. it won't be many years before i shall be a real soldier. just picture me then! i shall have a uniform, and march to music. i don't know where i may go, either. who knows to what part of the world the emperor will send his soldiers at that time?" "i know where you would like to go in our own country," said bertha. "to berlin, of course. what a grand city it must be! father has been there. our schoolmaster was there while he served his time as a soldier. at this very moment, it almost seems as though i could hear the jingling of the officers' swords as they move along the streets. the regiments are drilled every day, and i don't know how often the soldiers have sham battles." hans jumped up from his seat under the tree and began to march up and down as though he were a soldier already. "attention, battalion! forward, march!" bertha called after him. but she was laughing as she spoke. she could not help it, hans looked so serious. at the same time she couldn't help envying her brother a little, and wishing she were a boy, too. it must be so grand to be a soldier and be ready to fight for the emperor who ruled over her country. [illustration: statue of frederick the great.] "the schoolmaster told us boys yesterday about the grand palace at berlin. the emperor lives in it when he is in the city," said hans, wheeling around suddenly and stopping in front of bertha. "i think you must have caught my thoughts," said the little girl, "for the emperor was in my mind when you began to speak." "well, never mind that. do you wish to hear about the palace?" "of course i do, hans." "the schoolmaster says it has six hundred rooms. just think of it! and one of them, called the white room, is furnished so grandly that 2,400,000 marks were spent on it. you can't imagine it, bertha, of course. i can't, either." a german mark is worth about twenty-four cents of american money, so the furnishing of the room hans spoke of must have cost about $600,000. it was a large sum, and it is no wonder the boy said he could hardly imagine so much money. "there are hundreds of halls in the palace," hans went on. "some of their walls are painted and others are hung with elegant silk draperies. the floors are polished so they shine like mirrors. then the pictures and the armour, bertha! it almost seemed as though i were there while the schoolmaster was describing them." "i never expect to see such lovely things," said his sober little sister. "but perhaps i shall go to berlin some day, hans. then i can see the statue of frederick the great, at any rate." "it stands opposite the palace," said her brother, "and cost more than any other bronze statue in the world." "how did you learn that, hans?" "the schoolmaster told us so. he said, too, that it ought to stir the blood of every true german to look at it. there the great frederick sits on horseback, wearing the robe in which he was crowned, and looking out from under his cocked hat with his bright, sharp eyes. that statue alone is enough to make the soldiers who march past it ready to give their lives for their country." "he lived when the different kingdoms were separated from each other, and there was no one ruler over all of them. i know that," said bertha. "yes, he was the king of prussia. and he fought the seven years' war with france and came out victorious. hardly any one thought he could succeed, for there was so much against him. but he was brave and determined. those two things were worth everything else." "that wasn't the only war he won, either, hans." "no, but it must have been the greatest. did you know, bertha, that he was unhappy when he was young? his father was so strict that he tried to run away from germany with two of his friends. the king found out what they meant to do. one of the friends was put to death, and the other managed to escape." "what did his father do to frederick?" bertha's eyes were full of pity for a prince who was so unhappy as to wish to run away. "the king ordered his son to be put to death. but i suppose he was angry at the time, for he changed his mind before the sentence was carried out, and forgave him." "i wonder how kings and emperors live," said bertha, slowly. it seemed as though everything must be different with them from what it was with other people. "i'll tell you about frederick, if you wish to listen." "of course i do, hans." "in the first place, he didn't care anything about fine clothes, even if he was a king and was born in the grand palace at berlin. his coat was often very shabby. "in the next place, he slept only about four hours out of the whole twenty-four for a good many years. he got up at three o'clock on summer mornings, and in the winter-time he was always dressed by five, at the very latest. "while his hair-dresser was at work, he opened his most important letters. after that, he attended to other business affairs of the country. these things were done before eating or drinking. but when they had been attended to, the king went into his writing-room and drank a number of glasses of cold water. as he wrote, he sipped coffee and ate a little fruit from time to time. "he loved music very dearly, and sometimes rested from his work and played on his flute. "dinner was the only regular meal of the day. it was served at twelve o'clock, and lasted three or four hours. there was a bill of fare, and the names of the cooks were given as well as the dishes they prepared." "did the king ever let them know whether he was pleased or not with their cooking?" asked bertha. "yes. he marked the dishes he liked best with a cross. he enjoyed his dinner, and generally had a number of friends to eat with him. there was much joking, and there were many clever speeches. "when the meal was over, the king played on his flute a short time, and then attended to more business." "did he work till bedtime, hans?" "oh, no. in the evening there was a concert or lecture, or something like that. but, all the same, the king was a hardworking man, even in times of peace." "he loved his people dearly, father once told me," said bertha. "he said he understood his subjects and they understood him." "yes, and that reminds me of a story the schoolmaster told. king frederick was once riding through the street when he saw a crowd of people gathered together. he said to his groom, 'go and see what is the matter.' the man came back and told the king that the people were all looking at a caricature of frederick himself. a caricature, you know, is a comical portrait. "perhaps you think the king was angry when he heard this. not at all. he said, 'go and hang the picture lower down, so they will not have to stretch their necks to see it.' "the crowd heard the words. 'hurrah for the king!' they cried. at the same time, they began to tear the picture into pieces." "frederick the great could appreciate a joke," said bertha. "i should think the people must have loved him." "he had some fine buildings put up in his lifetime," hans went on. "a new palace was built in berlin, besides another one the king called 'sans souci.' those are french words meaning, 'without a care.' he called the place by that name because he said he was free-hearted and untroubled while he stayed there. "i've told you these things because you are a girl. but i'll tell you what i like to think of best of all. it's the stories of the wars in which he fought and in which he showed such wonderful courage. so, hurrah for frederick the great, king of prussia!" hans made a salute as though he stood in the presence of the great king. then he started for the wood-pile, where he was soon sawing logs with as much energy as if he were fighting against the enemies of his country. chapter vii. the brave princess "listen, children! that must be the song of a nightingale. how sweet it is!" it was a lovely sunday afternoon. every one in the family had been to church in the morning, and come home to a good dinner of bean soup and potato salad. then the father had said: "let us take a long walk over the fields and through the woods. the world is beautiful to-day. we can enjoy it best by leaving the house behind us." some of the neighbours joined the merry party. the men smoked their pipes, while the women chatted together and the children frolicked about them and picked wild flowers. how many sweet smells there were in the fields! how gaily the birds sang! the air seemed full of peace and joy. they all wandered on till they came to a cascade flowing down over some high rocks. trees grew close to the waterfall, and bent over it as though to hide it from curious eyes. it was a pretty spot. "let us sit down at the foot of this cascade," said bertha's father. "it is a pleasant place to rest." every one liked the plan. bertha nestled close to her father's side. "tell us a story. please do," she said. "ask neighbour abel. he knows many a legend of just such places as this. he has lived in the hartz mountains, and they are filled with fairy stories." the rest of the party heard what was said. "neighbour abel! a story, a story," they cried. of course the kind-hearted german could not refuse such a general request. besides, he liked to tell stories. taking his long pipe out of his mouth, he laid it down on the ground beside him. then he cleared his throat and began to speak. "look above you, friends. do you see that mark on the rocky platform overhead? i noticed it as soon as i got here. it made me think of a wild spot in the hartz mountains where there is just such a mark. the people call it 'the horse's hoof-print.' i will tell you how they explain its coming there. "once upon a time there was a beautiful princess. her name was brunhilda, and she lived in bohemia. she lived a gay and happy life, like most young princesses, till one day a handsome prince arrived at her father's palace. he was the son of the king of the hartz country. "of course, you can all guess what happened. the prince fell in love with the princess, and she returned his love. the day was set for the wedding, and the young prince went home to prepare for the great event. "but he had been gone only a short time when a powerful giant arrived at brunhilda's home. he came from the far north. his name was bodo. "he asked for the princess in marriage, but her heart had already been given away. she did not care for the giant, even though he gave her the most elegant presents,--a beautiful white horse, jewels set in gold, and chains of amber. "'i dare not refuse the giant,' said brunhilda's father. 'he is very powerful, and we must not make him angry. you must marry him, my daughter, in three days.' "the poor maiden wept bitterly. it seemed as though her heart would break. but she was a clever girl, and she soon dried her tears and began to think of some plan by which she might yet be free. she began to smile upon the giant and treat him with great kindness. "'i should like to try the beautiful horse you brought me,' she said to him. he was much pleased. the horse was brought to the door. the princess mounted him and rode for a time up and down in front of the palace. "the very next day was that set apart for the wedding. the castle was filled with guests who feasted and made merry. the giant entered into everything with a will. he laughed till the floors and walls shook. little did he think what was taking place. for the princess slipped out of the castle when no one was watching, hurried into the stable, and leaped upon the back of her swift white horse. "'lower the drawbridge instantly,' she called to the guard. she passed over it, and away she flew like the wind. "you were too late, too late, o giant, when you discovered that brunhilda was missing. "he flew out of the castle, and on the back of his own fiery black horse he dashed after the runaway princess. "on they went! on, on, without stopping. over the plains, up and down the hillsides, through the villages. the sun set and darkness fell upon the world, but there was never a moment's rest for the maiden on the white horse or the giant lover on his black steed. "sometimes in the darkness sparks were struck off from the horses' hoofs as they passed over rough and rocky places. these sparks always showed the princess ahead and slowly increasing the distance between herself and her pursuer. "when the morning light first appeared, the maiden could see the summit of the brocken ahead of her. it was the home of her lover. her heart leaped within her. if she could only reach it she would be safe. "but alas! her horse suddenly stood still. he would not move. he had reached the edge of a precipice. there it lay, separating the princess from love and safety. "the brave girl had not a moment to lose. the giant was fast drawing near. she wheeled her horse around; then, striking his sides a sharp blow with her whip, she urged him to leap across the precipice. "the spring must be strong and sure. it was a matter of life and death. the chasm was deep. if the horse should fail to strike the other side securely, it meant a horrible end to beast and rider. "but he did not fail. the feet of the brave steed came firmly down upon the rocky platform. so heavily did they fall that the imprint of a hoof was left upon the rock. "the princess was now safe. it would be an easy matter for her to reach her lover's side. "as for the giant, he tried to follow brunhilda across the chasm. but he was too heavy and his horse failed to reach the mark. the two sank together to the bottom of the precipice." every one thanked the story-teller, and begged him to tell more of the hartz mountains, where he had spent his boyhood days. the children were delighted when he spoke of the gnomes, in whom he believed when he was a child. "every time i went out in the dark woods," he said, "i was on the lookout for these funny little fairies of the underground world. i wanted to see them, but at the same time i was afraid i should meet them. "i remember one time that my mother sent me on an errand through the woods at twilight. i was in the thickest part of the woods, when i heard a sound that sent a shiver down my back. "'it is a witch, or some other dreadful being,' i said to myself. 'nothing else could make a sound like that.' my teeth chattered. my legs shook so, i could hardly move. somehow or other, i managed to keep on. it seemed as though hours passed before i saw the lights of the village. yet i suppose it was not more than fifteen minutes. "when i was once more safe inside my own home, i told my father and mother about my fright. "'it was no witch, my child,' said my father. 'the sound you describe was probably the cry of a wildcat. i thank heaven that you are safe. a wildcat is not a very pleasant creature to meet in a lonely place.' "after that, i was never sent away from the village after dark. "my boy friends and i often came across badgers and deer, and sometimes foxes made their way into the village in search of poultry, but i never came nearer to meeting a wildcat than the time of which i have just told you." "what work did you do out of school hours?" asked hans. the boy was thinking of the toys he had to carve. "my mother raised canary-birds, and i used to help her a great deal. nearly every woman in the village was busy at the same work. what concerts we did have in those days! mother tended every young bird she raised with the greatest care. would it become a good singer and bring a fair price? we waited anxiously for the first notes, and then watched to see how the voices gained in strength and sweetness. "it was a pleasant life, and i was very happy among the birds in our little village. would you like to hear a song i used to sing at that time? it is all about the birds and bees and flowers." "do sing it for us," cried every one. herr abel had a good voice and they listened with pleasure to his song. this is the first stanza: "i have been on the mountain that the song-birds love best. they were sitting, were flitting, they were building their nest. they were sitting, were flitting, they were building their nest." [illustration: bertha's home.] after he had finished, he told about the mines in which some of his friends worked. it was a hard life, with no bright sunlight to cheer the men in those deep, dark caverns underground. "of course you all know that the deepest mine in the world is in the hartz mountains." his friends nodded their heads, while hans whispered to bertha, "i should like to go down in that mine just for the sake of saying i have been as far into the earth as any living person." "the sun is setting, and there is a chill in the air," said bertha's father. "let us go home." chapter viii. what the waves bring bertha's mother had just come in from a hard morning's work in the fields. she had been helping her husband weed the garden. she spent a great deal of time outdoors in the summer-time, as many german peasant women do. they do a large share of the work in ploughing the grain-fields and harvesting the crops. they are much stronger than their american cousins. "supper is all ready and waiting for you," said bertha. the little girl had prepared a dish of sweet fruit soup which her mother had taught her to make. "it is very good," said her father when he had tasted it. "my little bertha is getting to be quite a housekeeper." "indeed, it is very good," said her mother. "you learned your lesson well, my child." bertha was quite abashed by so much praise. she looked down upon her plate and did not lift her eyes again till gretchen began to tell of a new amber bracelet which had just been given to one of the neighbours. "it is beautiful," said gretchen, quite excitedly. "the beads are such a clear, lovely yellow. they look so pretty on frau braun's neck, i don't wonder she is greatly pleased with her present." "who sent it to her?" asked her mother. "her brother in cologne. he is doing well at his trade, and so he bought this necklace at a fair and sent it to his sister as a remembrance. he wrote her a letter all about the sights in cologne, and asked frau braun to come and visit him and his wife. "he promised her in the letter that if she would come, he would take her to see the grand cologne cathedral. he said thousands of strangers visit it every year, because every one knows it is one of the most beautiful buildings in all europe. "then he said she should also see the church of saint ursula, where the bones of the eleven thousand maidens can still be seen in their glass cases." "do you know the story of st. ursula, gretchen?" asked her father. "yes, indeed, sir. ursula was the daughter of an english king. she was about to be married, but she said that before the wedding she would go to rome on a pilgrimage. "eleven thousand young girls went with the princess. on her way home she was married, but when the wedding party had got as far as cologne, they were attacked by the savage huns. every one was killed,--ursula, her husband, and the eleven thousand maidens. the church was afterward built in her memory. ursula was made a saint by the pope, and the bones of the young girls were preserved in glass cases in the church." "did frau braun tell of anything else her brother wrote?" asked her mother. "he spoke of the bridge of boats across the river, and said she would enjoy watching it open and shut to let the steamers and big rafts pass through. and he told of the cologne water that is sold in so many of the shops. it is hard to tell which makes the town most famous, the great cathedral or the cologne water." "father, how was the bridge of boats made?" asked bertha. "the boats were moored in a line across the river. planks were then laid across the tops and fastened upon them. vessels cannot pass under a bridge of this kind, so it has to be opened from time to time. they say it is always interesting to see this done." "yes, frau braun said she would rather see the bridge of boats than anything else in the city. she has already begun to plan how she can save up enough money to make the trip." "i will go over there to-morrow to see he new necklace," said bertha. "but what is amber, father?" "if you should go to the northern part of germany, bertha, you would see great numbers of men, women, and children, busy on the shores of the ocean. the work is greatest in the rough days of autumn, when a strong wind is blowing from the northeast. "then the men dress themselves as though they were going out into a storm. they arm themselves with nets and plunge into the waves, which are bringing treasure to the shore. it is the beautiful amber we admire so much. "the women and children are waiting on the sands, and as the men bring in their nets, the contents are given into their hands. they separate the precious lumps of amber from the weeds to which they are clinging." their father stopped to fill his pipe, and the children thought he had come to the end of the story. "but you haven't told us yet what amber is," said bertha. "be patient, my little one, and you shall hear," replied her father, patting her head. "as yet, i have not half told the story. but i will answer your question at once. "a long time ago, longer than you can imagine, bertha, forests were growing along the shores of the baltic sea. there was a great deal of gum in the trees of these forests. it oozed out of the trees in the same manner as gum from the spruce-tree and resin from the pine. "storms arose, and beds of sand and clay drifted over the forests. they were buried away for thousands of years, it may be. but the motion of the sea washes up pieces of the gum, which is of light weight. "the gum has become changed while buried in the earth such a long, long time. wise men use the word 'fossilized' when they speak of what has happened to it. the now beautiful, changed gum is called amber. "there are different ways of getting it. i told you how it comes drifting in on the waves when the winds are high and the water is rough. but on the pleasant summer days, when the sea is smooth and calm, the men go out a little way from the shore in boats. they float about, looking earnestly over the sides of the boats to the bottom of the sea. "all at once, they see something. down go their long hooks through the water. a moment afterward, they begin to tow a tangle of stones and seaweed to the shore. as soon as they land, they begin to sort out the great mass. perhaps they will rejoice in finding large pieces of amber in the collection. "there is still another way of getting amber. i know hans will be most interested in what i am going to say now. it has more of danger in it, and boys like to hear anything in the way of adventure." hans looked up and smiled. his father knew him well. he was a daring lad. he was always longing for the time when he should grow up and be a soldier, and possibly take part in some war. "children," their father went on, "you have all heard of divers and of their dangerous work under the sea. gretchen was telling me the other day about her geography lesson, and of the pearl-divers along the shores of india. i did not tell her then that some men spend their lives diving for amber on the shores of our own country. "they wear rubber suits and helmets and air-chests of sheet iron." "how can they see where they are going?" asked bertha. "there are glass openings in their helmets, and they can look through these. they go out in boats. the crew generally consists of six men. two of them are divers, and four men have charge of the air-pumps. these pumps force fresh air down through tubes fastened to the helmet of each diver. besides these men there is an overseer who has charge of everything. "sometimes the divers stay for hours on the bed of the sea, and work away at the amber tangles." "but suppose anything happens to the air-tubes and the men fail to get as much air as they need?" said hans. "is there any way of letting those in the boat know they are in trouble? and, besides that, how do the others know when it is time to raise the divers with their precious loads?" "there is a safety-rope reaching from the boat to the men. when they pull this rope it is a sign that they wish to be drawn up. but i have told you as much about amber now as you will be able to remember." "are you very tired, father dear?" said bertha, in her most coaxing tone. "why should i be tired? what do you wish to ask me? come, speak out plainly, little one." "you tell such lovely fairy-tales, papa, i was just wishing for one. see! the moon is just rising above the tree-tops. it is the very time for stories of the wonderful beings." her father smiled. "it shall be as you wish, bertha. it is hard to refuse you when you look at me that way. come, children, let us sit in the doorway. goodwife, put down your work and join us while i tell the story of siegfried, the old hero of germany." chapter ix. the magic sword far away in the long ago there lived a mighty king with his goodwife and his brave son, siegfried. their home was at xanten, where the river rhine flows lazily along. the young prince was carefully taught. but when his education was nearly finished, his father said: "siegfried, there is a mighty smith named mimer. it will be well for you to learn all you can of him in regard to the making of arms." so siegfried went to work at the trade of a smith. it was not long before he excelled his teacher. this pleased mimer, who spent many spare hours with his pupil, telling him stories of the olden times. after awhile, he took siegfried into his confidence. he said: "there is a powerful knight in burgundy who has challenged every smith of my country to make a weapon strong enough to pierce his coat of mail. "i long to try," mimer went on, "but i am now old and have not strength enough to use the heavy hammer." at these words siegfried jumped up in great excitement. "i will make the sword, dear master," he cried. "be of good cheer. it shall be strong enough to cut the knight's armour in two." early the next morning, siegfried began his work. for seven days and seven nights the constant ringing of his hammer could be heard. at the end of that time siegfried came to his master with a sword of the finest steel in his right hand. mimer looked it all over. he then held it in a stream of running water in which he had thrown a fine thread. the water carried the thread against the edge of the sword, where it was cut in two. "it is without a fault," cried mimer with delight. "i can do better than that," answered siegfried, and he took the sword and broke it into pieces. again he set to work. for seven more days and seven more nights he was busy at his forge. at the end of that time he brought a polished sword to his master. mimer looked it over with the greatest care and made ready to test it. he threw the fleeces of twelve sheep into the stream. the current carried them on its bosom to siegfried's sword. instantly, each piece was divided as it met the blade. mimer shouted aloud in his joy. "balmung" (for that was the name siegfried gave the sword) "is the finest weapon man ever made," he cried. siegfried was now prepared to meet the proud knight of burgundy. the very first thrust of the sword, balmung, did the work. the head and shoulders of the giant were severed from the rest of the body. they rolled down the hillside and fell into the rhine, where they can be seen even now, when the water is clear. at least, so runs the story. the trunk remained on the hilltop and was turned to stone. soon after this mimer found that siegfried longed to see the world and make himself famous. so he bound the sword balmung to the young prince's side, and told him to seek a certain person, who would give him a fine war-horse. siegfried went to this man, from whom he obtained a matchless steed. in fact it had descended from the great god odin's magic horse. siegfried, you can see, must have lived in a time when men believed in gods and other wonderful beings. he was now all ready for his adventures, but before starting out, mimer told him of a great treasure of gold guarded by a fearful serpent. this treasure was spread out over a plain called the glittering heath. no man had yet been able to take it, because of its terrible guardian. siegfried was not in the least frightened by the stories he heard of the monster. he started out on his dangerous errand with a heart full of courage. at last, he drew near the plain. he could see it on the other side of the rhine, from the hilltop where he was standing. with no one to help him, not even taking his magic horse with him, he hurried down the hillside and sprang into a boat on the shore. an old man had charge of the boat, and as he rowed siegfried across, he gave him good advice. this old man, as it happened, was the god odin, who loved siegfried and wished to see him succeed. "dig a deep trench along the path the serpent has worn on his way to the river when in search of water," said the old boatman. "hide yourself in the trench, and, as the serpent passes along, you must thrust your sword deep into his body." it was good advice. siegfried did as odin directed him. he went to work on the trench at once. it was soon finished, and then the young prince, sword in hand, was lying in watch for the dread monster. he did not have long to wait. he soon heard the sound of rolling stones. then came a loud hiss, and immediately afterward he felt the serpent's fiery breath on his cheek. and now the serpent rolled over into the ditch, and siegfried was covered by the folds of his huge body. he did not fear or falter. he thrust balmung, his wonderful sword, deep into the monster's body. the blood poured forth in such torrents that the ditch began to fill fast. it was a time of great danger for siegfried. he would have been drowned if the serpent in his death-agony had not rolled over on one side and given him a chance to free himself. in a moment more he was standing, safe and sound, by the side of the ditch. his bath in the serpent's blood had given him a great blessing. hereafter it would be impossible for any one to wound him except in one tiny place on his shoulder. a leaf had fallen on this spot, and the blood had not touched it. "what did siegfried do with the golden treasure?" asked hans, when his father had reached this point in the story. "he had not sought it for himself, but for mimer's sake. all he cared for was the power of killing the serpent." as soon as this was done, mimer drew near and showed himself ungrateful and untrue. he was so afraid siegfried would claim some of the treasure that he secretly drew balmung from out the serpent's body, and made ready to thrust it into siegfried. but at that very moment his foot slipped in the monster's blood, and he fell upon the sword and was instantly killed. siegfried was filled with horror when he saw what had happened. he sprang upon his horse's back and fled as fast as possible from the dreadful scene. "what happened to siegfried after that? did he have any more adventures?" asked bertha. "yes, indeed. there were enough to fill a book. but there is one in particular you girls would like to hear. it is about a beautiful princess whom he freed from a spell which had been cast upon her." "what was her name, papa?" asked gretchen. "brunhild, the queen of isenland. she had been stung by the thorn of sleep." odin, the great god, had said, "brunhild shall not awake till some hero is brave enough to fight his way through the flames which shall constantly surround the palace. he must then go to the side of the sleeping maiden and break the charm by a kiss upon her forehead." when siegfried, in his wanderings, heard the story of brunhild, he said, "i will make my way through the flames and will myself rescue the fair princess." he leaped upon the back of his magic steed, and together they fought their way through the fire that surrounded the palace of the sleeping beauty. he reached the gates in safety. there was no sign of life about the place. every one was wrapped in a deep sleep. siegfried made his way to the room of the enchanted princess. ah! there she lay, still and beautiful, with no knowledge of what was going on around her. the young knight knelt by her side. leaning over her, he pressed a kiss upon her forehead. she moved slightly; then, opening her blue eyes, she smiled sweetly upon her deliverer. at the same moment every one else in the palace woke up and went on with whatever had been interrupted when sleep overcame them. siegfried remained for six months with the fair brunhild and her court. every day was given up to music and feasting, games and songs. time passed like a beautiful dream. no one knows how long the young knight might have enjoyed this happy life if odin had not sent two birds, thought and memory, to remind him there were other things for him yet to do. he did not stop to bid brunhild farewell, but leaped upon his horse's back and rode away in search of new adventures. "dear me, children," exclaimed their father, looking at the clock, "it is long past the time you should be in your soft, warm beds." "papa, do you know what day to-morrow is?" whispered bertha, as she kissed him good night. "my darling child's birthday. it is ten years to-morrow since your eyes first looked upon the sunlight. they have been ten happy years to us all, though our lives are full of work. what do you say to that, my little one?" "very happy, papa dear. you and mother are so kind! i ought to be good as well as happy." "she is a faithful child," said her mother, after bertha had left the room. "that is why i have a little surprise ready for to-morrow. i have baked a large birthday cake and shall ask her little friends to share it with her. "her aunt has finished the new dress i bought for her, and i have made two white aprons, besides. she will be a happy child when she sees her presents." the mother closed her eyes and made a silent prayer to the all-father that bertha's life should be as joyful as her tenth birthday gave promise of being. the end. the little cousin series the most delightful and interesting accounts possible of child life in other lands, filled with quaint sayings, doings, and adventures. each one vol., 12mo, decorative cover, cloth, with six or more full-page illustrations in color. price per volume 0.60 _by mary hazelton wade (unless otherwise indicated)_ =our little african cousin= =our little alaskan cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little arabian cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little armenian cousin= =our little brown cousin= =our little canadian cousin= by elizabeth r. macdonald =our little chinese cousin= by isaac taylor headland =our little cuban cousin= =our little dutch cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little english cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little eskimo cousin= =our little french cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little german cousin= =our little hawaiian cousin= =our little hindu cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little indian cousin= =our little irish cousin= =our little italian cousin= =our little japanese cousin= =our little jewish cousin= =our little korean cousin= by h. lee m. pike =our little mexican cousin= by edward c. butler =our little norwegian cousin= =our little panama cousin= by h. lee m. pike =our little philippine cousin= =our little porto rican cousin= =our little russian cousin= =our little scotch cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little siamese cousin= =our little spanish cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little swedish cousin= by claire m. coburn =our little swiss cousin= =our little turkish cousin= the goldenrod library the goldenrod library contains stories which appeal alike both to children and to their parents and guardians. each volume is well illustrated from drawings by competent artists, which, together with their handsomely decorated uniform binding, showing the goldenrod, usually considered the emblem of america, is a feature of their manufacture. each one volume, small 12mo, illustrated 0.35 list of titles =aunt nabby's children.= by frances hodges white. =child's dream of a star, the.= by charles dickens. =flight of rosy dawn, the.= by pauline bradford mackie. =findelkind.= by ouida. =fairy of the rhone, the.= by a. comyns carr. =gatty and i.= by frances e. crompton. =helena's wonderworld.= by frances hodges white. =jerry's reward.= by evelyn snead barnett. =la belle nivernaise.= by alphonse daudet. =little king davie.= by nellie hellis. =little peterkin vandike.= by charles stuart pratt. =little professor, the.= by ida horton cash. =peggy's trial.= by mary knight potter. =prince yellowtop.= by kate whiting patch. =provence rose, a.= by ouida. =seventh daughter, a.= by grace wickham curran. =sleeping beauty, the.= by martha baker dunn. =small, small child, a.= by e. livingston prescott. =susanne.= by frances j. delano. =water people, the.= by charles lee sleight. =young archer, the.= by charles e. brimblecom. cosy corner series it is the intention of the publishers that this series shall contain only the very highest and purest literature,--stories that shall not only appeal to the children themselves, but be appreciated by all those who feel with them in their joys and sorrows. the numerous illustrations in each book are by well-known artists, and each volume has a separate attractive cover design. each 1 vol., 16mo, cloth 0.50 _by annie fellows johnston_ =the little colonel.= (trade mark.) the scene of this story is laid in kentucky. its heroine is a small girl, who is known as the little colonel, on account of her fancied resemblance to an old-school southern gentleman, whose fine estate and old family are famous in the region. =the giant scissors.= this is the story of joyce and of her adventures in france. joyce is a great friend of the little colonel, and in later volumes shares with her the delightful experiences of the "house party" and the "holidays." =two little knights of kentucky.= who were the little colonel's neighbors. in this volume the little colonel returns to us like an old friend, but with added grace and charm. she is not, however, the central figure of the story, that place being taken by the "two little knights." =mildred's inheritance.= a delightful little story of a lonely english girl who comes to america and is befriended by a sympathetic american family who are attracted by her beautiful speaking voice. by means of this one gift she is enabled to help a school-girl who has temporarily lost the use of her eyes, and thus finally her life becomes a busy, happy one. =cicely and other stories for girls.= the readers of mrs. johnston's charming juveniles will be glad to learn of the issue of this volume for young people. =aunt 'liza's hero and other stories.= a collection of six bright little stories, which will appeal to all boys and most girls. =big brother.= a story of two boys. the devotion and care of steven, himself a small boy, for his baby brother, is the theme of the simple tale. =ole mammy's torment.= "ole mammy's torment" has been fitly called "a classic of southern life." it relates the haps and mishaps of a small negro lad, and tells how he was led by love and kindness to a knowledge of the right. =the story of dago.= in this story mrs. johnston relates the story of dago, a pet monkey, owned jointly by two brothers. dago tells his own story, and the account of his haps and mishaps is both interesting and amusing. =the quilt that jack built.= a pleasant little story of a boy's labor of love, and how it changed the course of his life many years after it was accomplished. =flip's islands of providence.= a story of a boy's life battle, his early defeat, and his final triumph, well worth the reading. _by edith robinson_ =a little puritan's first christmas.= a story of colonial times in boston, telling how christmas was invented by betty sewall, a typical child of the puritans, aided by her brother sam. =a little daughter of liberty.= the author introduces this story as follows: "one ride is memorable in the early history of the american revolution, the well-known ride of paul revere. equally deserving of commendation is another ride,--the ride of anthony severn,--which was no less historic in its action or memorable in its consequences." =a loyal little maid.= a delightful and interesting story of revolutionary days, in which the child heroine, betsey schuyler, renders important services to george washington. =a little puritan rebel.= this is an historical tale of a real girl, during the time when the gallant sir harry vane was governor of massachusetts. =a little puritan pioneer.= the scene of this story is laid in the puritan settlement at charlestown. =a little puritan bound girl.= a story of boston in puritan days, which is of great interest to youthful readers. =a little puritan cavalier.= the story of a "little puritan cavalier" who tried with all his boyish enthusiasm to emulate the spirit and ideals of the dead crusaders. =a puritan knight errant.= the story tells of a young lad in colonial times who endeavored to carry out the high ideals of the knights of olden days. _by ouida (louise de la ramã©e)_ =a dog of flanders:= a christmas story. too well and favorably known to require description. =the nurnberg stove.= this beautiful story has never before been published at a popular price. _by frances margaret fox_ =the little giant's neighbours.= a charming nature story of a "little giant" whose neighbours were the creatures of the field and garden. =farmer brown and the birds.= a little story which teaches children that the birds are man's best friends. =betty of old mackinaw.= a charming story of child-life, appealing especially to the little readers who like stories of "real people." =brother billy.= the story of betty's brother, and some further adventures of betty herself. =mother nature's little ones.= curious little sketches describing the early lifetime, or "childhood," of the little creatures out-of-doors. =how christmas came to the mulvaneys.= a bright, lifelike little story of a family of poor children, with an unlimited capacity for fun and mischief. the wonderful never-to-be forgotten christmas that came to them is the climax of a series of exciting incidents. _by miss mulock_ =the little lame prince.= a delightful story of a little boy who has many adventures by means of the magic gifts of his fairy godmother. =adventures of a brownie.= the story of a household elf who torments the cook and gardener, but is a constant joy and delight to the children who love and trust him. =his little mother.= miss mulock's short stories for children are a constant source of delight to them, and "his little mother," in this new and attractive dress, will be welcomed by hosts of youthful readers. =little sunshine's holiday.= an attractive story of a summer outing. "little sunshine" is another of those beautiful child-characters for which miss mulock is so justly famous. _by marshall saunders_ =for his country.= a sweet and graceful story of a little boy who loved his country; written with that charm which has endeared miss saunders to hosts of readers. =nita, the story of an irish setter.= in this touching little book, miss saunders shows how dear to her heart are all of god's dumb creatures. =alpatok, the story of an eskimo dog.= alpatok, an eskimo dog from the far north, was stolen from his master and left to starve in a strange city, but was befriended and cared for, until he was able to return to his owner. miss saunders's story is based on truth, and the pictures in the book of "alpatok" are based on a photograph of the real eskimo dog who had such a strange experience. _by will allen dromgoole_ =the farrier's dog and his fellow.= this story, written by the gifted young southern woman, will appeal to all that is best in the natures of the many admirers of her graceful and piquant style. =the fortunes of the fellow.= those who read and enjoyed the pathos and charm of "the farrier's dog and his fellow" will welcome the further account of the adventures of baydaw and the fellow at the home of the kindly smith. =the best of friends.= this continues the experiences of the farrier's dog and his fellow, written in miss dromgoole's well-known charming style. =down in dixie.= a fascinating story for boys and girls, of a family of alabama children who move to florida and grow up in the south. _by marian w. wildman_ =loyalty island.= an account of the adventures of four children and their pet dog on an island, and how they cleared their brother from the suspicion of dishonesty. =theodore and theodora.= this is a story of the exploits and mishaps of two mischievous twins, and continues the adventures of the interesting group of children in "loyalty island." _by charles g. d. roberts_ =the cruise of the yacht dido.= the story of two boys who turned their yacht into a fishing boat to earn money to pay for a college course, and of their adventures while exploring in search of hidden treasure. =the young acadian.= the story of a young lad of acadia who rescued a little english girl from the hands of savages. =the lord of the air.= the story of the eagle =the king of the mamozekel.= the story of the moose =the watchers of the camp-fire.= the story of the panther =the haunter of the pine gloom.= the story of the lynx =the return to the trails.= the story of the bear =the little people of the sycamore.= the story of the raccoon _by other authors_ =the great scoop.= _by molly elliot seawell_ a capital tale of newspaper life in a big city, and of a bright, enterprising, likable youngster employed thereon. =john whopper.= the late bishop clark's popular story of the boy who fell through the earth and came out in china, with a new introduction by bishop potter. =the dole twins.= _by kate upson clark_ the adventures of two little people who tried to earn money to buy crutches for a lame aunt. an excellent description of child-life about 1812, which will greatly interest and amuse the children of to-day, whose life is widely different. =larry hudson's ambition.= _by james otis_, author of "toby tyler," etc. larry hudson is a typical american boy, whose hard work and enterprise gain him his ambition,--an education and a start in the world. =the little christmas shoe.= _by jane p. scott woodruff_ a touching story of yule-tide. =wee dorothy.= _by laura updegraff_ a story of two orphan children, the tender devotion of the eldest, a boy, for his sister being its theme and setting. with a bit of sadness at the beginning, the story is otherwise bright and sunny, and altogether wholesome in every way. =the king of the golden river:= a legend of stiria. _by john ruskin_ written fifty years or more ago, and not originally intended for publication, this little fairy-tale soon became known and made a place for itself. =a child's garden of verses.= _by r. l. stevenson_ mr. stevenson's little volume is too well known to need description. it will be heartily welcomed in this new and attractive edition. * * * * * transcriber's note: obvious punctuation errors repaired. [transcriber's note: bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and italic text is surrounded by _underscores_.] our little eskimo cousin the little cousin series _illustrated_ [illustration] by mary hazelton wade =our little japanese cousin= =our little brown cousin= =our little indian cousin= =our little russian cousin= =our little african cousin= =our little cuban cousin= =our little hawaiian cousin= =our little eskimo cousin= =our little philippine cousin= =our little porto rican cousin= =our little swiss cousin= =our little norwegian cousin= =our little siamese cousin= =our little italian cousin= =our little irish cousin= =our little turkish cousin= =our little german cousin= =our little jewish cousin= by isaac taylor headland =our little chinese cousin= by elizabeth roberts macdonald =our little canadian cousin= [illustration] each volume illustrated with six full-page plates in tint, from drawings by l. j. bridgman. cloth, 12mo, with decorative cover, per volume, 60 cents. [illustration] l. c. page & company new england building, boston, mass. [illustration: etu] our little eskimo cousin by mary hazelton wade _illustrated by_ l. j. bridgman [illustration] boston l. c. page & company _mdccccii_ _copyright, 1902_ by l. c. page & company (incorporated) _all rights reserved_ published, june 1902 colonial press electrotyped and printed by c. h. simonds & co. boston, mass., u. s. a. preface it is a very wonderful thing, when we stop to think of it, that no matter where we are placed in this great round world of ours, it seems just right to us. far away in the frozen north, where the lovely aurora borealis dances in the sky, where the long sunless winter night stretches halfway across the year, live a people who cannot keep themselves alive without working very hard. yet they are happy and fun-loving. they _make_ pleasures for themselves. they are patient and joyous in the midst of darkness and storm. they do not think of complaining at their hard lot, or that they do not live where nature is kinder and more generous. we call them eskimos. they belong to another race than ours,--a different branch of the great human family. they are yellow and we are white, to be sure. but we know that, no matter how far away any race of people lives, and no matter how different these people may be from us in looks and habits, they and we belong to the same great family. it includes every race and every colour, for we are the children of one father. what a pleasure it is, therefore, to travel from place to place and see more of the life of others! but suppose we cannot journey with our bodies; we need not stay at home on that account. let us use the wings of the mind, and without trouble or expense visit the hot lands and the cold, the yellow children and the red. let us know them and learn what they can teach us. contents chapter page i. baby days 9 ii. mother and child 18 iii. play-days 28 iv. dog team and sledge 38 v. kayak and harpoon 49 vi. the seal hunt 63 vii. feast and fun 74 viii. hard times 80 ix. an eskimo christmas 91 x. summer travels 97 list of illustrations page etu _frontispiece_ "he who hits the greatest number wins the game" 31 "etu had become quite skilful" 41 "whizz! sounds the harpoon as it speeds from etu's shoulder" 67 "etu stopped moving and lay quite still" 89 "the blocks of snow were handed to them" 98 our little eskimo cousin chapter i. baby days. a pair of very bright black eyes peered out from the mother's hood that winter morning. the thermometer, if there had been one, would have shown the temperature to be seventy degrees below the freezing point. yet baby etu did not seem to care. he was nestled so warmly in the heavy furs, and felt so safe on his mother's broad back, that he laughed and crowed in pure delight. it was his first ride since he was born, and there was so much to look at! at least he thought so, though great sheets of snow stretched outward to the frozen ocean, and covered the land in every direction. the twinkling stars gave the only light for etu to see by, yet it was daytime. it was that part of the twenty-four hours when the baby's people did their work; and that must be called day in etu's far northern country, even though darkness covers all the land. for etu lives in the frozen zone, on the shores of northern alaska, and during the long winter of eight months the sun shows his face very little above the horizon. here and there the snow looked as if it had been raised into low mounds. near these mounds holes could be seen in the ground, and pathways dug out between them. there were no trees, no fences, no roads. where was the village, and where was the baby's home? those holes marked the entrances to the winter houses built by etu's father and his neighbours. the mounds were the coverings of the houses. great pits had been dug in the earth, and lined with driftwood which had floated on to the shore. jaws of whales made the framework of the roofs, these being covered with sods cut out of the marshy plains in summer. mother nature did the rest by protecting all with a warm close blanket of snow. at first it makes one shudder to think of living in such homes during the long arctic winter. but the eskimos are satisfied, and feel so comfortable that they remove a great part of their clothing while they are indoors. the houses are made so snug that the sharpest winds cannot enter, and they cost nothing but the labour of making them. etu's mother allowed him to stay out only a few minutes this first time. she soon turned toward home, and coming to her own doorway crawled down through a long slanting tunnel in the ground, eight or ten feet long. when she reached the end, she was obliged to stoop even lower, for now she must pass upwards through another passage. lifting a trap-door, she stepped at once into the middle of her own home. why was there such a queer entrance? because the wind must be kept out at all hazards. after all, it seemed easy and natural enough to this woman who had never known other and pleasanter hallways. how close it seemed after the fresh cold air outdoors! there was a strong odour of smoking oil. it was noisy, too, as other women and children were moving around inside, for the house was shared in common by several families who were friendly to each other, and enjoyed living together. etu's mother quickly took off her outer coat of sealskin, and, lifting her baby out of his warm nest, placed him on a platform which stretched along one side of the room. what a round, smiling dumpling he was! his face was broad and flat, while his little nose looked as though it had been punched inwards. his bright eyes were quite narrow. he wore a curious skin cap drawn tightly over the top of his head. he must keep this on night and day for a year, at least. it would make his forehead taper upward, and that is a mark of beauty among his people. as soon as he was born, the top of his head was pressed between his nurse's hands, and the cap fitted on at once so that his head might grow in the proper shape. after that operation he was taken outdoors, and rolled in the snow. i suppose that was to get him used to the cold climate of his birthplace. don't you? baby etu's skin was much whiter than his mother's,--very nearly as white, in fact, as your own little brother's. why has he changed so much since he has grown to be a big boy? listen to the strange reason. when our eskimo cousin was born, there was a small dark spot on his back. day by day it grew larger; the change came very slowly, so slowly it could scarcely be noticed. but at last the darker colour had spread over the boy's whole body, till his skin was nearly like that of his father and mother. in course of time it would grow darker still, because he did not wash himself. please don't be shocked. it is _so_ hard to get water in that frozen land. snow must first be melted, and to do this heat is required. heating requires the burning of oil, and oil is very precious. it is scarcely any wonder, therefore, that etu has not been taught to be cleanly in all ways. the smoky air of the home during the long winter months also made the boy's skin grow darker. sometimes during his babyhood his mother would wash him as a mother cat washes her kittens, but that was all he has ever known of the delights of a bath. the mother-love made that pleasant, perhaps, but we cannot envy him. it was quite surprising to an arctic explorer some years ago, when he discovered the difference soap and warm water would make in an eskimo's appearance. "why, you are almost a white man," he exclaimed, "your friends will think you have been changed into another being by some magical spell." and he laughed heartily when he thought of the only magic being soap and water. etu tumbled about on the sealskins which covered the platform, watching his mother while she trimmed the wick of the lamp. what an odd-looking lamp it was! it was made of a crescent-shaped stone hollowed out. think of the labour of making it! it must have taken days, and even weeks, before the cavity was hollowed enough to hold the oil. but etu's people are such patient workers they do not worry over the time they spend. moss was built up around the sides of the lamp; it served for the wick which spluttered away as the oil burned and warmed the room. a lump of seal fat, or blubber as it is called, hung over the lamp. as it melted slowly in the heat, it dripped down into the cavity and furnished a steady supply of oil. there were two other lamps burning in etu's home, for you must remember there was a very large family living here. and these queer lamps not only gave light and warmth to all these people, but the cooking must also be done over them. etu watched the light with blinking eyes for a few moments, and then fell fast asleep. only think of it, he was nearly naked! there was no covering on his tiny body except a short skirt of fur,--his arms and legs were quite bare, yet his loving mother did not hurry to cover him over. he must get used to cold while he was still small, so that when he grew older he could bear exposure better. chapter ii. mother and child. the mother was proud that this first baby was a boy. she liked to dream of what a great hunter he would become. in a few years he would do his part to keep the wolf from the door, in more senses than one. he would bring home the seal, the walrus, now growing so scarce, the grim white bear, and make many a feast for his people. oh, no, girls could never do such things as these! she was a happy woman, indeed. this eskimo mother had a pleasant, sunny face, even though the chin was tattooed with three long lines from the mouth downwards. she firmly believed that it would be looked upon as a sign of goodness, when she reached the next world. it might help in bringing her to heaven. the work was done by her own hands and must have been quite painful. the sinew of a reindeer furnished the thread which she blackened with soot. fastening it in her bone needle, she drew it under and through the skin till the lines were plainly marked. they would stay that way as long as she lived. she bustled about at her work without fuss or hurry. more than once the children playing in the room got in her way, but she did not scold nor even look cross. now and then a hungry-looking dog poked his head up through the doorway, only to be chased out of sight again when discovered. as she worked she joined in the laughter and talk of the women. hark! the sound of many feet could be heard, and the women and children stopped their chatter to welcome the men of the household, who had been away on a bear hunt for many hours. "what luck? what luck?" all said at once, but there was no story of brave fighting to tell this night; the long march over the icy plains had met with no reward. but there was no danger of starving at present, for great dishes of smoking seal soup stood ready for the hunters. in a few minutes all the household were squatting on the floor around the bowls. they ate the delicious supper to their hearts' content; and how they did eat! it seemed as though their stomachs must be made of elastic, for otherwise how were they able to stow away such immense quantities of the rich, fatty food? with etu's people it is either a feast or a famine all the time. they have no regular time to eat, no such thing as breakfast, dinner, and supper. if there is a good supply of food on hand, they will keep on eating hour after hour in a way to fill other people with wonder. but if there is nothing in the larder they are able to go several days without eating; yet they seem to keep well and strong. all were satisfied at last, and baby etu waked up in time to be held and petted for a while before bedtime. his mother did not have any dishes to wash, but before she could settle herself for the night she had to arrange a net over the seal-oil lamp, and spread her husband's wet clothing in it to dry. she must rouse herself during the night to watch and turn it from time to time, for that is a woman's work, she has been taught. but where were all these people going to stow themselves for sleeping? there was no sign of a bed in the whole house. that question was easily settled, for a portion of the platform was set aside for each family. they arranged their fur rugs upon it, and crept in side by side. then, taking off all their clothing, they buried themselves under the warm covers. first in order lay the father of a family, next came the mother, and close to her the youngest child was always nestled. baby etu slept, warm and safe, that night and many afterward. not once during the long winter did he cry from colic. as soon as he was able to sit up alone his mother gave him lessons in what he needed most,--strength of body, and ease in moving every muscle. she would sit on the floor or platform and stretch out her legs in front of her. then she would brace etu against her feet, and, holding his hands, would bend his arms in every possible direction. now they must be stretched upwards, now to the right, the left, behind him, and so on. this would make him agile in hunting. as soon as the baby could walk he began to have other exercises for his legs, for he must make a good runner and dancer, also. as soon as etu began to take more notice of those around him, he received many presents of toys. there were animals carved out of ivory,--tiny whales and walruses, baby seals and reindeer. he could not break them easily. they were fine things to press against his aching gums when the first teeth pushed themselves into sight. if he had been a girl he would have had an ivory doll, with a little dress of mouse skin, but, of course, a boy would not care for such a plaything. it was not to be thought of. soon the time came for his first suit of clothes, and, oh, how many days of patient work his mamma spent on those little garments! in the first place, there must be some long stockings of reindeer skin, so made that the hairy side lay next his body. after that came socks of the skin taken from eider-ducks. and outside of all he must wear stout boots of sealskin with soles of thick whale hide. he must draw these up to his hips over his two pairs of deerskin trousers, just as his father and mother themselves did. his jacket was made of reindeer skin, with a warm hood fastened to it to draw over his head while outdoors in the searching winds. it had no buttons either before or behind, but fitted quite loosely. some one asks: "how did he get into this garment, since there were no openings except for the neck and sleeves?" he slipped it down over his head, as american boys put on their jerseys. the skin had been tanned and stretched and softened so beautifully by his mother that it was quite easy to do this. the baby's jacket was shaped round exactly like his father's, while his mother's had a long pointed tail both in front and behind. besides this difference, her own jacket is always trimmed with a fringe of coloured beads bought of the traders. this fringe reaches around the neck, and also around both of the tails. it is very beautiful, her neighbours all declare. it seems quite wonderful to us that etu's boots could be perfectly water-tight, although they were home-made. this eskimo mother is such a fine seamstress with her coarse needle and thread, that a drop of water cannot enter the skin boots after her work is done. when his first suit was entirely finished, and etu was dressed, he was ready for the coldest weather. as soon as he could walk easily, he had no more need to ride in the warm hood on his mother's back. there were times before this, however, when he cried with the cold even in that snug place, and his mother had been obliged to stop in her walk, loosen her jacket, and slip the baby inside of all her clothing next to her own warm body. after that the crying would stop, and etu would coo softly as the two went on their way. how many things had to be done before the baby's suit was finished! in the first place, his papa must kill the animals which furnished the warm skins. but when that was done, _his_ work was over. it was his wife's turn now. she removed the skins from the dead reindeer and seal, and stretched them out to dry, with the hairy side toward the earth. after a few days they were ready for her to begin the hardest part of the task. they must be scraped with a sharp knife until every atom of flesh should be removed, as well as the inner tough skin. now they were flexible enough for all the clothing except the stockings, and these must be very soft indeed for the tender baby feet. a piece of the skin of a baby deer was chosen by the careful mother, who next proceeded to chew it, inch by inch. her teeth were beautifully white and sharp, but the work was done so carefully that no hole, nor even mark, could be seen in the skin when it was finished. she was ready now to cut out the various garments with her odd scissors,--but, after all, it is wrong to call the queer knife she uses by the name of scissors. she speaks of it as an "oodlo," and it is useful in so many ways, she really could not keep house without it. it is shaped much like your mother's meat-chopper. it is made of bone edged with iron, and when etu's mother cuts with it, she moves it away from her in a way which looks very awkward to us. it not only takes the place of scissors, but is the hatchet, the knife, and also scraper with which the flesh is removed from the skins. chapter iii. play-days. month after month passed by with baby etu. the little round ball grew into a sturdy boy, who delighted in rough plays outdoors, as well as many indoor games, when the storms raged too greatly for him to leave the house. his mother never refused him anything possible to get. he was never scolded or punished, so it is no wonder he grew up kind and honest and truthful. and laugh? why, you can't imagine how many things there are for eskimo children to laugh about. in that cold and dreary land one would expect to see long faces, and hear people constantly groaning and complaining; but, instead of that, these people of the far north may be said to be ever "on the grin," as travellers there have often expressed it. and etu was like the rest of his people. he was always finding some new source of fun and pleasure. when he was still a tiny baby, left to amuse himself on the platform inside the house, he would watch for the dogs to appear in the passageway, and throw his ivory toys at them. then he would laugh and shake his sides as they dodged the play-things and scampered away. sometimes one of the older children would bring him a ball of snow or ice and teach him to kick it into the air again and again, without touching it with his hands, yet keeping it in motion all the time. when he grew older and braver he allowed himself to be tossed up in the air in a blanket of walrus hide. he must keep on his feet all the time, and not tumble about in the blanket. after awhile he could go almost to the roof and back again, holding himself as straight as a little soldier. [illustration: "he who hits the greatest number wins the game"] of course he slid down-hill and had any amount of sport, but the sled was generally the seat of his own deerskin trousers. he and his playmates liked to start from the top of an icy hill, and vie with each other in reaching the foot. sometimes the little fellows would double themselves up so they looked like balls of fur, then down the hill they would roll, over and over, one after another. and when they reached the bottom and jumped upon their feet, what a shouting there would be as they shook themselves and brushed off the snow! now that etu is a big boy, he plays still another game on the snowy hillsides. his father has killed a great number of reindeer, and the boy is allowed to have all the antlers he wishes. when the boys want to play the reindeer game, as we may call it, they set up the antlers in the snow, a short distance apart from each other. then they climb the hill again, and, seating themselves on their sleds, slide down past the antlers. they must steer clear of them and reach the foot without running into a single one. at least, that is the game, and the ones who do so successfully are the winners. but what kind of a sled do you think etu uses? it is simply a cake of ice; if you stop to think a moment, you can imagine how swiftly and smoothly it travels along. there is a still different game of reindeer-hunting which requires more skill. this time etu and his playfellows arm themselves with bows and arrows. as they coast rapidly past the reindeer antlers, they shoot at them and try to leave their arrows fixed in as many as possible. of course, he who hits the greatest number wins the game. this is exciting sport indeed, and etu will go home afterward ready to eat such a quantity of frozen seal blubber as to make the eyes of any one but an eskimo open wide with wonder. eskimo, i just said; but etu does not call himself by that name. he will tell you that he is one of the innuits, as his father has taught him. the word "innuit" means "people." etu's mother has told him of an old, old legend of her race, about the creation of the world. at first human beings were made white, but they were not worthy of their maker. then others were created who were the true people, or the innuits. the word eskimo means "eater of raw fish." it was given to these natives of the far north by the travellers who came among them and observed their queer ways of living and eating. "raw meat! raw fish!" they exclaimed among themselves. "these are indeed queer people who enjoy such food in a freezing climate." so it came about that they spoke of them as eskimos, and the name has clung to etu's people ever since. the boy remembers well his first candy. he had been ill, but was getting strong once more. his good patient mother wished to bring a smile to his pale face, so while he was sleeping she prepared a surprise. she took the red feet of a bird called the dovekie, and, drawing out the bones, blew into the skin until it was puffed out as full as possible. then she poured melted reindeer fat into these bright-colored pouches, and the candy-bags were finished. etu's eyes grew suddenly bright when they opened upon the surprise prepared for him. it did not take many minutes, you may well believe, for every bit of this odd candy to disappear. you may like chocolate creams and cocoanut cakes, and think them the greatest treat in the world, but in etu's opinion there is nothing better than a big lump of seal blubber or the marrow from the inside of a deer's bones. when he had his first bow and arrow, it was a very tiny one. he learned to shoot at a target inside his winter home. his mother would hang up pieces of fat meat across the room where he sat, and he would try very hard to pierce them. if he succeeded, he could have the meat to eat, so of course he tried very hard. at other times he would sit watching for a dog to push his head up through the doorway, and let fly the arrow at him. at first this seems like a very cruel sport, but the arrow was blunted and very small; it could not do much harm, even if it struck the dog, who would bound away out of sight only to appear again in a few moments. of course, etu has played ball all his life, but his ball is of a different kind from yours. it is made of sealskin. sometimes he will try with other boys to knock it about so continually that it is kept in the air for a long, long time without falling. at other times all engage in a grand game of football, but, according to their ideas, the children must on no account touch the ball with their hands. that would be a "foul play," as you boys would say. by their rules it can only be kicked. in the long winter evenings there is still more fun. in etu's big household old and young gather around the dim, smoky lamp and tell stories. there are such wonderful adventures to relate of daring deeds on sea and land. etu listens breathless to tales of the white bear surprised in his den, of long tramps after prey, when life depended on fresh supplies, and king frost was striving to seize the weakened bodies of the hunters. then there are quaint legends and fairy tales, besides stories of wondrous beings in the unseen world around. some of these beings are good, and some bad. etu does not like to hear about these last, and tries to put them out of his mind when he is travelling alone. but the evenings are not wholly given to story-telling, for the people are fond of music. they like dancing, also, for it makes them feel jolly and gay. they pass many an hour singing monotonous songs which they think very sweet, but which we would think tiresome. sometimes when etu's mother has finished her work for the day, she gathers the children of the house around her, and shows them how to make wonderful figures with strings of deer's sinews. you all know the game of cat's cradle; well, it is something like that, only very much harder. the woman fastens the string back and forth on her son's hands, then weaves it quickly in and out; before one knows it, she has shaped it into the body of a musk ox. a few more changes are made, when, behold! it is no longer a musk ox, but has become a reindeer or a seal. it requires a great deal of skill to do this, but etu can make nearly as many figures as his mother, although she has had so many years of practice. chapter iv. dog team and sledge. when he was three years old, our little northern cousin had his first and only pets. they were two little puppies left without any mother. they looked like baby wolves with their sharp, pointed noses, erect ears, and furry backs; but they were very cunning, and amused their little master all day long. when night came they crept under the heavy covers, and lay close to etu's feet while he slept, keeping him as warm and comfortable as he could possibly desire to be. but, like all other pets, these puppies _would_ grow up, and then their work in life began as well as etu's. they must be trained to draw a sledge, for they must be able to carry their young master on long journeys over the snowy plains. etu's mother made him some reins to be fastened to the dogs' necks. she placed the ends in the hands of her little boy, who sat on the platform, holding a whip. he must learn to manage the team, he must teach the dogs to obey his voice, to move to the right or the left, as he directed; in short, to understand that he was truly their master. every new birthday two more dogs were given to etu, and it became his duty to feed and train them to be in readiness when he was old enough to hunt with his father. do not imagine for a moment that this was an easy matter. no white man has ever yet, i believe, found himself able to manage a pack of eskimo dogs. each one is fastened to the sledge by a single cord, and, as they hurry onward at the sound of their master's voice, it seems as though there were the most dreadful confusion. one dog, wiser and cleverer than the rest, is always chosen as the leader; his rein is a little longer than the others. he is always the one that listens most closely to the directions given, turning his head backward from time to time to look at his master, and make sure that he is right. then onward he dashes, the other dogs following close at his heels. [illustration: "etu had become quite skilful"] etu spent some time in deciding which dog was the best out of his own pack, but when he was quite sure of vanya's strength and brightness he gave him the greatest care and attention of all. but the whip! it was far harder to learn its use than to master all his other lessons. the handle was only six inches long, while the lash was at least sixteen feet. to throw it out and then bring it back without letting it become entangled among the legs of two or three dogs was a difficult task. but to be sure of striking only the one for whom it was intended, was a far harder thing to learn. even when etu had become quite skilful, it seemed as though every time he rode away he must come home with at least one broken bone. for as the dogs gradually gained in speed, and one or another received a stroke of the whip to remind him of his duty, he would jump wildly around. perhaps he would upset two or three others in an instant. then there would be such a yelping, and such a breaking of reins would follow, it seemed impossible for etu to straighten them out again, and harder still it must have been for him to keep his seat, and not be thrown off. but the boy loves the work, and nothing pleases him more than to be sent twenty miles to a neighbouring village on an errand for his father. in the winter season, when the dogs are not working, they are sometimes allowed to stay in the passageway leading to the house. and you already know that they try again and again to make their way inside. the burning lamp gives such pleasant warmth, and the smell of the seal or reindeer meat is so tempting that they are willing to run the chance of the blows they are almost sure to get for being so daring. they are warmly clothed, however, and can bear the most terrible weather without harm coming to them. beneath the long hair a heavy soft wool grows in the winter time, and protects their bodies from the icy cold. it is etu's duty to feed all the dogs of the household. it does not take a great amount of his time, for the poor hard-working creatures have only one meal in two days! if there is danger of a famine, and provisions are scarce, they are fed but once in three days. this is during the winter, moreover, for in summer they are expected to provide for themselves, getting fish from the shallow beds of the rivers, killing birds as they alight on the shore, catching baby seals, and getting reindeer moss or lichens from the rocks. it is fun to watch etu on feeding day. he gathers the dogs around him in a wide circle, and tosses first to one, then to another, his strip of sealskin. if a dog moves from his place or jumps out of turn to receive his food, he is only rewarded by a lash of the whip, instead of the longed-for meat. so by long experience they have learned to wait patiently. these eskimo dogs must have wonderful stomachs to digest the tough food on which they live. it is simply impossible to chew the strips of skin, so they are swallowed whole. sometimes a young dog chokes over his hard work, and coughs up his precious bit, only to have it snatched away from him by one of his neighbours. we feel like pitying these dogs of the cold lands. they are deeply devoted to their masters, yet a word of kindness is rarely spoken to them. their work is hard, and their food is scant. in winter they must draw the sledges, and in summer, as their masters travel from place to place, they are laden with heavy packs which they carry cheerfully. this reminds me that when etu played "horse" in his early days, it wasn't _horse_, after all; it was _dog_, instead, for the eskimo dog is the only horse of the far north. when etu was old enough to drive a team of a dozen dogs, he had reached his tenth birthday. his father said to him then: "now, etu, you are old enough to make your own sledge. you have often helped me, but now you are able to do the work alone." our little cousin set manfully to work at once. it was so nice to think of having a sledge for his very own, and one that he had made himself, too. it was not a very hard task, once he had gathered his materials together. the jawbones of a whale were used for the framework and runners. sealskin was fitted over this framework, and a little seat made from which etu's legs hung over in front when he was driving. "but will the bone runners travel swiftly enough over the snow?" some one asks. "not unless they are properly iced," etu would answer. every time the boy starts out on a journey, he must prepare the runners afresh by squirting water upon them from his mouth. a coating of smooth ice is formed almost instantly, which will last for a short distance. then it must be renewed. soon after etu's sledge was completed, he was sent by his father to look for seal-holes along the coast. it was a bright, clear day, and, although it was fifty degrees below zero, the boy enjoyed his ride; he had no thought of cold, as there was only a slight wind blowing. he journeyed on and on, his bright eyes watching for signs of seals beneath the snow-covered ice. he did not realise how far he was from home. he was many miles away, when a strong wind suddenly arose. how it cut his cheeks and bit his nose! he knew he must turn back at once or he might be overcome. brave boy as he was, there would keep entering his mind the thought of a neighbour who was frozen while travelling in just such weather. when his sledge arrived at his own doorway, there sat the man in his seat, straight and stiff; but the reins were tightly held in dead hands. the dogs had kept on their way unharmed, while the driver gradually lost all knowledge of them, and of this world. etu put his gloved hand to his nose again and again, to make sure it was all right; it was such an easy thing for it to freeze without his knowledge. and now his hands began to grow numb, and then his feet, although he often sprang from his sledge to run with the dogs and jump in the snow. ah, that icy wind! would it never stop? the boy's eyes became blinded, and at last he thought: "it is of no use. i don't care very much, anyway. i begin to feel so queer and stupid. what does it mean?" that was the last he knew till he awoke in his own home to find his mother bending over him; she was rubbing him with balls of snow, and looking very, very anxious. how the blood tingled through his body, as it began to move freely once more! but he was safe now, and could no longer feel the terrible wind blowing against him. it was a narrow escape for etu. it was well for him that he was within a mile of the village when he lost the power to think. the dogs kept on their way, and brought him quickly to his own home. chapter v. kayak and harpoon. when etu was only nine years old he began to go out upon the ocean, fishing and shooting with his father. of course he was allowed to go on calm days only. years of practice would be needed before he could be trusted to manage his boat in winter storms, or risk his life in seal hunting. when he was eleven years old, however, he had learned to paddle very well, and, besides, he had grown to be such a big boy that his father said: "you must have a new kayak, etu; your mother will help you make it. you have outgrown the other, and it is not safe." it was one of etu's duties to watch for all the driftwood floating in toward shore. every piece is more precious to these people of the north than we can imagine. they have no money, but if they could express the value of the bits of driftwood in dollars and cents, we would be amazed. some of us, i fear, would feel like carrying a shipload of lumber to etu's people and making a fortune very easily. when our little eskimo wished to begin the making of his boat, he went first to the family treasure house. of course you can guess what was stored there. not diamonds and pearls, nor gold and silver; but simply--driftwood. etu chose with much care the pieces from which to make a stout framework for his boat. it was important that he should take light wood that had not lost its strength by drifting about in the water too long. he cut the strips with a bone knife and bound them into shape with strong cords of seal sinew. the ends of the boat were sharply pointed. his mother's work began now. she took the skins of seals which her husband had just killed and scraped away all the scraps of blubber and flesh left on the hides. then, rolling them tightly together, she left them for some days. when they were again unrolled, it was quite easy to scrape off the hairs with a mussel shell. after this, the skins were well washed in sea water. a very important step must be taken next. the skins must be stretched. etu's first boat must be a fine one and there must be no wrinkles in the covering. the safest way was to stretch them over the framework of the boat itself. then they would be sure to fit well. an eskimo woman feels very much ashamed if any part of the boat's covering is loose or wrinkled. people will think she is a poor worker, and that would be a sad disgrace. how did etu's mother manage to make the boat water-tight? it was done through her careful sewing. she worked with her coarse bone needle, and the sinews of seal and deer were the only thread; yet when the kayak was finished, not a single drop of water could enter. it was a clever piece of work. where was etu to sit in this wonderful boat? the deck was entirely covered excepting the small hole in the centre. the boy had measured this hole with great care when he made the framework of the kayak. it was just large enough for him to squeeze through. his feet and legs must be underneath the deck, and his thighs should fill up the hole exactly. now you understand why the boy's father spoke of his outgrowing the old boat. do you also see why there was no larger hole? think for a moment of the waters through which he must ride. our rough seas would seem calm to etu. if the deck were not covered, the dashing waves would swamp his boat almost instantly. his people had found this out for themselves; so they cleverly planned a boat different from that of any other in the world. etu made a stout paddle with two blades. it is a pleasure for his mother and her friends to watch him use it. he is very skilful, and now, at twelve years of age, he can make the kayak skim over the water like the wind. how straight he always sits! he balances the boat exactly and first bends the right blade into the water, then the left, without seeming to work hard, either. and in some wonderful way, one can hardly understand how, he speeds onward. no wonder it is such a pleasure to watch him. etu is very proud of his paddle; not because he made it, but because of the time his mother spent in decorating it. it is inlaid with bits of stone and ivory set in a pretty pattern. surely, his mother is a fine worker. she has just made him a present of a new pair of gloves. they are to be worn while he is out in his boat, and reach above his elbows. they will protect his arms and keep them dry, even if the waves sweep clear over him. but they are not like common gloves, for they are embroidered in a fine pattern. she cut out bits of hide and dyed them different colours. then she sewed them together in a neat design on the arm pieces of the gloves. shouldn't you call that embroidery? while etu's boat was being made, his mother had a party. perhaps it would be better to call it a "sewing-bee." etu was sent around to the different women in the village. he told them his mother was ready to sew the covering on his boat. would they like to help her? now there is nothing eskimo women like better than to come together for a friendly chat. so the invitation was accepted, and one morning, bright and early, a party of women could be seen gathered around the sealskins. their fingers worked swiftly, but i fear their tongues moved still faster. there was a great deal of laughter, for they seemed to have many funny stories to tell. and i don't believe there was a bit of unkind gossip; at least, their faces didn't show it. it was amusing to see how much their teeth were used. they were like another hand to these eskimo women, for, as they sewed, they held the piece of skin in its place with their teeth. when the covering must be stretched over this hard place or that edge, it was the teeth again that gave the needed help. etu knows one old woman whose teeth are worn almost down to the gums. she must have worked very hard all the years of her life. she must have sewed on many boat-coverings and made many suits of clothes before this could have been done. when etu's kayak was finished, his mother invited the workers up to the house, where they were treated to a dish of seal-blood soup and a pipe of tobacco. it was a grand surprise. in the first place, the heated blood of the seal is always a dainty; and then, they seldom had the privilege of smoking tobacco. it was a great rarity, for it could only be obtained through trade with the white people. when night came, all were in great good humour as they left for their own homes. but, as they stepped outdoors, what a beautiful sight met their eyes! the northern lights were shooting across the heavens in glorious colours. have you never noticed on cold winter nights lines of light shooting upward into the sky? it is always in the north that we see them, and we wonder and exclaim as we look. your mother tells you, "it is the _aurora borealis_." it is not fully known what causes the strange light. it is thought, however, to be electricity. in etu's land the aurora is far more wonderful and beautiful than with us. the visitors were used to such sights, yet they called to the boy and his mother to come outdoors and look. "the lights are brighter than i ever saw them in my life," exclaimed one of the women. at first it seemed as though there were a great cloud of light just above the horizon, but it suddenly changed till the heavens appeared to be alive. the very air around the people quivered, as long, bright lines shot upward across the sky. they changed so quickly, it seemed as though a mighty power was directing them about, now here, now there. it made one dizzy to watch them. now there would be streamers of green and red and blue darting from the sky-line way to the very zenith. there they would meet in a purplish crown of glory. again the sky would change in its appearance, and a red light would spread over all. it was so bright that the snow in every direction was tinted a rosy colour. "what makes it, mother?" whispered etu. "is it the work of good spirits, or are evil ones trying to show us their power?" "i do not know, my child," was the answer. "we are not wise, and cannot understand these things. come, let us go back into the house. the sight makes me fearful." etu had many finishing touches to put on his boat after it was covered. a wooden hoop must be fitted around the hole in which he was to sit. several thongs of seal hide must be fastened on the deck, under which his spear and harpoon should rest while he paddled. still other straps were bound to the sides of the deck, for, unless the birds or seals could be fastened to the boat in some way after they had been killed, how could they be towed home? then etu began to work on his harpoon. his father had to help him now, for it needed skill and care to fit it exactly to the throwing-stick. the eskimos long ago found that the bow and arrow were not useful in their narrow, dangerous boats. only a one-handed weapon can be used in such a place, so they invented the harpoon and the bird dart. the harpoon is a long piece of wood pointed with bone or iron. it is fastened into a handle of wood called a throwing-stick. a cord of seal hide is attached to it at the other end. you should see our stout little etu riding the waves in his kayak, and balancing the throwing-stick on his shoulder to send the harpoon flying straight to the mark. but suppose the harpoon lodges fast in the seal's body; if the hunter still holds the other end of the cord attached to it, the creature in his fury may make such plunges as to drag the boat and all down under the water and destroy them. something else must be invented. this was the buoy or float. so it was that etu had to make a buoy to complete his hunting outfit. he took the skin of a young seal, from which his mother had scraped off all the hairs, and tied up the holes made by the head and legs. through a small tube fastened in the skin he could blow up his queerly shaped buoy to its fullest size. now the float was completed. do you understand what help it would give? if the float is attached to the other end of the line when the harpoon is thrown, the hunter can let everything go. he does not need to have any part fastened to the boat. for the float cannot sink, and will show him where to follow the game, and where to throw next; yet he is himself in no danger of being pulled after the animal. even now etu would not be safe to go hunting in rough waters. he must have a special coat prepared. this, again, was his mother's work. the skin of the seal was used after all the hair was removed. the jacket was made to fit closely over his other garments. it had a hood to be drawn tightly over his head, long sleeves, and drawing-strings around the neck and lower edge. when etu gets into his boat he must fit his jacket around the hoop of the sitting-hole, and draw the cord tightly. and now he seems a part of the boat itself. no water can enter, and although the waves may dash completely over him he will keep dry, and the boat will not sink. no boy could be happier than etu was when his outfit was complete. he ran to meet his father to tell him the joyful news. now he could be looked upon as a man, no longer a child. he would hereafter be allowed to take part in the dangers of his father's life. he was very glad. this happy, good-natured boy, who disliked to say a cross word to any one, who would not fight with other boys, was certainly no coward. for his heart was set upon war,--not war with his fellows, but war with the winds and waves, and the powerful creatures of sea and land. he was ready for battle. time would show that courage was not wanting when he came face to face with danger. chapter vi. the seal hunt. it was about this time that etu's father bored holes in his son's lips. these holes were made at each end of the mouth. ivory buttons were fitted into them, and now etu felt that he was more of a man than ever before. it was a proud moment when he looked in the bit of mirror his father had bought for ten seal hides, and gazed on his queer ornaments. he thought they were very beautiful, and then they fitted so well! the pain of having the holes bored, and the unpleasant feeling before the flesh healed, were of little matter to him. it was not worth thinking about. it was a terrible winter, and food was scarce. there was a very small supply of meat on hand in the village. the first pleasant morning after etu's fishing outfit was finished, he started off for a day's hunt on the ocean. very early in the morning he and his father went out on the rocks to look for the weather signs. yes, it would be a clear day; it would be safe to venture on the waves. the other men of the village were already out, and soon all were busy launching their boats. no breakfast was eaten; they could work better and shoot straighter if they waited to eat until they came back. each one of the party carefully arranged his harpoon, spear, and float on the deck of his boat; then, shoving it into the icy water, sprang in after it and quickly fitted himself into the small seat. the sea jacket must be drawn carefully around the hoop, for, if water should enter, the boat would soon sink. as the hunters paddled merrily along, the waves kept dashing over the decks. but the men sang and shouted gaily to each other as though it were the finest sport in the world. yet it was a lonely scene about them; we should even call it fearful. cakes of ice jostled against the boats here and there, and far out in the dim light a floating field of ice could be seen by the watchful eskimos. sometimes they hunted for the seals on such fields, for these creatures often gather in herds on the ice to bask in the sun and to sport together. but to-day they would search for them in the ocean itself. the boats skimmed onward over the waves till the land lay far behind. three hours passed before the seal ground was reached. etu paddled steadily and kept up with the men who had so much more experience than himself. as his father watched him from time to time, he thought, "my boy will be a leader for his people when i grow old and weak. i have never before seen one so young show such strength." [illustration: "whizz! sounds the harpoon as it speeds from etu's shoulder"] etu's father was held to be the best huntsman of the village, and for this very reason was looked upon as the chief. the eskimos share everything in common, but one man in a settlement is chosen as the leader. he settles the disputes and gives advice when it is needed. he directs the hunt and judges the wrong-doer. when he fails in strength it is but right that another should be chosen in his place. when the seal ground was reached at last, the men moved away from each other in different directions; the singing and shouting stopped as they rested on their paddles and watched for seals' heads to appear above the water. etu's father kept quite near him; he might be needed to help his son in case he was successful. ten minutes passed, then twenty, thirty, but the boy did not grow impatient. his bright eyes watched closely, scanning the water in all directions. at last he was rewarded, for look! there is a brown head rising into view. the seal is easily frightened, and darts out of sight when he sees the boy in the boat. but etu does not move a muscle till the seal has disappeared. then he paddles rapidly toward the spot where the creature sank out of sight and once more quietly waits, but this time with harpoon in hand. seals are able to stay under water for twenty minutes at a time. they can close their nostrils whenever they choose, and they breathe very slowly at all times. but they must come to the surface after a time for fresh air. etu knows this and watches. ah! the water moves again. the prey is to be seen and is but a short distance away. whizz! sounds the harpoon as it speeds from etu's shoulder and goes straight to the mark. quick as a flash the float is thrown from the boat, and the coil of rope fastened to it runs out as the seal drags it along. he throws himself about in agony, but cannot free himself from the cruel harpoon lodged in his side. the water is stained with blood. now the float can be seen on the surface of the waves, now it is dragged below as the seal dives out of sight; but etu does not worry. he must paddle far enough away from the seal, however, to keep out of danger. for although it is usually a timid and gentle creature, yet, when it is attacked, it grows daring and dangerous. etu knows of several hunters whose boats have been ripped open by seals; they would have been killed by their angry foes if their comrades had not come to their rescue. the boy has listened to stories of such narrow escapes ever since he was old enough to understand these things. so he is very quick and watchful. he does not notice that his father has drawn quite close, and sits, spear in hand, ready to end the seal's life if his son should fail. and now the wounded animal appears again directly in front of the boat. a good chance must not be lost, and etu, seizing his spear, drives it straight through one of the flippers. it pierces the seal's lungs, and after a few gasps the beautiful soft eyes close in death. "well done, my boy," shouted his father. "you have won the first prize of the day. you shall treat our friends." now it is a custom among these people of the cold lands that when a seal is killed the successful hunter at once cuts away a portion of blubber, and divides it among the rest of the party. etu, therefore, pulled the dead seal close to his boat, drew out the spear and harpoon, and coiled the cord attached to it. after putting these in their proper places on the deck of the kayak, he cut away the blubber, and proudly distributed the treat among the men, who by this time had drawn near. it was at least noontime, and was the first food tasted that day. every one praised the boy's skill, and then all drew off once more to their different stations. before the afternoon was over, etu's father had secured two seals, and two more were killed by others of the party. it had been a most successful hunt, although several accidents had occurred. one of the seals captured by etu's father had succeeded in tearing the float into shreds before he was finally killed. another of the hunters was overturned and almost drowned. this was because the cord attached to the harpoon had caught in a strap on the deck as it was running out. the wounded seal dragged him along as it plunged, before he had a chance to free his boat. over they went, man and boat, and only the keel of the kayak could be seen. the seal, too, was out of sight. did it see the man? was it attacking him below the surface of the water? three of the man's companions paddled rapidly toward the overturned boat. one of them reached his arm down under the water and, giving a skilful jerk to the man's arm, brought him up suddenly on even keel. another of the party cut the cord with his spear. still a third found the paddle, of which he had lost hold, and gave it into his hands. then all started off in pursuit of the seal as though nothing had happened. you must ask etu to tell you more of the wonderful doings of that first ocean hunt. he will never forget even the smallest thing which happened on that day. it was near night when the party started homeward, and three good hours of paddling were before them. at length, however, the shore came into view. nearer and nearer it looked to the tired workers. and yes! there were the women waiting and watching, ready for the good news. etu was not the first to land, for you remember he had a seal in tow, and those who are so burdened cannot travel as quickly over the water as others who have no extra weight. he travelled homeward beside his father's still more heavily laden boat; while both the man and his son pictured the mother's delight at etu's success. as the boats landed, one by one, the men jumped out, and started for home with their weapons. the women would draw up the boats into safe places. they would also dispose of the seals. the men's work was done, and nothing was left for them now except to sit around the oil lamp, eat, and tell stories of the day's adventures. this very night there would be a seal feast at etu's home, and hours would be given up to eating and making merry. chapter vii. feast and fun. it did not take long for the hunters to exchange their wet clothing for dry garments. then with their wives and children they gathered in the home of their chief. "how could the feast be prepared so quickly?" we ask in surprise. if we could have been there we should not have wondered very long. the people squatted on the floor in a circle. etu and his father stood in their midst with big knives, ready to cut up the seals lying before them. hungry as they were, they must not eat yet. something important must be done first. the eskimos have many strange beliefs. they think there is a spirit in everything,--the rock, the snow, the wind, the very air has its spirit. the seal, therefore, has its spirit, too, and must be treated respectfully. etu's father solemnly sprinkled water on the body, while every one watched him in silence. it was an offering to the animal's spirit. he next carefully cut away the skin and showed the thick layer of blubber beneath. the eyes of the company sparkled with delight. many funny faces were made as each in turn received a huge chunk of raw blubber. please don't shudder at the thought of eating it. white travellers among the eskimos tell us it is really very good, and tastes much like fresh cream. it is only after it has been kept for a long time that it begins to taste rancid and fishy. after the blubber had been divided among the company, the bodies of the two seals were opened, and the blood scooped out. it seemed truly delicious to the hungry visitors. the last course of the feast consisted of the seal's ribs, which were picked until nothing was left save the bones. how the people did eat! how they enjoyed the dainties served to them! there were many stories told by those who could stop long enough to talk. etu was asked, over and over again, to describe how he killed his first seal. and each time the movements of his face, as well as his arms and hands, seemed to express as much as the words themselves. at this strange feast, for which no cooking was needed, the women were not served first, as in our own land. it was the men who were first thought of, and who received the choicest pieces. but etu did not forget his mother, and looked out to see that she was well served. when the feast was over at last, all joined in a song. there were only a few notes, and these were repeated over and over again; but the party must have enjoyed it, or they would not have sung it so many times. at last the moon shone down upon them, and etu's mother hastened to draw the sealskin curtain. for her people dread the power of the moon, and do not willingly sit in its light. it is a wonderful being, and etu has been taught that it brings the cold weather to his people. how is this possible? why, as it dwells afar off in the sky, it whittles the tusk of a walrus. in some wonderful way the shavings are changed into the snow which falls in great sheets over the earth. by this time the party began to think of going home. they must prepare for another "sleep," they said, and the people of the house were soon left to themselves. etu does not count time as we do. he speaks of a "moon" ago, instead of a month. yesterday is the period before the last "sleep," and the years are counted by the winters. a fresh notch is cut in the wall of his winter home when the family leave it for their summer's travels. that is the only way his people have to keep account of the passing time. they do not write or read, except as they are taught by their white visitors, and etu has never seen a book in his life. the boy's father has shown him how to make good maps of the coast. they are very neat, and are measured so exactly that every island and point of land are correctly marked for many miles. they are drawn with the burnt ends of sticks on smooth pieces of driftwood, but if you ever visit etu, you can trust to them in exploring the country. on the day after the feast the other seals were divided evenly among all the people in the village. the successful hunters did not once dream of keeping them for their own families. what! have a fine dinner yourself, while others around you go hungry! it was not to be thought of. all must share alike. chapter viii. hard times. time passed by. the weather was terribly cold, even for these people. the hunters went out on the ocean whenever it was safe to venture, but the seals and walruses were very scarce. they had probably gone in search of warmer waters. at this very time their winter stores were all stolen. whenever there is an extra supply on hand, it is hidden in a deep hole underground, so that neither wild animals nor dogs can reach it. such a place for stores is called a _cachã©_ by our western hunters and trappers. one night etu was wakened by a great noise outside. in a moment the whole household was aroused. they heard the dogs howling and rushing around. there was certainly a fight of some kind. etu and his father were dressed in a moment, as well as two other men who shared the home. "wolves! it is a pack of wolves," cried the women. "don't go out and leave us; it is not safe." but the men only seized their spears and moved as quickly as possible down the passageway. they must go to the aid of the dogs, who had been left outdoors for the night. they also thought of their precious stores. the wolves had probably scented the place and were then attacked by the dogs. in a short time the men returned to the frightened household. they were all safe. the wolves had fled, but the harm had already been done. not a scrap of the precious stores remained. the dogs had finished what the wolves left behind them. it was the quarreling of the dogs themselves over the food that had wakened the people. it was plain, however, that the wolves had been there, because the dead body of one of them lay close by the storehouse. the dogs had been more than a match for them. there was nothing for etu and his people to eat that day. there was scarcely any oil in the lamps. the women and children tried to keep warm beneath the piles of furs; the men went out to search along the shore for seal holes. our brave little etu looked upon himself as a man now. so, leading his brightest dog by a cord, he started out in search of prey. the dog had a wonderfully keen scent. he would help in finding the hiding-place of a seal, if there were one to be found. you may not know what a queer home the mother seal makes for her baby. she chooses a place on the solid ice that is covered with a deep layer of snow. she scrapes away the snow and carries it down through a hole in the ice into the water below. when her work is done, she has a dome-shaped house. the floor is the icy shelf, from which there is a passageway to the water beneath. there is a tiny breathing-place in the snowy roof to which she turns when needing air. the baby seal is born in this strange home. he lies here and sleeps most of the time till he is old enough to take care of himself. his mother often visits him. she hopes his enemies will not find him. but the bear, the fox, and the eskimo dog, are watching for signs of just such hiding-places as these. their scent is keen and they discover the tiny breathing-holes when men and boys would pass them by. this is why etu took his dog along with him. perhaps you wonder why etu did not let vanya run free. he only wished him to find a seal hole; the boy would do the hunting himself. the dog, if left alone, might succeed in scaring away the old seal; and etu wished to get both the baby and its mother. the boy tramped for many hours. remember, he had no breakfast this morning, yet he went with a bright face and a stout heart. when night came, etu was still brave and cheerful, although he had met with no success. he went home and found the men just returning. they also had failed. they could expect no supper, nor fire to warm them, after the long day's tramp in the bitter cold, but they must not show sadness; they must keep up stout hearts for the sake of the women and children. after all, there was a surprise waiting for etu. his mother had used the last bit of oil in thawing a little snow to give the household some water to drink. and, besides this, there was a scrap of seal hide for each one to chew. tough as it was, it was received as though it were the greatest dainty in the world. after this meal, if it could be called one, etu crept into bed, and was soon sound asleep. morning came, and our little cousin started out once more in search of food. but he had no better success than the day before. when he got home at night there was good news awaiting him, although it did not bring any supper. his father had found a seal-hole, and had said to the other men, "i will not leave my place till i can bring food for my hungry people." they left him, and went back to the village to tell his waiting household. his good wife at once got a heavy fur robe, and sent it back to her patient husband. he could wrap it about his feet, as he sat watching in the cold. perhaps it would be only a short time before he would hear the mother seal blowing at the hole below. but, again, hours might pass before she would come back to nurse her baby. yet the man must watch and be ready to pierce the breathing-hole with his long spear at any moment,--it was his only chance of killing the mother. the long hours of the night passed; the morning, too, was gone, when, suddenly, the quick ears of the hunter heard the welcome sound. and now, a second blow! the seal's head must be close to the hole. like a flash, down went the waiting spear, and fastened itself through the nose of the seal. if it had turned a half-inch in its course, it would have failed in its work. there was a violent pull at the spear, as the seal darted down through the passage from her icy home to the water below. but the hunter had a long rope fastened to the spear, and he let it run out quickly. then, brushing away the snowy roof, he jumped down on the floor of the "igloo." with two or three strong pulls he brought up the struggling seal, and quickly ended her life. it was an easy matter to dispose of the frightened baby. what a prize he had gained! he did not think of his frost-bitten nose, nor of his empty stomach. he only pictured the joy of the waiting people when he should reach home. when the hard-earned supper was set before them, you cannot guess what was the greatest dainty of all. it was the milk inside the baby seal's stomach! it was sweet and delicate in its taste, and was much like the milk from a green cocoanut. there were many other hard times before that winter was over, but etu did his part bravely, and no one died of want. one day the boy hunted a seal bear-fashion, and was successful, too. he had learned many lessons from this wise creature, and he did not forget them. the polar bear, so strong and fierce, is also very cunning. if he discovers a dark spot far away on the ice, he seems to say to himself, "ah! there is a seal asleep. i will deceive him, and catch him for my dinner." so he creeps, or, rather, hitches along, with his fore feet curled beneath him. nearer and nearer he draws to his prey. and now the sleeping seal awakes. is there danger? but the bear at once stops moving, and makes a low, strange sound. it is different from his usual voice. the seal listens, and is charmed. he turns his head from side to side, and then is quite still once more. the bear creeps nearer now; once more the seal starts, but is again charmed by the strange sound. suddenly he is caught in those powerful claws, and the long, sharp teeth fasten themselves in his body. in a moment it is all over with the poor seal. [illustration: "etu stopped moving and lay quite still"] this is one of the lessons etu learned from ninoo, the bear. he followed his teacher well when one day he, too, saw a dark spot on the shore, quite a distance away. holding his spear beneath him, he crouched down on the snow, and jerked himself along. for some time the seal was not aroused. then, opening his eyes, he must have thought: "is that a brother seal over there? his coat is like mine." still he watched, for a seal is easily frightened. etu stopped moving and lay quite still. "no, there is no danger," thought the seal; and he closed his eyes again. once more etu began to move, and drew quite near before the seal stirred again. but now the creature seemed to question himself once more. "is it a friend, or is it one of my terrible enemies?" he was about to dart away when etu began to make a low, strange sound. you would have thought it was the bear himself, he was imitated so well. the seal seemed pleased, and did not stir again. before another five minutes the young hunter had killed his victim. he hurried homeward with the heavy burden flung over his broad shoulders. you can imagine how proud his mother felt when he appeared in the doorway of the house and showed his prize of the morning. chapter ix. an eskimo christmas. not long after this etu's people celebrated a festival. it was about christmas time, but the boy had never heard of our own great holiday. yet his own christmas always means very much to him. all the people of the village met together on a certain evening in etu's home. the medicine-man was there, and made a sort of prayer. he prayed that all might go well with the people during the coming year. this medicine-man is the priest as well as the doctor among the eskimos. after the prayer there was a feast. the hunters had done their best, and had managed to get a good supply of seal meat on hand. the next day after the feast, men, women, and children gathered together in a circle in the open air. a vessel of water had been placed in their midst. each one brought a piece of meat with him. no one spoke while it was being eaten, but each thought of his good spirit, and wished for good things. then each in turn took a drink of water from the vessel. as he did so he spoke, telling when and where he was born. when this ceremony was over, all threw presents to each other. they believed they would receive good things from the good spirits if they were generous at this time. soon after this festival came new year's. this, too, was a strange celebration. two men, one of them dressed as a woman, went from hut to hut blowing out the flame in each lamp. it must be lighted from a fresh fire. the people believe there is a new sun in the heavens at the beginning of each new year. they think they ought to picture this great change in their own homes. the year was a moon old, as etu would say, when one day he was out hunting for seal-holes with his father. they brought a pack of dogs along with them. these had just been loosened for a run when they darted off as though they had found a fresh scent. they rushed toward a great bank of snow on the side of a high rock. surely it was no seal-hole they had discovered. the small opening on the surface of the snow showed that it was the breathing-place of a polar bear. the mother bear eats vast quantities of food at the beginning of winter; then she seeks a sheltered spot at the foot of some rock, and begins her long rest. the snow falls in great drifts over her. this makes a warm, close house. does it seem as though she must die for want of air? there is no danger of this, for the breath from her great body thaws enough snow around her to form a small room. it also makes a sort of chimney through the snow, to the air above. the baby bear is born in this house of snow, and there he stays with his mother till old enough to hunt for himself. it was the home of a mother bear, then, that the dogs had discovered. they were wildly excited, for eskimo dogs are no cowards. they love a bear hunt hugely. they rushed upon the opening and quickly pushed away the snow. etu and his father stood on the watch for the mother bear and her cub to appear. they were as much excited as the dogs, but stood with spears in hand, perfectly still. look out now! for here they come. what a tiny little thing the baby bear is! it is like a little puppy. it would be easy to end its life, but etu knows that would not be safe. it would make the mother a hundred times more dangerous. the great creature looks now in one direction, now in another. it would not be hard for her to escape; but she will not leave her cub. so she rushes madly toward etu's father. the dogs jump around her, biting at her heels. she does not seem even to notice them. look at the long sharp teeth as she opens her mouth for a spring upon the man. one blow of her paws would knock him senseless. but he does not fear. he jumps to one side and dodges the blow. at the same time, he strikes at her throat with his long spear. the blood gushes forth and she staggers. however, she shakes herself together with a great effort and rises on her hind legs to strike again. the pack of dogs surround her and keep biting at her legs, but the man would not be able to escape if etu did not suddenly come up behind. he plunges his own spear far into her side. she gives one fearful groan and falls to the ground. no hunter will ever be troubled by her again. the poor little cub runs to its mother's side, giving piteous cries. but no one is left now to pity and love it, so its life is mercifully and quickly ended. the men and dogs are soon on their homeward way. they must get sledges and go back quickly for the bodies of the two bears. suppose that while they were gone another party of eskimos should come along, need they fear their prey would be stolen? the thought does not enter their heads, for such a thing has never been known to happen among their people. they are honest in all ways, and would not touch that which they believe to be another's. chapter x. summer travels. the long winter was over at last, and etu's people got ready to leave their underground homes. they would spend the first spring days farther up the coast, and closer still to the water's side; for there they could watch the seal-holes more easily. the household goods were packed on the sledges, and etu said good-bye to his winter home for four months. the men walked along, guiding the dogs, while the women and children rode in the sledges. they travelled nearly all day before they came to a place where they wished to settle. but the weather was even now bitterly cold. the snow still covered the earth, and the water along the shore was a mass of broken ice. [illustration: "the blocks of snow were handed to them"] where were these people to be sheltered when night came on? the question could be easily answered. they would build homes for themselves in an hour or two. the sheets of snow around them were quite solid, and the boys and men began to saw the snow into thick blocks. the walls and roofs of the houses should be built of these. two men stood in the centre of each cleared space: the blocks of snow were handed to them. these were laid on the ground, side by side, in a circle as large as they wished the house to be. the foundation was quickly made. then another row of snow blocks was laid above the first, but drawn in toward the centre a very little. then came a third row, and so on, till at last there was just space enough at the top for one block of snow to fill it in completely. the new house looked like a great snow beehive. but the two builders were shut up inside! one of the men on the outside cut a block of snow out of the wall of the house. this made a doorway through which people could go and come. it could be closed afterward, when the inmates desired, by filling it again with a snow door. the builders now took loose snow and sifted it into the cracks and crevices to make the house quite close and tight. after this, the floor must be trodden down smooth, and then the women could enter to set up housekeeping. a bed of snow was quickly made, over which the fur rugs were thrown. next, a stand of snow was shaped, and the lamp set up in its place. the oil was soon burning brightly, and snow was melted to furnish drinking-water. in half an hour more our cousin etu was eating supper as comfortably as he could wish. not long after, he was sound asleep on his snow bedstead, without a single dream of cold or trouble. after a few weeks of seal hunting, etu noticed that the birds were returning. there were great numbers of them,--wild ducks, geese, and sea-birds of many kinds. the ice began to disappear, and it was great sport to paddle his boat over to the islands near the shore, and shoot a bagful of birds for dinner. but sometimes he stayed in his boat, and, moving slowly along the shore, would throw his bird-dart at ducks as they flew by. his aim was straight and true, and he was almost sure to be successful. spring changed suddenly into summer, and now the snow house must be left, for etu and his people were ready to move again. besides, the walls of the house grew soft, and would soon melt away. where would etu travel next? you ask. he would answer: "not far from here there is a broad river where great numbers of salmon live during the warm weather. it is great sport catching the fish. now we can have so much rich food that we can all grow fat." once more the dogs were harnessed, and the spring camping-ground was left behind, as the eskimo party journeyed southward. when the river was reached, new homes must be made ready. but what material would be used now? there were no trees to furnish wood, for the forests were still hundreds of miles south of them, and snow at this time of the year was out of the question. but etu's people were well prepared, for they took their supply of skins, and quickly made tents out of them. it was still so cold that a double row of skins must be used to keep out the sharp winds. and now they were ready for the happiest part of the whole year. they need not fear hunger for a long time to come. plenty of fish in the river, plenty of birds in the air, birds' eggs, which the bright eyes of the boys and girls would discover; and, besides all these dainties, they would get stores of reindeer meat. "how could any one be any happier than i?" thought etu, and he smiled a broad smile, making a funny face to express his joy. in another country of the world as far north as etu lives, the laplander has herds of tame reindeer. they are driven as etu drives his dogs. they give sweet milk, too. etu has never heard of these people, but he has been told that there is a place in his own country where his kind american friends have brought some of these tame reindeer from lapland. great care is taken of them, so they will grow and get used to their new home. it will be a fine thing for etu's people to have these tame reindeer and be able to get fresh milk during the long winter, as well as tame animals that will supply them with food when they are in danger of starving. but etu busies himself now with setting traps for the wild reindeer which begin to appear in the country as summer opens. they have spent the winter in the forests far away, but as the heat of the sun begins to melt the snow, they travel toward the shores of the ocean. here the baby reindeer are born. they are tiny, weak little creatures at first; but they grow fast, and in a few days are able to take care of themselves, and get their own food. the reindeer have a wonderfully keen sense of smell. even when the ground is covered with a deep layer of snow, they seem able to tell where the lichens and mosses are living beneath it. no one has ever seen a reindeer make a mistake in this matter. when he begins to paw away the snow with his broad, stout hoofs, you may be sure he has discovered a good dinner for himself. the lichens are tender and white, and taste somewhat like wheat bran. it is no wonder the reindeer grows fat on this plentiful food. etu hunts the reindeer in several different ways. sometimes when he is out on the watch for them he hears a great clattering. it may be a long way off, and he cannot see a living thing, yet he knows what that sound means. it is the hoofs of the reindeer as they come pounding along. he lies down and keeps very still. he watches closely, however, to see if the reindeer are coming in his direction. if he finds this to be so, he keeps in the same position and waits till they have passed by him and are headed for the shore. then he jumps up suddenly, and chases them with fury. they get confused, and rush onward in disorder. on he follows till they reach the water's side, where they plunge madly in. they are good swimmers, but are so frightened that etu is easily able to secure at least one of them. sometimes our eskimo cousin goes a long way over the plains, and with his father's help digs a deep pit in the earth. they cover it over with brushwood. if a herd of reindeer should travel in this direction, some of them would fall into the pit and break their slender legs. it would be an easy matter then to come and get them. but there is another way that etu likes best of all. soon after he came to his summer home he hunted about over the country till he had chosen a spot where the reindeer were likely to come. here he built a sort of fort, or wall, out of stones. he could hide behind this wall, and watch for his game without their being able to see him. he spent many days of the summer in this place with one of his boy friends. they would sit there talking, or playing some quiet game, but their bows and arrows were always ready; and their eyes ever on the lookout for the reindeer who might come that way at any moment. many times, of course, they met with no success; but many times, too, they took a herd by surprise, and were able to carry home a goodly feast to their friends and relatives. reindeer meat is tender and sweet, the marrow and tongue being the parts best liked by etu's people. but the most delicious food etu ever puts into his mouth is the contents of a reindeer's stomach! we must not be shocked at this, though it does seem a queer thing to eat, doesn't it? the reason etu likes it so well is probably this: the food of the reindeer is moss; when it has entered his stomach it has a slightly acid taste, so it gives a relish the people cannot often get. besides, it belongs to the vegetable kingdom, and etu's people, we know, do not have the pleasure of eating corn, potatoes, and other delicious fruits of the earth, so commonly used by us that we hardly appreciate them. it was after one of these long days on the plains that etu came home feeling quite ill. his head ached; his eyes were bloodshot; his hands and face burned like fire. his loving mother was quite worried. she put her son to bed at once, and sent for the medicine-man. she got a present of deer skins ready to give him as soon as the great person should appear. after he had accepted the deer skins the doctor put on a horrible black mask; then he began to move about the tent, waving his arms from side to side, and repeating a charm. do you understand what he was trying to do? he thought a bad spirit had got hold of etu; he believed the hideous mask and the charm of certain words would drive it out. after awhile he went away, and etu was alone again with his own people. his fever lasted for several days, but at length it left him, and he grew well and strong once more. he believed the great medicine-man had healed him; but we think mother nature worked her own cure through rest in his own warm bed. the poor boy was tired out, and had caught a hard cold watching on the plains. as soon as he was strong his father said: "the trading season has come, for it is already two moons since we made our camp. we must journey southward to the great river. we shall see our friends from the western coast; they must have already started to meet us. let us get our furs, seal oil, and walrus tusks together to sell to them, for, no doubt, they will have many things to give us in exchange. we greatly need some copper kettles and tobacco. oh, yes, let us get ready as soon as possible." etu was delighted to hear these words. now would come the merriest time. he would have a long journey, and he dearly liked a change. but that was not all. he would see new people, and hear of new things; he would have a chance to trade, and that would be great sport in itself. besides all these things, he knew his people would spend at least ten days with their friends from the west; and there would be much dancing and singing and story-telling, both day and night. hurrah, then, for this summer journey! you may be sure etu did his best in packing and making ready. in another twenty-four hours there was no sign left of this eskimo village. the dogs, the sledges, and the people were all gone. nothing was left except a few articles used in housekeeping, and these were buried in an underground storehouse. if you wish to hear more about etu, and of his yearly visit south; if you care to hear about the big whale he helped to kill last winter, and of his adventure with a walrus, you must write and ask him about these things. and yet, after all, i fear he could not read the letter. you would better go and visit him. it is well worth the journey, for then you can see for yourself how a boy can be cheerful and happy and loving, even though he lives in the dreariest part of the whole world. the end. the little cousin series the most delightful and interesting accounts possible of child-life in other lands, filled with quaint sayings, doings, and adventures. each 1 vol., 12mo, decorative cover, cloth, with six full-page illustrations in color by l. j. bridgman. price per volume $0.60 "juveniles will get a whole world of pleasure and instruction out of the little cousin series.... pleasing narratives give pictures of the little folk in the far-away lands in their duties and pleasures, showing their odd ways of playing, studying, their queer homes, clothes, and play-things...."--_detroit news-tribune._ _by mary hazelton wade_ =our little swiss cousin.= =our little norwegian cousin.= =our little italian cousin.= =our little siamese cousin.= =our little cuban cousin.= =our little hawaiian cousin.= =our little eskimo cousin.= =our little philippine cousin.= =our little porto rican cousin.= =our little african cousin.= =our little japanese cousin.= =our little brown cousin.= =our little indian cousin.= =our little russian cousin.= =our little german cousin.= =our little irish cousin.= =our little turkish cousin.= =our little jewish cousin.= _by isaac headland taylor_ =our little chinese cousin.= _by elizabeth roberts macdonald_ =our little canadian cousin.= animal tales by charles g. d. roberts illustrated by charles livingston bull as follows: =the lord of the air= (the eagle) =the king of the mamozekel= (the moose) =the watchers of the camp-fire= (the panther) =the haunter of the pine gloom= (the lynx) each 1 vol., small 12mo, cloth decorative, per volume $0.50 realizing the great demand for the animal stories of professor roberts, one of the masters of nature writers, the publishers have selected four representative stories, to be issued separately, at a popular price. each story is illustrated by charles livingston bull, and is bound in a handsome decorative cover. the little colonel books (trade mark.) _by annie fellows johnston_ each, 1 vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative, fully illustrated, per vol. $1.50 =the little colonel stories.= (trade mark.) illustrated. being three "little colonel" stories in the cosy corner series, "the little colonel," "two little knights of kentucky," and "the giant scissors," put into a single volume. =the little colonel's house party.= (trade mark.) illustrated by louis meynell. =the little colonel's holidays.= (trade mark.) illustrated by l. j. bridgman. =the little colonel's hero.= (trade mark.) illustrated by e. b. barry. =the little colonel at boarding school.= (trade mark.) illustrated by e. b. barry. =the little colonel in arizona.= (_in preparation._) (trade mark.) illustrated by l. j. bridgman. since the time of "little women," no juvenile heroine has been better beloved of her child readers than mrs. johnston's "little colonel." each succeeding book has been more popular than its predecessor. =joel: a boy of galilee.= by annie fellows johnston. illustrated by l. j. bridgman. new illustrated edition, uniform with the little colonel books, 1 vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative $1.50 a story of the time of christ, which is one of the author's best-known books, and which has been translated into many languages, the last being italian. =flip's "islands of providence."= by annie fellows johnston. 12mo, cloth, with illustrations $1.00 in this book the author of "the little colonel" and her girl friends and companions shows that she is equally at home in telling a tale in which the leading character is a boy, and in describing his troubles and triumphs in a way that will enhance her reputation as a skilled and sympathetic writer of stories for children. =asa holmes=; or, at the cross-roads. a sketch of country life and country humor. by annie fellows johnston. with a frontispiece by ernest fosbery. large 16mo, cloth, gilt top $1.00 "'asa holmes; or, at the cross-roads' is the most delightful, most sympathetic and wholesome book that has been published in a long while. the lovable, cheerful, touching incidents, the descriptions of persons and things are wonderfully true to nature."--_boston times._ =the great scoop.= by molly elliot seawell, author of "little jarvis," "laurie vane," etc. 12mo, cloth, with illustrations $1.00 a capital tale of newspaper life in a big city, and of a bright, enterprising, likable youngster employed therein. every boy with an ounce of true boyish blood in him will have the time of his life in reading how dick henshaw entered the newspaper business, and how he secured "the great scoop." =little lady marjorie.= by francis margaret fox, author of "farmer brown and the birds," etc. 12mo, cloth, illustrated $1.50 a charming story for children between the ages of ten and fifteen years, with both heart and nature interest. =the sandman=: his farm stories. by william j. hopkins. with fifty illustrations by ada clendenin williamson. one vol., large 12mo, decorative cover $1.50 "an amusing, original book, written for the benefit of children not more than six years old, is, 'the sandman: his farm stories.' it should be one of the most popular of the year's books for reading to small children."--_buffalo express._ "mothers and fathers and kind elder sisters who take the little ones to bed and rack their brains for stories will find this book a treasure."--_cleveland leader._ =the sandman=: more farm stories. by william j. hopkins, author of "the sandman: his farm stories." library 12mo, cloth decorative, fully illustrated, $1.50 mr. hopkins's first essay at bedtime stories has met with such approval that this second book of "sandman" tales has been issued for scores of eager children. life on the farm, and out-of-doors, will be portrayed in his inimitable manner, and many a little one will hail the bedtime season as one of delight. =a puritan knight errant.= by edith robinson, author of "a little puritan pioneer," "a little puritan's first christmas," "a little puritan rebel," etc. library 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.50 the charm of style and historical value of miss robinson's previous stories of child life in puritan days have brought them wide popularity. her latest and most important book appeals to a large juvenile public. the "knight errant" of this story is a little don quixote, whose trials and their ultimate outcome will prove deeply interesting to their reader. =beautiful joe's paradise=; or, the island of brotherly love. a sequel to "beautiful joe." by marshall saunders, author of "beautiful joe," "for his country," etc. with fifteen full-page plates and many decorations from drawings by charles livingston bull. one vol., library 12mo, cloth decorative $1.50 "will be immensely enjoyed by the boys and girls who read it."--_pittsburg gazette._ "miss saunders has put life, humor, action, and tenderness into her story. the book deserves to be a favorite."--_chicago record-herald._ "this book revives the spirit of 'beautiful joe' capitally. it is fairly riotous with fun, and as a whole is about as unusual as anything in the animal book line that has seen the light. it is a book for juveniles--old and young."--_philadelphia item._ ='tilda jane.= by marshall saunders, author of "beautiful joe," etc. one vol., 12mo, fully illustrated, cloth, decorative cover $1.50 "no more amusing and attractive child's story has appeared for a long time than this quaint and curious recital of the adventures of that pitiful and charming little runaway. "it is one of those exquisitely simple and truthful books that win and charm the reader, and i did not put it down until i had finished it--honest! and i am sure that every one, young or old, who reads will be proud and happy to make the acquaintance of the delicious waif. "i cannot think of any better book for children than this. i commend it unreservedly."--_cyrus townsend brady._ =the story of the graveleys.= by marshall saunders, author of "beautiful joe's paradise," "'tilda jane," etc. library 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated by e. b. barry $1.50 here we have the haps and mishaps, the trials and triumphs, of a delightful new england family, of whose devotion and sturdiness it will do the reader good to hear. from the kindly, serene-souled grandmother to the buoyant madcap, berty, these graveleys are folk of fibre and blood--genuine human beings. phyllis' field friends series _by lenore e. mulets_ six vols., cloth decorative, illustrated by sophie schneider. sold separately, or as a set. per volume $1.00 per set $6.00 =insect stories.= =stories of little animals.= =flower stories.= =bird stories.= =tree stories.= =stories of little fishes.= in this series of six little nature books, it is the author's intention so to present to the child reader the facts about each particular flower, insect, bird, or animal, in story form, as to make delightful reading. classical legends, myths, poems, and songs are so introduced as to correlate fully with these lessons, to which the excellent illustrations are no little help. the woodranger tales _by g. waldo browne_ =the woodranger.= =the young gunbearer.= =the hero of the hills.= each, 1 vol., large 12mo, cloth, decorative cover, illustrated, per volume $1.00 three vols., boxed, per set $3.00 "the woodranger tales," like the "pathfinder tales" of j. fenimore cooper, combine historical information relating to early pioneer days in america with interesting adventures in the backwoods. although the same characters are continued throughout the series, each book is complete in itself, and, while based strictly on historical facts, is an interesting and exciting tale of adventure. * * * * * =the rosamond tales.= by cuyler reynolds. with 30 full-page illustrations from original photographs, and with a frontispiece from a drawing by maud humphreys. one vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative $1.50 these are just the bedtime stories that children always ask for, but do not always get. rosamond and rosalind are the hero and heroine of many happy adventures in town and on their grandfather's farm; and the happy listeners to their story will unconsciously absorb a vast amount of interesting knowledge of birds, animals, and flowers. the book will be a boon to tired mothers, and a delight to wide-awake children. =larry hudson's ambition.= by james otis, author of "toby tyler," etc. illustrated by eliot keen. one vol., library 12mo, cloth, decorative cover, $1.25 james otis, who has delighted the juvenile public with so many popular stories, has written the story of the rise of the bootblack larry. larry is not only capable of holding his own and coming out with flying colors in the amusing adventures wherein he befriends the family of good deacon doak; he also has the signal ability to know what he wants and to understand that hard work is necessary to win. =black beauty=: the autobiography of a horse. by anna sewell. _new illustrated edition._ with nineteen full-page drawings by winifred austin. one vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative, gilt top, $1.25 there have been many editions of this classic, but we confidently offer this one as the most appropriate and handsome yet produced. the illustrations are of special value and beauty. miss austin is a lover of horses, and has delighted in tracing with her pen the beauty and grace of the noble animal. "=yours with all my heart=:" the autobiography of a real dog. by esther m. baxendale. very fully illustrated with upwards of a hundred drawings by etheldred b. barry. large 12mo, cloth decorative $1.50 mrs. baxendale's charming story, though written primarily for children, will find a warm welcome from all those who love animals. it is a true story of a deeply loved pet and companion of the author's for thirteen years; and it cannot fail to inspire in the hearts of all the young people fortunate enough to hear it that affection and sympathy for domestic animals so essential in the moulding of character. it is delightfully human in its interest, and contains, besides the main theme of a rarely beautiful dog life, character sketches which show keen observation and that high order of talent requisite in writing for children, and exemplified in "black beauty" and "beautiful joe," of a place beside which, the publishers believe, "yours with all my heart" will be found worthy. =songs and rhymes for the little ones.= compiled by mary whitney morrison (jenny wallis). new edition, with an introduction by mrs. a. d. t. whitney, with eight illustrations. one vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative $1.00 no better description of this admirable book can be given than mrs. whitney's happy introduction: "one might almost as well offer june roses with the assurance of their sweetness, as to present this lovely little gathering of verse, which announces itself, like them, by its deliciousness. yet as mrs. morrison's charming volume has long been a delight to me, i am only too happy to link my name with its new and enriched form in this slight way, and simply declare that it is to me the most bewitching book of songs for little people that i have ever known." cosy corner series it is the intention of the publishers that this shall contain only the very highest and purest literature,--stories that shall not only appeal to the children themselves, but be appreciated by all those who feel with them in their joys and sorrows. the numerous illustrations in each book are by well-known artists, and each volume has a separate attractive cover design. each, 1 vol., 16mo, cloth $0.50 _by annie fellows johnston_ =the little colonel.= (trade mark.) the scene of this story is laid in kentucky. its heroine is a small girl, who is known as the little colonel, on account of her fancied resemblance to an old-school southern gentleman, whose fine estate and old family are famous in the region. this old colonel proves to be the grandfather of the child. =the giant scissors.= this is the story of joyce and of her adventures in france,--the wonderful house with the gate of the giant scissors, jules, her little playmate, sister denisa, the cruel brossard, and her dear aunt kate. joyce is a great friend of the little colonel, and in later volumes shares with her the delightful experiences of the "house party" and the "holidays." =two little knights of kentucky,= who were the little colonel's neighbors. in this volume the little colonel returns to us like an old friend, but with added grace and charm. she is not, however, the central figure of the story, that place being taken by the "two little knights." =cicely and other stories for girls.= the readers of mrs. johnston's charming juveniles will be glad to learn of the issue of this volume for young people, written in the author's sympathetic and entertaining manner. =aunt 'liza's hero and other stories.= a collection of six bright little stories, which will appeal to all boys and most girls. =big brother.= a story of two boys. the devotion and care of steven, himself a small boy, for his baby brother, is the theme of the simple tale, the pathos and beauty of which has appealed to so many thousands. =ole mammy's torment.= "ole mammy's torment" has been fitly called "a classic of southern life." it relates the haps and mishaps of a small negro lad, and tells how he was led by love and kindness to a knowledge of the right. =the story of dago.= in this story mrs. johnston relates the story of dago, a pet monkey, owned jointly by two brothers. dago tells his own story, and the account of his haps and mishaps is both interesting and amusing. =the quilt that jack built.= a pleasant little story of a boy's labor of love, and how it changed the course of his life many years after it was accomplished. told in mrs. johnston's usual vein of quaint charm and genuine sincerity. _by edith robinson_ =a little puritan's first christmas.= a story of colonial times in boston, telling how christmas was invented by betty sewall, a typical child of the puritans, aided by her brother sam. =a little daughter of liberty.= the author's motive for this story is well indicated by a quotation from her introduction, as follows: "one ride is memorable in the early history of the american revolution, the well-known ride of paul revere. equally deserving of commendation is another ride,--untold in verse or story, its records preserved only in family papers or shadowy legend, the ride of anthony severn was no less historic in its action or memorable in its consequences." =a loyal little maid.= a delightful and interesting story of revolutionary days, in which the child heroine, betsey schuyler, renders important services to george washington. =a little puritan rebel.= like miss robinson's successful story of "a loyal little maid," this is another historical tale of a real girl, during the time when the gallant sir harry vane was governor of massachusetts. =a little puritan pioneer.= the scene of this story is laid in the puritan settlement at charlestown. the little girl heroine adds another to the list of favorites so well known to the young people. =a little puritan bound girl.= a story of boston in puritan days, which is of great interest to youthful readers. _by ouida_ (_louise de la ramã©e_) =a dog of flanders=: a christmas story. too well and favorably known to require description. =the nã¼rnberg stove.= this beautiful story has never before been published at a popular price. =a provence rose.= a story perfect in sweetness and in grace. =findelkind.= a charming story about a little swiss herdsman. _by miss mulock_ =the little lame prince.= a delightful story of a little boy who has many adventures by means of the magic gifts of his fairy godmother. =adventures of a brownie.= the story of a household elf who torments the cook and gardener, but is a constant joy and delight to the children who love and trust him. =his little mother.= miss mulock's short stories for children are a constant source of delight to them, and "his little mother," in this new and attractive dress, will be welcomed by hosts of youthful readers. =little sunshine's holiday.= an attractive story of a summer outing. "little sunshine" is another of those beautiful child-characters for which miss mulock is so justly famous. _by juliana horatia ewing_ =jackanapes.= a new edition, with new illustrations, of this exquisite and touching story, dear alike to young and old. =story of a short life.= this beautiful and pathetic story will never grow old. it is a part of the world's literature, and will never die. =a great emergency.= how a family of children prepared for a great emergency, and how they acted when the emergency came. =the trinity flower.= in this little volume are collected three of mrs. ewing's best short stories for the young people. =madam liberality.= from her cradle up madam liberality found her chief delight in giving. _by frances margaret fox_ =the little giant's neighbours.= a charming nature story of a "little giant" whose neighbours were the creatures of the field and garden. =farmer brown and the birds.= a little story which teaches children that the birds are man's best friends. =betty of old mackinaw.= a charming story of child-life, appealing especially to the little readers who like stories of "real people." =mother nature's little ones.= curious little sketches describing the early lifetime, or "childhood," of the little creatures out-of-doors. _by will allen dromgoole_ =the farrier's dog and his fellow.= this story, written by the gifted young southern woman, will appeal to all that is best in the natures of the many admirers of her graceful and piquant style. =the fortunes of the fellow.= those who read and enjoyed the pathos and charm of "the farrier's dog and his fellow" will welcome the further account of the "adventures of baydaw and the fellow" at the home of the kindly smith. =the best of friends.= this continues the experiences of the farrier's dog and his fellow, written in miss dromgoole's well-known charming style. _by frances hodges white_ =helena's wonderworld.= a delightful tale of the adventures of a little girl in the mysterious regions beneath the sea. =aunt nabby's children.= this pretty little story, touched with the simple humor of country life, tells of two children who were adopted by aunt nabby. _by marshall saunders_ =for his country.= a sweet and graceful story of a little boy who loved his country; written with that charm which has endeared miss saunders to hosts of readers. =nita, the story of an irish setter.= in this touching little book, miss saunders shows how dear to her heart are all of god's dumb creatures. * * * * * transcriber's note: obvious punctuation errors repaired. our little cuban cousin the little cousin series by mary hazelton wade _ten volumes, illustrated_ [illustration] _previously issued_ =our little japanese cousin= =our little brown cousin= =our little indian cousin= =our little russian cousin= _now ready_ =our little cuban cousin= =our little hawaiian cousin= =our little eskimo cousin= =our little philippine cousin= =our little porto rican cousin= =our little african cousin= each volume illustrated with six full-page plates in tints, from drawings by l. j. bridgman cloth, 12mo, with decorative cover, per volume, 50 cents net. (postage, 6 cents additional) [illustration] l. c. page & company, new england building, boston [illustration: maria] our little cuban cousin by mary hazelton wade _illustrated by_ l. j. bridgman [illustration] boston l. c. page & company _mdccccii_ _copyright, 1902_ by l. c. page & company (incorporated) _all rights reserved_ published, june, 1902 colonial press electrotyped and printed by c. h. simonds & co. boston, mass., u. s. a. preface largest of all the fair west indian islands which lie in our open doorway is cuba. the great south doorway to the united states and all north america, you know, is the gulf of mexico. but recently, as we all remember, we have had war and bloodshed at this doorway. the spanish government, in trying to subdue its rebellious province of cuba, brought great hardship and suffering upon the cuban people, our neighbours, and our government at last decided that such things must not be at our very doorway. so to-day cuba is free, and the great trouble of war is over and past for her. yet, though war no longer troubles the cuban people, they have many new hardships and difficulties to contend with, and need the friendly help of their more fortunate neighbours scarcely less than before. now, in order that we may be able to help our friends and neighbours, the cubans, we must know them better, and surely we shall all feel a stronger interest than ever before in their welfare. so we shall be glad to meet and know our little cuban neighbour, maria. we shall ask to have what maria says translated for us, for most of us do not understand the spanish language, which maria speaks. we must remember, too, to pronounce her name as if it were spelled mahreeah, for that is the way she and her family pronounce it. our cuban cousins, you know, like our cousins in porto rico, are descended from the dark-eyed, dark-haired spanish people. their forefathers came over seas from spain to cuba, as the english colonists came across the ocean to our country, which is now the united states. yet we must remember that the spanish people and the english people are near akin in the great human family. they both belong to the white race; and so we shall call our black-eyed little neighbour our near cousin. welcome, then, to our little cuban cousin! contents chapter page i. danger 9 ii. the picnic 17 iii. legends 29 iv. next-door neighbours 37 v. sugar 45 vi. the quarters 53 vii. home again 61 viii. startling news 64 ix. first years in the new world 72 x. the merrimac 81 xi. victory 90 xii. havana 97 list of illustrations page maria _frontispiece_ "'i counted three different forts of the enemy'" 21 "they sat back in the low, broad seat" 39 "the machines made a steady, grinding sound" 50 "'it is like a big lizard'" 76 "the american flag was waving and peace ruled in the land" 100 our little cuban cousin chapter i. danger. "maria! maria! maria!" was the low call from some unknown direction. it sounded like a whisper, yet it must have travelled from a distance. low as it was, the little girl dozing in the hammock in the lemon grove was awake in an instant. she sprang out and stood with hands shading her eyes, looking for the owner of the voice. she well knew what it meant. ramon was the only one who had agreed to call in this way. it was a sign of danger! it meant, "the enemy are coming. look out and get ready." shouldn't you think our little cuban cousin would have trembled and cried, or at least run for protection to her mother? maria was only nine years old. she was a perfect fairy of a child, with tiny hands and feet and soft black eyes. but she was used to war by this time. she never knew when she went to sleep at night but that her home would be burnt down by the cruel spaniards before the end of another day. ramon got up before sunrise this morning. he had been away from home for several hours. he had gone out in the country "to look around," as he said. from his own front door the burning roofs of the houses of old friends not a mile distant could be seen the night before. the spanish troops must be near. who could say but that the boy's own home would suffer next? he was tall and active, and he longed very much to help his people. they had suffered much from their spanish rulers and now they were working hard for freedom. but ramon's father had been ill for a long time. he was growing weaker every day. the boy's mother looked very sad at times. her eyes filled with tears when she said: "my dear boy, you must not leave us now. your duty lies at home. you must be your father's right hand and protect your little sisters and myself." the diaz children lived in a cosy little home in the country. it was only a few miles from havana. their father had a small sugar plantation. he had been able to raise enough sugar to buy everything the family needed until lately. but now times were very hard. it was not easy to sell the sugar; besides this, the good man and his family were in constant danger. what had they done? you ask. nothing. they did not love their spanish rulers, to be sure, and they believed their countrymen were fighting justly to free their beautiful island home. they would help these countrymen, or insurgents, as they were called, if they had a chance. but maria's father had never, himself, fought against the spaniards. he was a quiet, kindly gentleman, and he had no love for war. what did the spaniards care for that? they might say to themselves: "this man has a pleasant home. he raises sugar. he may give food and shelter to those daring cuban soldiers. then they can keep up their strength and be able to keep up the fight against us all the longer." so far maria's home had been spared. although many other houses near her had been burned, hers stood safe and unharmed yet. but "to-morrow is another day," the child often repeated to herself, after the manner of her people. that meant, "although i am safe now, no one knows what will come next." then maria would sigh for a moment and look sad. but she was naturally merry and gay, and the next moment would be dancing about and humming a lively tune. what news was her brave brother bringing this morning? as soon as he came in sight, maria ran to meet him. the sun was very hot and the little girl's head was bare, but she did not think of these things. the spaniards! the spaniards! made the only picture she could see. as soon as she was within easy call, ramon told her that a company of the enemy was only two miles away. he had been very close to them. he had even heard them talking together while he hid in the bushes. "just think, maria," he exclaimed, "they were laughing at the easy time they would have in breaking our spirit. they said that before long they would starve us into giving up. i rather think they won't. do you know, maria, i believe god will send us help if we are only patient. the americans live so near us, i don't see how they can help taking our part, when they know the way we are treated. but come, we must hurry and tell father the news. he will know what we ought to do to get ready for a visit to-day." the children hurried to the house, and soon every one was in a state of the greatest excitement. when señor diaz was told of the approach of the spaniards, he said, in his gentle voice, "we would best have a picnic." the children looked greatly astonished at the idea of a picnic at such a time, but their father went on to explain. he had often thought of the coming of the spanish troops. he had made a plan in case he should hear of their approach. the house should be locked up; all the family should go down to the shore of a small lake a quarter of a mile back in the woods. the path that led to this lake was so hidden that a stranger would not know it was there. ramon could lead the oxen; the father thought that he was strong enough to guide the horse to the picnic-ground. if the spaniards found no one about the house, and no animals worth capturing, they might possibly pass by without doing any harm. señora diaz and old black paulina got a hasty luncheon ready. maria said she must certainly take her sewing materials, for she was going to embroider some insurgent emblems. her little sister, isabella, carried her pet kitten in her arms, and cried because the parrot must be left behind. "he'll be so lonesome," she said; "and i just know he'll call 'isabella' all day long." the dear little girl cried hard, but everybody's hands were so full that mr. poll was left in the house. a big linen cloth was stretched over the cage. if kept in the dark, he would probably be still, and not attract the attention of the soldiers, if they stopped and looked in. the black man servant, miguel, stayed behind to shut up the chickens in barrels, but would follow the rest of the party in a few moments. the path led in and out through the beautiful southern woods. there were cocoanut-palms and ebony and mahogany trees, while underneath were creeping vines and bushes, making a close thicket of underbrush. there was no talking. the family crept along as quietly as possible, lest they should be heard and followed. for by this time the enemy must be very near. chapter ii. the picnic. in a few minutes the lake was in sight. it was a very pretty sheet of water. a tiny boat rocked to and fro close to the shore, for ramon and maria often came here to row about the quiet lake. ramon soon had two hammocks swinging between the trees for his father and mother. the lunch was spread out on the ground, as it was already past the time for the noonday meal. "what did they have to eat?" you ask. there were some delicate white rolls, that paulina knew how to make so nicely. there was guava jelly to eat on the rolls; fresh lemons and newly made sugar from which to make a refreshing drink. besides these, there was plenty of cold fried chicken. could any children have a nicer picnic lunch than this, even if a long time had been spent in getting ready for it? the guava jelly looked just as clear and beautiful as that which is brought to america, and sold here at such a high price. did you ever see it in the stores of boston or new york, and think how nice it must taste? perhaps your mother has bought it for you when you were getting well after a long illness, and wished to tempt your appetite by some new dainty. maria has several guava-trees near her home. paulina makes so much jelly from the ripe fruit that perhaps the little girl does not realise how nice it is. after the lunch, señor diaz stretched himself in one of the hammocks for a quiet rest. he was very tired after his walk through the woods. he was also troubled over the sad state of things in his country, and was worried that he was not strong enough to take a more active part against the enemy. his wife lay down in the other hammock for a noonday nap, after which she promised to help maria in her sewing. paulina gathered the remains of the lunch and put things in order, while the three children rowed around the lake. "won't you hear me read out of my primer, maria?" said isabella. "ramon, dear, give your oars a rest, and float for a little while. you can listen, too, and i know you'll like my lesson to-day." the little girl was just learning to read, and she had a book printed by the insurgents. no one had to urge her to study, for even her own little primer was made up of stories about the war. she had tucked her loved book in the loose waist of her dress when she left the house. no one had noticed it before. [illustration: "'i counted three different forts of the enemy'"] "why, yes, my darling sister, certainly i will listen, and help you with the big words, too," answered maria, while ramon drew in his oars, and lay back in the boat with a pleasant smile. of course the words were all spanish, because that was the only language the children had ever learned. isabella read: "my papa is in the army of the cubans. he fights to make us free. do you hear the cannon roar? our men will bring victory. long live cuba!" when isabella came to the word "victory," maria had to help her. it was such a big word for the six-year-old child to pronounce. she looked at it again and again, repeating it slowly to herself. then she said: "i'll never fail on that word again, maria, no matter where it is. how i would like to see it in great big letters on a silk banner! i'd wave it all day long." this was a good deal for such a little girl to say, but then, you know, she was living in the midst of war. "good for you," said her brother; "we'll all live yet to see the words of your primer come true. long live free cuba! i say. but come, let's go on shore, and play war. you and maria can be the spaniards, and i'll be the insurgent army. you just see how i will make short work of taking you prisoners." the children landed under a big cotton-tree. they made a fort out of dead branches which they gathered. this fort was to belong to the spanish troops. the two girls placed themselves behind it, and stood ready to defend themselves. it was not many minutes before ramon took them by surprise, and dragged them to the boat, which stood for the cuban headquarters. "do you know," said the boy, when they stopped to rest a few minutes from their sport, "i counted three different forts of the enemy during my tramp this morning. the cowardly spaniards don't dare to march very far away from those forts. they really don't give our men a chance to have a good fair battle. they think by having plenty of forts they can keep our soldiers from getting into the cities. then they will scare the rest of us who live in the country from feeding them. in that way we will be starved into giving in. we'll see, that's all." by this time maria could see that her mother had waked up and left the hammock. "she will be ready to help me with my work now," said maria. "don't you want to come and watch me embroider, isabella?" the two girls were soon sitting beside their mother, while ramon went with miguel on a hunt for birds. the insurgent emblems which maria was so eager to make were to be given to the cuban soldiers. they were to wear beneath their coats. suppose that an insurgent should stop at any place, and ask for food and rest; how would the people know that he was true to his country, and not a friend of the spaniards? he could show his little piece of flannel with the watchword of the cubans embroidered upon it. that was the only thing needed. the people would be safe now in giving him help. maria did her work very nicely. she made a scalloped edge with red silk all around the white cloth. a crimson heart on a green cross must then be made, with underneath these words: "be of good cheer. the heart of jesus is with me." two hours went by before ramon came back. miguel and he were bringing a large net full of birds. of course, they had done no shooting. that would not have been wise when spanish soldiers might be near to hear the noise. no, they had searched through the woods till they found some sour orange trees. the fruit was ripe now and there were sure to be numbers of parrots around. they could be caught in the net that miguel had brought from the house that morning. they had to creep along very quietly so as to take the birds by surprise. they had great success, it seemed; but what would the family do with a dozen dead parrots? eat them, to be sure. paulina would make a fine stew for dinner that very night. that is, of course, if they were fortunate enough to find the house still standing when they reached home. the flesh of this bird is tough, and one wonders that ramon and maria are so fond of parrot stew. in cuba there are many nicer birds for eating. but each one has his own tastes. no two people are alike, we have found out long ago. "i discovered something in the woods that i want to show you girls," said ramon. "it's only a little ways off. won't you come, too, mamma? it's the dearest little nest i ever saw in my life. it must belong to a humming-bird." ramon's mother and the children followed him till the boy stopped in front of a low bush. hidden away under the leaves was the tiny nest. it was no bigger than a large thimble. it was made of cotton, bound together with two or three horse-hairs. "i'm sure i couldn't have sewed it as well as that," said maria. "see how the threads are woven in and out. it's wonderful what birds can do. but look at the eggs, mamma dear. see! there are two of them. they aren't any bigger than peas." just then the children heard a fluttering of tiny wings. it was mrs. humming-bird who had come home. she was troubled at the sight of the strangers. "did you ever before see such a small bird?" whispered isabella. "she looks like a butterfly, and a small one, too. aren't her colours beautiful?" "we would best let her go back to her nest, now, my dears," said señora diaz. "you can watch, ramon, and find out when the baby birds hatch. we shall all like to see them, i'm sure." they left the bush and turned back toward the lake. ramon stopped again, however, when they came to a small lace-wood tree. "you know you asked me to get you some of the wood to trim your doll's dress, isabella. here is a good chance to get it. i'll follow you in a few minutes." ramon took out his knife, and soon the young tree was cut away from the roots. it would take some time to strip off the bark. it must be done carefully and peeled off in one piece, so as to leave the pith of the tree quite smooth and whole. several strips of delicate lace could be obtained from this pith. now isabella would be able to dress her doll in great elegance. she could ruffle the lace on the waist and flounces of the doll's skirt and make it look as beautiful as though it cost a good deal of money. isabella herself has a dress trimmed with the lace, but paulina needs to be very careful when she irons it. it was growing dark when ramon arrived at the shore with his tree. "we will go back now," said señor diaz, "and see if the soldiers have left us our home." all were soon making their way back to the house, which they found unharmed. nothing had been touched by the enemy. perhaps they had not thought it worth while to stop. at any rate, there was great joy in the diaz family that evening as they sat on the balcony, sipping cups of hot sweetened water. the times were so hard they could not buy coffee, and _guaraba_, as they called it, was the next best thing. maria is very fond of it. the children were so tired from the day's excitement that by eight o'clock they were quite ready to go to dreamland. isabella started first. she went up to her father and, placing her tiny hands across her breast, looked up into his eyes with a sweet, solemn look. he knew at once what it meant. she was asking an evening blessing before leaving him for the night. every one in the room stopped talking; all bowed their heads while the kind father said: "may god bless my darling child, and all others of this household." maria and ramon followed isabella's example, and soon the children were sound asleep. isabella dreamed that she taught her loved parrot to say "liberty," and was delighted at her success. chapter iii. legends. the next morning it rained quite hard, so the children had to stay in the house. "what shall we do with ourselves?" said maria. "oh, i know. we'll ask father to tell us stories." "what shall it be to-day?" he asked. "do you want a tale of old spain, or shall it be the life of columbus; or maybe you would like a fairy story?" "a fairy story! a fairy story!" all cried together. "very well, then, this shall be a tale that our people heard in europe a thousand years ago. "it was long before columbus dreamed of his wonderful voyages across the atlantic. it was before people had even thought of the idea of the roundness of the earth. they had such queer fancies in those days. few men dared to sail far into the west. they believed that if they did so they would come into a place of perfect darkness. "still they had one legend of a land across the atlantic that was very beautiful. many of our greatest men believed in it. it was called the island of youth, and people who reached it could live for ever, and never grow old." "what made them think there was such a place?" asked maria, with wide-open eyes. "they had heard that long ago there was a very brave young man. he had a wonderful horse as white as the foam of the ocean. strange to say, this horse could carry him through the water more safely than the stoutest boat. as he was looking for adventure, he started off on the back of his fairy steed to cross the ocean. "after he had travelled for some distance, he stopped to kill a giant who had enchanted a princess. when the giant was dead, and the beautiful maiden was free once more, he travelled on till he came to a land where the trees were loaded with birds. the air was filled with their sweet music. "he stayed in this land for a hundred years. he was merry and gay all the time. he was never ill, and never tired." "but wasn't he lonesome?" asked ramon. "i should think he would wish for other company besides the birds." "oh, there were many other people there, of course, and as our traveller was fond of shooting, he had great sport hunting the deer. "but at last something happened to make him think of his old home and friends. it was a rusty spear that came floating to the shore one day. it must have travelled across the ocean. the young man grew sad with longing for the scenes of his early days. he mounted his white steed once more, plunged into the ocean, and at last reached his own home. "but think, children. it was a hundred years since he had seen it. his old friends were all dead. the people seemed like dwarfs. i suppose he must have grown in size and strength while away on the island of youth. at any rate, his own home was not what he expected to find it. he had no wish to live longer. he lay down and died. the island of youth had not been such a great blessing to him, after all. "another story used to be told in spain of the island of seven cities. it was a legend of our own cuba, for all we know. people said that a thousand years before columbus crossed the atlantic, an archbishop was driven away from spain. why was it? he was untrue to his king. he sailed far from his country with a goodly company of men and women. "after a long voyage they reached a land which they called antilla. there were people already living here. they were kind and gentle. "the archbishop divided the land into seven parts. he built churches and other fine buildings. he got the natives to help him. all lived together in peace and happiness. "but look, children, the rain has stopped falling, and the sun is shining. you can go outdoors now, and amuse yourselves. before you leave, however, let me ask you a question in geography. "cuba is shaped like what animal? think how long and narrow it is, and of the ridge of mountains running through the centre of the island. i will give you until to-morrow to guess the answer. "and, by the way, did you ever think that our home is really the top of a row of mountains reaching up from the floor of the ocean? ah, what wonders would be seen in the valleys below us, if we could journey under the water, and explore it for ourselves!" just as the good man stopped speaking, miguel knocked at the door. two ragged little girls were standing at his side. they were strangers. where had they come from during the hard rain of the morning? it seemed that miguel had been tramping through the woods after game. he did not care for the rain. he was a good-natured servant, and was always ready to make pleasant surprises for the family. when he was about four miles from home, he came upon an unexpected camp. there were about thirty people in it. there, on the mountainside, they had made rough huts to live in. there were not only men and women, but little children, also. they had been here for two or three weeks. what a sad story they had to tell! it was the old story. they wished to be peaceful; they did not join the army of the cubans. still, they might possibly help them in some little way. but they did not go to the great city. they fled to the woods on the mountainside. they kept themselves from starving by gathering berries and wild fruit. their children were sent out every morning to the country homes which were not too far off to beg for food and help. "poor little children!" exclaimed maria, when miguel had finished his story. "we will help you all we can, won't we, papa?" and the child's eyes were full of tears, as she said: "we may be homeless like them, yet." isabella ran to call her mother and ask her help. clothing was collected, and all the food the family could spare was put into baskets. it was far too large a load for the little girls to carry, so ramon and miguel went with them. "what a good servant miguel is!" said señor diaz to his wife, after they were gone. "so many of the blacks are lazy, and only think of their own comfort. but miguel is always good-natured and ready to help." chapter iv. next-door neighbours. it was a beautiful sunday morning. the birds were singing gaily outside. maria opened her eyes. perhaps she would have slept longer if she had not been wakened by a sound in the next room. it was ramon who was calling. "say, maria, what shall we do to-day while father and mother are gone to church? let's go over to the plantation. you know we've been invited ever so many times, and it is such fun watching the men at work." "all right," said maria, "but there's no hurry. we will wait till after the folks have gone before we start." just beyond the home of the diaz children was an immense sugar plantation. it covered at least a square mile of land. the rich planter who owned it employed more than a hundred black men. it was cutting season now, and the work was carried on day and night, both sundays and week-days. sunday afternoon, however, was a half-holiday, even in the busiest time, and the black people then gave themselves up to merrymaking, no matter how tired they were. [illustration: "they sat back in the low, broad seat"] by nine o'clock señor diaz and his wife had left home in the oddest-looking carriage you ever heard of. it was a _volante_. there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. it looked somewhat like an old-fashioned chaise. it had immense wheels, and the shafts were at least sixteen feet long. we think at once, how clumsily one must move along in such a carriage. but it is not so. it is the best thing possible for travelling over the rough roads of cuba. it swings along from side to side so easily that a person is not bumped or jostled as he would be in any other kind of carriage. but one does not see many new volantes in cuba now. they are going out of fashion. señor diaz was very proud of this carriage when it was new. it was trimmed with bands of silver. it had beautiful silk cushions. even now, the good man and his wife looked quite elegant as they sat back in the low, broad seat. isabella sat between them. miguel rode on the horse's back as driver. he wore a scarlet jacket trimmed with gold braid. he had on high boots with spurs at his heels. he felt very proud. it made very little difference to him that his coat was badly torn and the braid was tarnished. these were war-times and one could not expect new clothes. "if the people at the great house invite you to stay till evening, you may do so," said señor diaz to his two older children just as he was driving away. "i know you will be gentlemanly, ramon; and maria dear, my little daughter will certainly be quiet and ladylike." away swung the volante down the road, while ramon and maria put on their wide straw hats and started across the fields for the rich sugar planter's home. they looked very pretty as they moved along under the shade-trees. both were barefooted; maria wore a simple white dress, and ramon a linen shirt and trousers. they reached their neighbour's grounds in a few minutes. they soon found themselves in front of a large, low house with beautiful gardens and shade-trees around it. but of what was the house made? it was of the same material as maria's home, yet we see nothing like it in our own country. it was neither brick, nor wood, nor stone. maria would say to us: "why, this is 'adobe,' and it keeps out the sun's hot rays nicely. don't you know what adobe is? it is a mixture of clay and sand dried by the sun. some people call it unburnt brick. it was nearly white when the house was new, but now you see it is quite yellow." there was no glass in the window-cases. in such a warm land as cuba glass would keep out the air too much, and the people inside would suffer from the heat. but there were iron bars across the casements; there were also shutters to protect the house from the sun and rain. the children went in at the door, opened by a black servant. she looked kind and pleasant, and showed two rows of white teeth as she smiled at the young visitors. a gorgeous yellow bandanna was wound around her head. "come right in, little dears. massa and missus will be glad to see you; little miss lucia has been wishing for company to-day." she led ramon and maria into a large sitting-room with two rows of rocking-chairs opposite each other. they stretched nearly from one end of the room to the other. there was scarcely any other furniture. a minute afterward, lucia opened the door. she was about maria's age and very pretty. but she was dressed like a grown-up young lady. she carried in her hand a dainty little fan, which she moved gracefully as she talked. "oh, i am so glad to see you," she cried. "but let us go out into the garden; it is much pleasanter there; don't you think so? i want to show you my sensitive plant. did you ever have one?" maria and ramon had heard their father speak of this plant, but they had never happened to see one themselves. they followed lucia out on the balcony. a morning-glory vine was trailing up the trelliswork. it was bright with its delicate blossoms, pink and blue and purple. close beside it was the sensitive plant. "it came up of itself," said lucia. "that is, you know, it was not planted by any one. you see its leaves are wide open now. it is keeping the morning-glory blossoms company. perhaps they are talking together. who knows? but when night comes it will close up in the same way as the petals of its next-door neighbour." "now, ramon, just touch the leaves gently." "why, it acts as if afraid of me, doesn't it?" said the boy. "see how it shrinks away, even before i take hold of it. i declare, it knows more than some animals." "would you like to ride around the plantation? we have three ponies; so each one of us can have one," said their little hostess. her visitors were delighted at the idea. while a servant was sent for the ponies the children sat down under a royal palm-tree. it stood at least sixty feet high. its trunk was perfectly straight. far up at the top was the wide-spreading plume of leaves. there were no branches at the sides. "i just love this tree," said lucia. "it seems so strong as well as beautiful. isn't it queer that the trunk of such a big tree should be hollow?" "i think it queerer still that the roots should be so small and fine," answered ramon. "did you ever eat what is found at the top of the royal palm? everybody says it is delicious." "yes, we had it boiled once for a dinner-party," said lucia. "it was delicious, but you know it kills the tree to take it off; so father says it is almost wicked to get it. i think he is right." chapter v. sugar. by this time the ponies had been brought up, and the young riders started off. how high the sugar-canes stood! the children could not see over the tops, even from their ponies' backs. the long, narrow leaves hung down much like our own indian corn. far up on each plant was a feathery white plume. the stalks were now a golden yellow colour. this was mother nature's sign that the cane was full of sap. at maria's home the cane had been already cut and made into sugar. but there were only two or three fields. here, on lucia's plantation, there were hundreds of acres. the men had been working for weeks already, and it was not yet half cut. "oh, look, ramon!" said maria, "see that dear little black baby asleep between the canes. she can't be more than two years old. the other children must have gone away and forgotten her." ramon jumped down, and, picking up the little tot, lifted her up in front of him on the pony's back. she had been waked up so suddenly that she began to cry. but when the others smiled at her she rolled her big eyes around, and soon began to laugh. she was going to have a ride with white children, and that was a grand event in her life. a turn in the rough road showed an ox-cart ahead. how small the cuban oxen are! but they are such gentle, patient creatures, a child could drive them. how they pushed ahead with their heavy load! when they were young a hole had been bored through the centre of their nostrils, and an iron ring was passed through. when the oxen were harnessed a rope was fastened on each side of this ring. the black driver held the ends of the rope, and guided the oxen. he had no whip, for it was not needed. "let's follow him up to the top of the hill," said lucia. "he must carry his load to the boiler-house that way, and i do like to watch the oxen go down a steep place. there, see! the man will not even get off; he's perfectly safe." as the heavily loaded wagon passed over the brow of the hill, the oxen squatted down like dogs, and seemed to slide rather than walk, till they reached the foot. "bravo!" shouted ramon. "i'd trust such creatures anywhere. they ought to be rewarded with a good supper to-night. and now that they have reached level ground see how well they trot along. these dear little ponies cannot do much better." the children still followed the ox-cart, and soon reached the sugar-mill. immense machines were crushing the canes, and the sap was flowing into great tanks from which it was afterward taken to be boiled. "what does the molasses come from?" you may ask. all cuban children would tell you at once that it is the drippings from the newly made sugar. lucia's father does not sell his molasses, as do many other planters. he thinks it is not worth while. you cannot guess what use he makes of it. his work-people spread it on the ground to make it richer for the next year's crop. his wife does not think of having it used in cooking, either, as american women do, and so lucia has never tasted gingerbread in her life. perhaps you feel sorry for her. never mind. she enjoys sucking the juice from the fresh sugar-cane as well as the black children on her father's plantation; she has as much of this as she wishes, so she never misses the molasses cookies and cakes you like so much. "lucia, how is it your father keeps on having the cane cut?" asked ramon, as the children stood watching the sap boiling down to sugar. "you know, don't you, a new law has been passed ordering the work stopped? it is all because the spaniards are afraid that the poor insurgents will get food and help from the sugar planters." "yes, i know," answered lucia. "i heard father talking about it. he said he had paid the government a large sum of money to let him keep on. so he's all right. but perhaps i ought not to have said this, for it is his own business, and i should not repeat what i hear." the children entered the sugar-mill, and stood watching the workers. every one was so busy that no notice was taken of the young visitors. here were great troughs full of the canes which were being crushed by heavy rollers; the juice was flowing fast into the tanks below. and there were the caldrons full of the boiling syrup; by their sides stood men with long, heavy skimmers stirring the juice, and taking off the scum which rose to the surface. [illustration: "the machines made a steady, grinding sound"] there were large, shallow pans close by, where the sugar was placed to cool. the air was full of the sweet smell of the sugar; the engines were clanking noisily; the machines made a steady, grinding sound, and, above all, the cries of the negroes could be heard, as they called to each other at their work. a few minutes was long enough for the children to stay in this busy, steaming place. then they went out again into the bright, clear air. after giving the black baby into the charge of one of the negro girls who was standing near by, our little cousins mounted their ponies, and rode slowly back to the house. they passed field after field where men were cutting down the tall sugar-canes. how rapidly they moved along, leaving the ground quite clear, as they passed over it! was it such hard work? they certainly bent over very much as they lifted the heavy, clumsy tools in their hands. these tools looked somewhat like long cheese-knives, only they were much thicker and heavier. ramon would say, "why, those are machetes. i wish i could use one now in defending my country. many a brave insurgent has nothing else to fight with excepting the machete he brought from his little farm. no guns can be obtained, for the spaniards hold the cities, and will not allow any weapons to get to the cubans. but those machetes will do great good yet." as the boy watched the men working, he was thinking how differently he would like to use the machete, but he did not say anything of this kind to lucia. he was just a little afraid that her father was not as anxious for cuba to be free as he and his own parents were. when the children reached the house, lucia's parents insisted that ramon and maria should spend the day, and a delicious luncheon was now waiting for them. "this afternoon," said the planter, "you may go over to the quarters and see the fun. you know it is a half-holiday, and there will be great good times among the blacks." chapter vi. the quarters. after a little rest in the garden, the children started out once more. this time they chose to walk, taking lucia's big dog with them for company. even before they started, they could hear the sound of drums and shouting and laughter coming from the quarters. they did not have far to go before they came upon a crowd of black children. the boys were having a game of ball. it was so confused it would be hard to describe it. it certainly could not be called baseball, nor anything like it. and here were the cabins, built close together. cocoanut and mango trees shaded the little huts. near each one was a small garden where the people raised the vegetables they liked best. okra was sure to be seen here, for what old mammy could be satisfied with her sunday dinner unless she had some of this delicious plant in at least one of the dishes? here also was the chicota, much like our summer squash, and corn, on which the pigs must be fattened. as for fruits, there were custard-apple and sour-sop trees, the maumee, looking much like a melon; besides many other things which grow so easily in the warm lands. chickens were running about in every direction, while there seemed as many pens with pigs grunting inside as there were cabins. how happy the people all seemed! that is, all but a baby here and there who had been forgotten by his mother and was crying to keep himself company as he sprawled about on the ground. and how grand the women thought themselves in the bright red and yellow bandannas wound around their heads! you may be sure that all of the jewelry the people owned was worn that day. maria could not help smiling at one young girl who had immense rings in her ears, three chains of glass beads around her neck, heavy brass rings on her fingers, and broad bracelets that clinked together on her arms. she strutted around as proudly as the peacocks near by. they are handsome birds, but very vain and silly, like this poor black girl who seemed to admire herself so greatly. she tossed her head from side to side as she got ready to lead the dance. the drummer bent to his work with all his heart; one pair of dancers after another took their places, and moved in perfect time with faster and faster steps. the crowd of bystanders watched them in admiration. under the shade of a mango-tree two black children were playing a game of dominoes. "what a nice set it is," said ramon to his sister. "i am going to ask them if they bought it. it must have cost quite a big sum for them to spend." the older of the two players heard ramon's words. he looked up with a proud smile that made his mouth stretch from ear to ear as he said: "i made them all myself, little master. i got the wood from an ebony-tree." "but of what did you make the white points set into the dominoes?" asked ramon. "they look like ivory." "i cut them out of alligator's teeth, little master. now didn't i do well?" this was said with another broad grin and a big roll of his eyes that made lucia and maria laugh in spite of themselves. "well, i should say so," answered ramon. "you deserve a medal. but can you read and write? a boy as smart as you ought to go to school." "no, little master. but that doesn't trouble me any. i don't need any learning," was the answer. and no doubt the little fellow had no idea but that he was as well off as any one need be. he could play in the sunshine all day long and he had plenty of good food. wasn't his mother a fine cook, though! he was right in thinking so, too, for she could make the nicest "messes" out of the herbs and vegetables growing in the little garden behind the cabin. there were melons and plantains in abundance; salt fish or jerked beef to eat every day, and a long sleep at night on a straw bed in the cabin. oh, life was a lovely thing! and what should the little black boy know of the cruel war and the cuban children who had been driven away from their homes? to be sure, he had heard sad stories in his life, but they were about the old times when his people were brought to cuba as slaves. he had listened to his father's tales of slavery, although he himself had been free ever since he was a little child. the boy's grandfather was born far away in africa where the sun was always hot. he had lived a wild, happy life in his little village under the palm-trees by the side of a broad river. as he grew up he hunted the panther and the elephant, and made scarecrows to frighten away the monkeys from the corn-fields. he was very happy. but one day a band of white men took the village by surprise. they took many other prisoners besides himself. the poor blacks were put in chains and driven on board boats in which the white men had come to the place. down the river they sailed, never more to see their little thatched homes and have gay feasts under the palms. at last they came to the great ocean, where a large vessel was waiting for them. as they were packed away in the hold of the vessel, no notice was taken of their cries except a lash of the whip, now and then, across their bare backs. then came the long voyage, and the dreadful seasickness in the crowded hold of the vessel. many died before the shores of cuba came in sight. but when those who still lived were able once more to stand on dry land they were too weak and sick to care where they should go next. in a few days, however, they found themselves working under masters on the sugar plantations, and making new homes and friends among those who were slaves like themselves. the little domino player told manuel that his grandfather worked so faithfully that after awhile he was given a part of each day for his own use. in this way he earned money enough to buy his own freedom as well as his wife's. but he had children growing up who were still slaves. he wished them to be free also. then came an order from the spanish rulers that all the slaves should be gradually given their liberty. but this was not till many years after their black brothers in america had been set free by that great man, president lincoln. chapter vii. home again. after ramon and maria got home that night they told paulina about their visit to the quarters, and their talk with the little domino player. paulina knew him well, and said he was a very bright and good boy. "some of those little negroes are too lazy," she declared, "but pedro is always busy. i wish he could go to school, for he will make a smart man." she went on to tell more of the old days. there was one story of which she was very fond. it was of a cargo of slaves who were being brought to cuba. they outwitted their masters. this was the way they did it. after the ship had been sailing for many days, it began to leak badly. the water poured in so fast that all hands were kept busy pumping it out. it seemed, after a while, to rush in faster than the men could get it out. the ship's carpenter went around the vessel, and hunted in every part, but could not find a single leak. "it is the work of the evil one," cried the captain. the slaves wrung their hands, and wailed, while the crew worked at the pumps till they were quite worn out. when it seemed as though the ship must soon sink, an island came in sight. the spaniards quickly lowered provisions and water into the small boats, and rowed away, leaving the slaves to die, as they supposed. but they had no sooner got well out of reach than the ship began to rise out of the water. the black people could be seen dancing about on the deck in delight. the sails were set to the wind, and away sped the vessel. how was it possible? this was the whole story. the prisoners had gotten hold of some knives, with which they cut through the outer planking of the vessel. of course, it began to leak sadly. but when the carpenter searched for these leaks the slaves had cleverly filled the holes with plugs packed with oakum, and he could not find them. in this way the whole cargo of negroes succeeded in getting out of the clutches of the spaniards. old paulina chuckled as she told the story and thought of the cleverness of her people. chapter viii. startling news. it was a pleasant evening in february. the children felt gay and happy, for their father was getting so much stronger. why, this very day he had walked with them a mile in an excursion to a cave. miguel had told them such wonderful things about it, they begged their father to take them there. although they lived so near, they had never happened to visit it before. when they reached the spot, they were obliged to crouch down in order to enter the cave. the opening was merely a small hole between the rocks. but, as they crept down under the ground, the passage grew wider, and led into a large room. "do you suppose robinson crusoe's cave was anything like this?" maria asked her brother. but the answer was, "i don't think so; you know it was not beautiful. and see here, maria, look at those shining pendants hanging from the roof. they are as clear as diamonds. oh, look down beside your feet; there are more of those lovely things; they are reaching up to meet those coming from above." "what makes them, papa?" señor diaz then explained to the children that there must be a great deal of lime in the rocks overhead, and that, when the water slowly filtered through the roof of the cave, it brought with it the lime which formed in these wonderful crystals. "people pay great sums of money for precious stones," said their father, "but what could be more beautiful than these shining pyramids! the pendants hanging from the roof are called stalactites. those reaching up from the floor of the cave are stalagmites. do you suppose you can remember such hard words, my dear little isabella? but come, children, i have something else to show you here." he led the children to a little pond, in which they could dimly see, by the light of the torch, fish sporting about in the water. "those fishes are happy as can be, yet they are perfectly blind. i made some experiments years ago that led me to discover it. you see how dark it is. the creatures living here would have no use for eyesight, so they gradually became blind. we can only keep the organs of our body in good condition by using them." it was no wonder the children enjoyed the day with their father, as he always had so much of interest to tell them. this evening, as they sat on the balcony, maria was talking about the fish that lived in darkness, when ramon suddenly exclaimed: "look! look! the garden is fairly alive with lights. the cucujos are giving us a display of fireworks. let's catch them, and have some fun. except in the rainy season, it is not often that we see so many." he ran into the house for a candle, and the three children were soon chasing the cucujos along the walks. the light of the candle attracted the insects, then it was an easy matter to catch hundreds of them in a fine thread net. we should call them fireflies, but they are much larger and more brilliant than any insect we have ever seen. as they floated along above the flowers, maria said they always made her think of fairies with their torch-bearers. the light was soft and cloud-like, yet it was bright enough to show the colours of the flowers, although the night was quite dark. "why not make a belt of them for your waists, as well as necklaces and bracelets?" ramon asked his sisters. "then you can go in and show yourselves to mother. you can tell her you are all ready for a party." "all right," answered the girls. "but you must help us, ramon." how could the children do such things without hurting the beautiful little creatures, we wonder. but they knew a way, as they had done them before. each cucujo has a tiny hook near its head, which can be fastened in a person's clothing without harming it in the least. grown-up ladies in havana often adorn themselves in this way when going to a party. they look very brilliant, i assure you. it was not many minutes before maria and isabella were fairly ablaze with lights. then they danced into the house to be admired by their parents. "now let's take them off and put them in those wicker cages you made last summer, ramon," said isabella. "i'm sure the poor little things are tired of hanging from our clothes. they must wish to fly around once more. they will not mind being shut up in the cages for a day or two, if we give them plenty of sugar to eat." "all right, but i wouldn't keep them shut up long enough to make pets of them," said her brother. "i cannot help believing they would rather be free." as he said these words, there was a step on the garden walk, and a moment later a strange man stood in front of the children. "is your father at home?" he asked. "i have a message for him." ramon hurried into the house. señor diaz came out and spoke with the stranger in low tones. when he went back into the sitting-room he carried in his hand a piece of paper that looked perfectly blank. the stranger had disappeared again into the darkness. "what did the children's good father do with that paper?" you ask. he went quickly to his desk and put it under lock and key. nothing could be done with it till the morning sun should light up the eastern sky. "then what?" you curiously ask again. if we could have watched señor diaz, we should have seen him go to his desk once more, take out the precious paper, and go over it with a hair pencil dipped in a bottle of colorless liquid. after that, we should have seen maria running with the paper to the window, where the sun's rays would dry it quickly. lo and behold! writing began to appear which threw the whole family into a great state of excitement. these were the words: "the u. s. warship _maine_ has been blown up. the americans are roused. they believe without doubt that the spaniards are the doers of the terrible deed. victory shall be ours at last, for the united states will now surely take our part against spain." there was no signature to the letter. that very night maria's household were wakened by a brilliant light pouring into their windows. it came from the burning plantation where lucia had her home. when morning dawned there was no trace of a building left on the whole place. no person was injured, however, but lucia and her parents went to friends in havana. the rich planter had become a poor man in a single night. who had set the fire? it was probably the insurgents, who had discovered that the planter was a friend of the spaniards and was secretly working against the freedom of cuba. chapter ix. first years in the new world. "papa dear," said maria, one evening not long after this, "why did our people ever leave spain and come here to make a home for themselves? of course, they had heard what a beautiful island it is, but was that the only reason?" "they had indeed heard this, my child, but they also believed they could become rich by raising sugar-cane or tobacco. great fortunes were made in the old days on the plantations here. my own grandfather was a very wealthy man. "but you know the story of cuba since then. the heavy taxes and the cruel laws of spain caused my relatives, as well as thousands of other families, to lose their fortunes. we have tried to free ourselves many times but have not succeeded yet." "well, don't be sad, papa dear; the good time is coming quickly now, you know. we have not had as hard a time as the poor savages columbus found here, anyway. how i do pity them!" said maria, with her eyes full of tears. "yes, they had a sad time of it indeed," her father went on. "they thought at first the white men were angels and the boats they sailed in were beautiful birds that had brought the visitors straight from heaven. but they soon changed their minds. "columbus was greatly excited when he looked upon the plants and trees so different from any he had ever seen. he said: 'i will call this place the "pearl of the antilles,"' and so it has been called to this day. he also wrote of it, 'it is as much more grand and beautiful than any other land as the day is brighter than the night.' "i suppose you know, maria, that columbus visited cuba four times, and yet he never discovered that it was an island." "i wish you would tell me more about the savages he found here," maria said. "of course, i know there is not a trace of them left in the land. their hard work in the mines and the cruel treatment of the spaniards soon killed them off. oh, it is a wicked, wicked shame!" "their skins were bronze in colour, like the indians of north america; but they did not know where their own people came from. once they were asked this question by one of the white strangers. they only answered by pointing their hands upward. it was as much as to say, 'from heaven!' "the women had long and beautiful hair, but the men had no beards whatever. they painted their bodies with the red earth so common on the island, and adorned their heads with the feathers of brilliant birds. "they lived mostly in the open air, and slept in hammocks under the trees. they made their hammocks out of the wild cotton you have seen growing in the fields. the women spun and wove this into the only cloth they ever used. "they had no gardens. they had no need to plough and plant, for nature gave them all they needed. there were many fruits growing wild then, as now. they picked the delicious mangoes, bananas, and custard-apples which were so plentiful. they gathered the yams and maize which also grew wild all over the island. what more could they wish?" "i should think they would have liked a little meat once in awhile," said maria, who had been very much interested in everything her father said. [illustration: "'it is like a big lizard'"] "certainly," he replied, "these savages liked hunting, and often brought home game to be roasted. they were very fond of the meat of the iguana. you have often seen this reptile, maria." "oh, i know," she replied; "ramon shot one only the other day. it is like a big lizard." "yes, that is true. the indians also hunted the voiceless dog, as we sometimes call the creature even now. i hardly know why the spaniards gave it such a name. it is more like a rabbit than any other animal. there were great numbers on the island in the old times." "you said the indians slept mostly in hammocks," said maria. "didn't they have any houses?" "oh, yes, but they stayed in them very little, except during the rains. they built them of wood and palm leaves. they were clustered together in villages. sometimes there were two or three hundred houses in one settlement, while several families used one house in common." "how did they defend themselves?" maria asked, as her father stopped speaking. "they had lances pointed with sea shells, and wooden swords," he replied. "these were more for show than for use, for you know they were a sober, peaceful people. such weapons would have been of little use if they had tried to fight with the spaniards. the easiest thing would have been for them to leave the island and seek a new home. but they were not wise enough for that, although they had large canoes in which they might have travelled to some distance. they dug them out of the trunks of trees. some of them were large enough to hold fifty men. their oars were well shaped, but they used them only as paddles. they had no row-locks. "they were a happy people, although quiet and serious in most of their ways. they used to dance and sing at their merry-makings, and their music was quite sweet." "papa dear, if you are not too tired, won't you tell me again about the great spaniard who was entertained by the indians? it was before they learned to fear the white strangers, and they still believed they were friends." "let me see, little daughter. oh, yes, now i know whom you mean. i told you that story long ago. i am surprised you should remember it. "it was bartholomew columbus, who was sent to act as governor during the admiral's absence. he passed from one place to another on the island to collect tribute from the chiefs. these chiefs had already learned how eager the spaniards were for gold; so they gave it to the governor freely and cheerfully. that is, of course, those who had it. but if they could not give this they presented the white man with quantities of the wild cotton. "there was one chief who prepared a grand entertainment in honour of his visitors. a procession of women came out to meet them, each one bearing a branch of the palm-tree. this was a sign of submission. after the women, came a train of young girls with their long hair hanging over their graceful shoulders. "a great feast was spread in the chief's palace and the visitors were entertained with music and dancing. when night came, a cotton hammock was given to each to sleep in. "for four days the feasting and games and dancing were kept up. then the visitors were loaded with presents and their dark-coloured hosts kept them company for quite a distance as they journeyed onward to the next stopping-place. "could any people do more to show themselves friendly than these poor, gentle savages? ah! how sadly they were repaid for their trust in the white men! "but come, we have thought enough about the past. let us return to the present and the great things that are daily happening around us." chapter x. the merrimac. every day now was full of excitement for the diaz family. letters were often brought to the house by some secret messenger. each time they told of some new and surprising event. the insurgents were braver than ever before. they dared more because they knew of the good friends coming to help them. yes, the united states was getting troops ready to meet the spaniards on cuban soil. and our great war-ships were gathering also. they, too, were coming to help cuba. the great battle-ship _oregon_ was speeding through two oceans that she, also, might take part. the eyes of the whole world were watching her voyage, and millions of people were praying for her safety. how we love the _oregon_ to-day and the brave captain and sailors who brought her safely through her long journey! one little american boy, only nine years old, felt so sorry for the suffering children of cuba that he wrote these words: "war, war, war on spain, who blew up our beautiful, beautiful _maine_. think of the poor little cuban dears, think of their hardships, their sorrows, their tears, who die every day for the want of some food; wouldn't you be in a fighting mood? then hurrah! for the soldiers who nobly do fight in the cause of the weak and for nature's great right." this is not very good poetry, but it shows the deep feeling of our children for their little cuban cousins. maria, in her pretty little home under the palm-trees, was spared, yet, as she and we knew, there were thousands of children no older than herself who suffered and died before cuba was free. our little cousin was delighted when she knew that the american fleet was actually close to the shores of her land. but the spanish war-vessels were here too. they were lying in the harbour of santiago. it was at the other end of the island, but news passed from one to another very quickly among the insurgents. ramon drew pictures of the two fleets as he imagined they looked. he made new pictures every day. how he longed to see them with his own eyes! i really fear that he would have run away from home and joined the army at this exciting time, if he had not loved his parents so dearly. why did the spanish fleet stay in the harbour of santiago? why did they not go out and meet the american war-ships? were they afraid? it certainly seemed so. they believed they were in a very safe place. there was only a narrow entrance to the harbour. it was defended at each side of this opening, for on the left were new batteries which had lately been set up, and on the right was the grand old morro castle which had stood there for hundreds of years. in the olden times it had defended cuba against her enemies more than once. "morro" means hill, and the fortress at santiago was well named, for it is built on a rocky promontory several hundred feet high, at the junction of the open sea and the san juan river. mines were sunk in the narrow entrance to the harbour so that, if the american ships should dare to enter, they would explode these mines and be destroyed like the _maine_. it was no wonder the spanish admiral thought they were safe in staying where they were. then it happened that a young american thought of a plan by which the spaniards might be caught in a trap. his name was lieutenant hobson. it was a very daring plan, but he was a wonderfully brave man. he said to admiral sampson, who commanded the american fleet: "let me take the _merrimac_. it is a coaling vessel and very heavy. it has six hundred tons of coal on board. we can place torpedoes in different parts of the ship. a few men can help me sail her into the channel. when the narrowest part is reached we will fire off the torpedoes and escape from her before she sinks. that is, we will do so if we can. but the _merrimac_ will be across the narrow channel and the spanish ships cannot get out. our own ships will then be free to attack another part of the island. the spanish seamen will have to remain where they are till they are glad to surrender." admiral sampson had thought of many plans, but he liked this one of lieutenant hobson's best of all. but who should be chosen to go with the brave man on this dangerous errand? chosen! why, there were hundreds who asked to share his danger, and only six could go with him. you would have thought it was some great festival they longed to take part in, if you could have seen how disappointed the men were, who had begged to go and were refused. but no, it was a fight with death. to begin with, the _merrimac_ must pass the batteries and morro castle. she and those on board might easily be destroyed before she reached the place where the work was to be done. and then, when her own torpedoes should be fired off, how could hobson and his men expect to escape from the sinking ship? but they were risking their lives in the cause of those who needed their help. you and i know now that they were brought safely through all the dangers which surrounded them. the _merrimac_ passed the guns of the morro unharmed, for the spaniards were poor marksmen. she reached the narrow channel where hobson meant to do his great work. but a shot from the batteries knocked away her rudder, so they could not steer her across the narrow channel. then a great mine exploded under her and tore a big hole in her side. she began to sink. hobson and his men lay flat upon the deck. shells and bullets came whizzing about them. they dared not rise, even though the ship was breaking apart as the shells crashed through her sides. at length the _merrimac_ had sunk so low that the water was up to her deck. a raft floated close to the men. it was one they had brought with them to help in escaping. they caught hold of the edges and kept their heads above water. just then a spanish launch drew near. the men on board were about to fire when hobson cried out and asked if an officer were in the boat, as he wished to surrender. admiral cervera, the commander of the spanish fleet, had himself sent the boat. he ordered the firing to cease and accepted hobson and his men as prisoners of war. when the news of hobson's brave deed reached maria, she could think of nothing else for days afterward. she would picture him in his cell at morro castle, looking out to sea where the american fleet were still cruising. "how proud of him they must all be!" she cried to ramon. "they can't be any prouder of him than we are to have such friends as he," the boy replied. "why, he will be looked upon now as one of the greatest heroes the world ever knew. i shall always be proud of morro castle because of his having been confined there. "you know, we went all over the place when we were little, maria. i believe he is kept prisoner in that part of the castle which is built over the water cave. you know we heard that he can look far out on the sea from his windows. "think of the dungeons underneath, where people were locked up years ago. we peeked into one of them that day we visited the fortress and i remember how dark and damp they were. i do hope hobson is treated well and won't have to stay at morro very long." chapter xi. victory. it was only a few mornings after the news of hobson's brave venture. the children were out in the garden, where ramon had discovered a chameleon on a grass plot. it was a sunny day, so perhaps that was the reason the chameleon's skin was such a bright green. "you know how gray they look on dull days," said ramon. "perhaps if i should put him on the branch of that tree, now, he would change to a brownish tint, to look as much as possible like it. he's a stupid little thing, though. if he does change colour, i don't believe he knows it himself. mother nature takes care of him, you know, and makes him change as a kind of protection. he has no way of defending himself, but if he is of the same colour as the substance around him, it is hard for his enemies to find him. "oh, dear! it makes me laugh when i think of a battle i once saw between two chameleons. they stood facing each other. their small eyes glared as they slowly opened and shut their jaws like pairs of scissors. they moved about once a minute. i did not have time to see which won the battle; it took too long a time for them to do anything." as the children stood watching the lizard they heard the sound of hoofs down the road. then there was a cloud of dust as a horseman came riding rapidly along. he turned in at the driveway. "what news? what news?" cried ramon, who rushed to meet him. it was an old friend of the family who had given secret help to the cuban soldiers throughout their struggle for freedom. "of course, you knew the american troops had landed, didn't you? well, run in and ask your father to come out. i can only stop a moment and i have much to tell him." the gentleman had hardly stopped speaking before señor diaz appeared on the veranda. he was told about the position of the americans not far from santiago. they had met general garcia, the brave leader of the insurgents. the cuban and american armies were now working together. battles had already been fought with the common enemy. but that which interested the children most was the story of the rough riders and their daring charges at el caney and san juan hill. many of these rough riders were men who had led a wild life on the plains in america. some of them had no book-learning; they were not what one usually calls "gentlemen;" but they were great horsemen and brave soldiers. they feared nothing in the world. they were commanded by colonel wood, and had been recruited by lieutenant-colonel roosevelt, who had been out on the plains among them when a young man. he admired their spirit and was glad to be their commander now. he knew their ways. he led them up the san juan heights when the enemy was protected by forts and shooting right and left at the americans. but the rough riders charged onward with great courage and gained the summit. they took possession of the blockhouse at the top, and killed most of the spaniards and drove the rest away. it was a glorious fight and a glorious victory. "a few more deeds like that, and war and trouble will be ended for us," said the gentleman as he rode away to carry the good news to others. "hurrah for lawton and roosevelt!" shouted ramon as he danced about the garden. "santiago will soon be out of the hands of the spaniards, and they will be clearing out of cuba altogether. it seems as though i could not rest without shaking hands with our american friends." the dear boy did not have long to wait, for the very next day came the news that the spanish fleet had been destroyed. it had tried to escape out of the harbour, but had been discovered by the watchful yankees. in a few hours all of spain's war-ships had been sunk or driven ashore. what was now left for cuba's tyrants? the battle-ships of the great republic were ranged along her shores unharmed and strong as ever. the spanish troops were shut up in the city without hope of escape. surrender was the only thing possible to ward off great loss of life on both sides. the spanish commander made a formal surrender to general shafter, and spain's empire in the west indies came to an end almost on the very spot where it had begun four hundred years before. and now the mines were taken out of the harbour and our battle-ships could enter in safety. as our vessels glided inside one after another they made a wonderful picture. the harbour seemed alive with boats, and it looked like a floating city. still grander was the sight on land when thousands gathered around the governor's beautiful palace at havana to see the stars and stripes of america unfurled. as the flag spread its folds to the breeze, the band struck up the air we love so well. it was the "star spangled banner." boom! boom! went the cannon, and thousands of american and cuban hearts were filled with joy. "victory! victory!" shouted ramon, when the good news reached him that night. and "victory!" cried little isabella, who added with all her childish might, "long live cuba." even the parrot echoed the words of the children. he seemed to feel that something very great must have happened, for his voice was shriller than usual. in fact, the family could have no peace in the house, even if there were peace all over cuba, till master poll's cage had been covered with a thick, dark cloth, and he was made to believe that night had suddenly fallen upon his home. chapter xii. havana. "children, would you like to go to havana and visit our good friend señor alvarez for a week? he has invited us all to come and talk over the good fortune that has come to our land. you can have a good time seeing the sights." of course the children were delighted at their father's words; so it came to pass that maria found herself, a day or two afterward, in a beautiful home in the very heart of the great city. it was a grand house to her childish eyes. it was all of stone, covered with a yellowish stucco. it was at least a hundred years old, she was told. it was built around the four sides of an open square, and had no piazzas on the outside like her own home. but the court inside was very beautiful. a fountain played here all day long, and there were blossoming plants standing in pots on the marble floor. the family spent much of their time on the verandas in this court. it was far pleasanter than inside the house, where the windows were so heavily barred that they made one not used to the custom feel almost as if he were in a prison. the doors of the house were bullet-proof to make it safe against attack. there was but one entrance to the house, and that led directly into the court. here the family carriage always stood unless it was in use. the gentleman who lived here had one son, a little older than ramon. he showed the children all around the city. as they went from place to place, he told them how hard his father had worked to raise money for the cuban soldiers. his mother sold all her jewels, that she might help, too. but they had to do this secretly, of course. if the spaniards had discovered it, they might have lost their lives. this boy's name was blanco. he was a fine, manly fellow, and was looking forward now to coming to america. "i shall go to harvard college," he told maria. "i wish to be a minister, but i'm afraid if i do become one, i shall not feel like praying for the spaniards." the boy's heart was still bitter, but perhaps he will feel more kindly when he grows older. one day he took his young friends out to morro castle. havana has a hill fortress of that name, as well as santiago. although hobson and his men had never been imprisoned in this one, yet the diaz children were glad to see it. it stood on a rocky point reaching into the sea. the great guns were still pointing out between the masses of yellow stone. but they were silent. the american flag was waving and peace ruled in the land, although soldiers were on guard here and all through the city. [illustration: "the american flag was waving and peace ruled in the land"] at the far end of the fortress was a tall lighthouse. it stood like a sentinel to stand watch against possible danger. once upon a time a wall reached from the great fort in both directions around the city of havana. but now there was scarcely a trace of it left. "how narrow and dirty the streets are," said maria as they left the morro. "i must say i would rather live in the country, if i could choose for myself." "it doesn't matter so much about the width of the streets," said blanco, "or the poor sidewalks, either. because, you know, we almost always ride. the working people are the ones who walk. but i do not like the dirt. that is all the fault of the spaniards. they taxed us enough, but they kept the money for themselves. "last summer i was very sick with yellow fever. mother thought i would not get well. she said she believed we had so much of this dreadful disease because the city is allowed to be so unclean. "but look quickly at that punch and judy show! let's stop and watch it. there is a man playing the harp to make it more entertaining." the children leaned out of the carriage to see the show. isabella had never seen punch and judy before, and she was greatly delighted. in a few minutes they moved on, but soon stopped again, for here stood a man turning a hand-organ with a monkey beside him dressed in a most ridiculous little suit of clothes. the monkey was dancing to the music. suddenly he gave a spring and landed in the carriage right in maria's lap. off came the monkey's cap into his little hands, and with the most solemn look it was held up to each of the children in turn. "take that, you poor little beggar," said ramon as he put a silver coin into the cap. down jumped the monkey and off he scampered to his master. there were many odd sights for the little country cousins. among them were chinese peddlers showing the pretty ornaments which had been brought across the ocean. once the children passed a cow that was being led home after her morning's work. she had gone with her master from house to house, stopping long enough at each place for her to give as much milk as the people wished. the cow was followed by a man leading a long train of mules. they were laden with empty baskets. they, too, were going home, as they had left their loads at the markets in the city. the sun was quite hot and the party hurried home to rest during the noon hours, for, of course, every one took a nap at this time of the day. they might not all lie down; perhaps some of those who had stores in the busy part of the city would not leave their places of business; they might only lean back and doze in their chairs; but they would certainly keep quiet and close their eyes, if nothing more. it made one think of the story of the "sleeping beauty" to see havana at twelve o'clock, noon, in the summer season. as for maria, the dainty maiden quite enjoyed her rest at the great city house. she could lie very comfortably in a hammock while a little negro girl kept off the flies and mosquitoes with a big fan. she needed the nap in the city more than at home because she was awakened so early by the bells. perhaps the children enjoyed sunday more than any other day during their stay in the city, for it was then that they visited the cathedral containing the tomb of columbus. there were many churches and grand buildings in havana, but none could interest the children like this. it was not very far from the house, but they all went in the carriage, carrying with them the mats to kneel on during the service. it was a grand old stone building, overgrown with moss. there were many bells in the two high towers. they were pealing loudly as the party drove up. "just think how old it is," whispered maria to her brother as they entered the building. "blanco says that some of the bells were brought from spain more than two hundred years ago. do look at the beautiful marble pillars, isabella. isn't it a grand place?" it was not yet time for the service to begin, so blanco led the children to the tomb of columbus, where his ashes had rested for so many years. it was at the right of the high altar. all that could be seen was a marble tablet about seven feet square. above it stood a bust of the great discoverer. "they say that spain has asked the right to have the ashes, and america is going to let her take them. but we shall still have the tomb and the grand old cathedral where they have rested so long," said blanco. "now come and admire the altar." it stood on pillars of porphyry and was fairly covered with candlesticks, images, and gaudy decorations. somehow they did not go well with the simple beauty of the rest of the church. but the children admired it, for they were ready to admire everything. when the service was over, they drove out by the governor-general's palace. it was his no longer, however. the american general who had charge of the city lived here now. no doubt he enjoyed the beautiful gardens and ponds. he was very active in improving the city. yes, the work had already begun, and in a few months maria would no longer be able to complain of the dirt in havana. she could say again, but with a different thought in her busy little mind, "to-morrow is another day." yes, although it is but a short time since maria's visit to havana, even now everything is changed in the diaz family. the good father no longer worries; he is fast getting to be a strong, healthy man. he has a fine position under the new government, and maria lives in a new home just outside the city of havana. she is rapidly learning to speak english, while one of her dearest friends is a little american girl who has lately made her home in cuba. the end. the little cousin series by mary hazelton wade first series these are the most interesting and delightful accounts possible of child-life in other lands, filled with quaint sayings, doings, and adventures. the "little japanese cousin," with her toys in her wide sleeve and her tiny bag of paper handkerchiefs; the "little brown cousin," in whose home the leaves of the breadfruit-tree serve for plates and the halves of the cocoanut shells for cups; the "little indian cousin," who lives the free life of the forest, and the "little russian cousin," who dwells by the wintry neva, are truly fascinating characters to the little cousins who will read about them. four volumes, as follows: =our little japanese cousin= =our little brown cousin= =our little indian cousin= =our little russian cousin= each 1 vol., 12mo, cloth decorative, with 6 full-page illustrations in tints, by l. j. bridgman. price, per volume $0.50 _net_ (postage extra) price, per set, 4 vols., _boxed_ 2.00 _net_ (postage extra) "juveniles will get a whole world of pleasure and instruction out of mary hazelton wade's little cousin series.... pleasing narratives give pictures of the little folk in the far-away lands in their duties and pleasures, showing their odd ways of playing, studying, their queer homes, clothes, and playthings.... the style of the stories is all that can be desired for entertainment, the author describing things in a very real and delightful fashion."--_detroit news-tribune._ the little cousin series by mary hazelton wade second series the great success and prompt appreciation which this charming little series met last season has led to its continuation this year with a new set of child characters from other lands, each as original and delightful as the little foreign cousins with whom the little cousins at home became acquainted in last season's series. six volumes, as follows: =our little cuban cousin= =our little hawaiian cousin= =our little eskimo cousin= =our little philippine cousin= =our little porto rican cousin= =our little african cousin= each 1 vol., 12mo, cloth decorative, with 6 full-page illustrations in tints by l. j. bridgman. price, per volume $0.50 _net_ (postage extra) price, per set, 6 vols., boxed 3.00 _net_ (postage extra) "boys and girls, reading the tales of these little cousins in different parts of the world, will gain considerable knowledge of geography and the queer customs that are followed among strange people."--_chicago evening post._ "not only are the books interesting, but they are entertainingly instructive as well, and when entertainment can sugar-coat instruction, the book is one usually well worth placing in the hands of those to whom the knowledge will be useful."--_utica observer._ "to many youthful minds this little series of books may open up the possibilities of a foreign world to which they had been total strangers. and interest in this wider sphere, the beyond and awayness, may bear rich fruit in the future."--_n. y. commercial advertiser._ cosy corner series it is the intention of the publishers that this series shall contain only the very highest and purest literature,--stories that shall not only appeal to the children themselves, but be appreciated by all those who feel with them in their joys and sorrows,--stories that shall be most particularly adapted for reading aloud in the family circle. the numerous illustrations in each book are by well-known artists, and each volume has a separate attractive cover design. each, 1 vol., 16mo, cloth $0.50 _by annie fellows johnston_ =the little colonel.= the scene of this story is laid in kentucky. its heroine is a small girl, who is known as the little colonel, on account of her fancied resemblance to an old-school southern gentleman, whose fine estate and old family are famous in the region. this old colonel proves to be the grandfather of the child. =the giant scissors.= this is the story of joyce and of her adventures in france,--the wonderful house with the gate of the giant scissors, jules, her little playmate, sister denisa, the cruel brossard, and her dear aunt kate. joyce is a great friend of the little colonel, and in later volumes shares with her the delightful experiences of the "house party" and the "holidays." =two little knights of kentucky=, who were the little colonel's neighbors. in this volume the little colonel returns to us like an old friend, but with added grace and charm. she is not, however, the central figure of the story, that place being taken by the "two little knights," malcolm and keith, little southern aristocrats, whose chivalrous natures lead them through a series of interesting adventures. =cicely and other stories for girls.= the readers of mrs. johnston's charming juveniles will be glad to learn of the issue of this volume for young people, written in the author's sympathetic and entertaining manner. =big brother.= a story of two boys. the devotion and care of steven, himself a small boy, for his baby brother, is the theme of the simple tale, the pathos and beauty of which has appealed to so many thousands. =ole mammy's torment.= "ole mammy's torment" has been fitly called "a classic of southern life." it relates the haps and mishaps of a small negro lad, and tells how he was led by love and kindness to a knowledge of the right. =the story of dago.= in this story mrs. johnston relates the story of dago, a pet monkey, owned jointly by two brothers. dago tells his own story, and the account of his haps and mishaps is both interesting and amusing. _by edith robinson_ =a little puritan's first christmas:= a story of colonial times in boston. a story of colonial times in boston, telling how christmas was invented by betty sewall, a typical child of the puritans, aided by her "unregenerate" brother, sam. =a little daughter of liberty.= the author's motive for this story is well indicated by a quotation from her introduction, as follows: "one ride is memorable in the early history of the american revolution, the well-known ride of paul revere. equally deserving of commendation is another ride,--untold in verse or story, its records preserved only in family papers or shadowy legend, the ride of anthony severn was no less historic in its action or memorable in its consequences." =a loyal little maid.= a delightful and interesting story of revolutionary days, in which the child heroine, betsey schuyler, renders important services to george washington and alexander hamilton, and in the end becomes the wife of the latter. =a little puritan rebel.= like miss robinson's successful story of "a loyal little maid," this is another historical tale of a real girl, during the time when the gallant sir harry vane was governor of massachusetts. =a little puritan pioneer.= the scene of this story is laid in the puritan settlement at charlestown. the little girl heroine adds another to the list of favorites so well known to the young people in "a little puritan rebel," etc. _by ouida (louise de la ramée)_ =a dog of flanders:= a christmas story. too well and favorably known to require description. =the nürnberg stove.= this beautiful story has never before been published at a popular price. =a provence rose.= a story perfect in sweetness and in grace. =findelkind.= a charming story about a little swiss herdsman. _by miss mulock_ =the little lame prince.= a delightful story of a little boy who has many adventures by means of the magic gifts of his fairy godmother. =adventures of a brownie.= the story of a household elf who torments the cook and gardener, but is a constant joy and delight to the children who love and trust him. =his little mother.= miss mulock's short stories for children are a constant source of delight to them, and "his little mother," in this new and attractive dress, will be welcomed by hosts of youthful readers. =little sunshine's holiday.= an attractive story of a summer outing. "little sunshine" is another of those beautiful child-characters for which miss mulock is so justly famous. _by juliana horatia ewing_ =jackanapes.= a new edition, with new illustrations, of this exquisite and touching story, dear alike to young and old. =story of a short life.= this beautiful and pathetic story will never grow old. it is a part of the world's literature, and will never die. =a great emergency.= how a family of children prepared for a great emergency, and how they acted when the emergency came. =the trinity flower.= in this little volume are collected three of mrs. ewing's best short stories for the young people. =madam liberality.= from her cradle up madam liberality found her chief delight in giving. _by frances margaret fox_ =the little giant's neighbors.= a charming nature story of a "little giant" whose neighbors were the creatures of the field and garden. =farmer brown and the birds.= a little story which teaches children that the birds are man's best friends. miss fox has an intimate knowledge of bird life and has written a little book which should take rank with "black beauty" and "beautiful joe." =betty of old mackinaw.= a charming story of child-life, appealing especially to the little readers who like stories of "real people." _by will allen dromgoole_ =the farrier's dog and his fellow.= this story, written by the gifted young southern woman, will appeal to all that is best in the natures of the many admirers of her graceful and piquant style. =the fortunes of the fellow.= those who read and enjoyed the pathos and charm of "the farrier's dog and his fellow" will welcome the further account of the "adventures of baydaw and the fellow" at the home of the kindly smith among the green hills of tennessee. _by frances hodges white_ =helena's wonderworld.= a delightful tale of the adventures of a little girl in the mysterious regions beneath the sea. =aunt nabby's children.= this pretty little story, touched with the simple humor of country life, tells of two children, who, adopted by aunt nabby, have also won their way into the affections of the village squire. _by charles lee sleight_ =the prince of the pin elves.= a fascinating story of the underground adventures of a sturdy, reliant american boy among the elves and gnomes. =the water people.= a companion volume and in a way a sequel to "the prince of the pin elves," relating the adventures of "harry" among the "water people." while it has the same characters as the previous book, the story is complete in itself. _by other authors_ =the story of rosy dawn.= by pauline bradford mackie. the christmas of little wong jan, or "rosy dawn," a young celestial of san francisco, is the theme of this pleasant little story. =susanne.= by frances j. delano. this little story will recall in sweetness and appealing charm the work of kate douglas wiggin and laura e. richards. =millicent in dreamland.= by edna s. brainerd. the quaintness and fantastic character of millicent's adventures in dreamland have much of the fascination of "alice in wonderland," and all small readers of "alice" will enjoy making millicent's acquaintance. =jerry's adventures.= by evelyn snead barnett. this is an interesting and wholesome little story of the change that came over the thoughtless imps on jefferson square when they learned to know the stout-hearted jerry and his faithful peggy. =a bad penny.= by john t. wheelwright. no boy should omit reading this vivid story of the new england of 1812. =gatty and i.= by frances e. crompton. the small hero and heroine of this little story are twins, "strictly brought up." it is a sweet and wholesome little story. =the fairy of the rhône.= by a. comyns carr. here is a fairy story indeed, one of old-fashioned pure delight. it is most gracefully told, and accompanied by charming illustrations. =a small small child.= by e. livingston prescott. "a small small child" is a moving little tale of sweet influence, more powerful than threats or punishments, upon a rowdy of the barracks. =peggy's trial.= by mary knight potter. peggy is an impulsive little woman of ten, whose rebellion from a mistaken notion of loyalty, and her subsequent reconciliation to the dreaded "new mother," are most interestingly told. =for his country.= by marshall saunders, author of "beautiful joe," etc. a sweet and graceful story of a little boy who loved his country; written with that charm which has endeared miss saunders to hosts of readers. =la belle nivernaise.= the story of an old boat and her crew. by alphonse daudet. all who have read it will be glad to welcome an old favorite, and new readers will be happy to have it brought to their friendly attention. =wee dorothy.= by laura updegraff. a story of two orphan children, the tender devotion of the eldest, a boy, for his sister being its theme and setting. with a bit of sadness at the beginning, the story is otherwise bright and sunny, and altogether wholesome in every way. =rab and his friends.= by dr. john brown. doctor brown's little masterpiece is too well known to need description. the dog rab is loved by all. =the adventures of beatrice and jessie.= by richard mansfield. the story of two little girls who were suddenly transplanted into the "realms of unreality," where they met with many curious and amusing adventures. =a child's garden of verses.= by r. l. stevenson. mr. stevenson's little volume is too well known to need description. it will be heartily welcomed in this new and attractive edition. =little king davie.= by nellie hellis. the story of a little crossing-sweeper, that will make many boys thankful they are not in the same position. davie's accident, hospital experiences, conversion, and subsequent life, are of thrilling interest. =the sleeping beauty.= a modern version. by martha b. dunn. this charming story of a little fishermaid of maine, intellectually "asleep" until she meets the "fairy prince," reminds us of "ouida" at her best. =the young archer.= by charles e. brimblecom. a strong and wholesome story of a boy who accompanied columbus on his voyage to the new world. his loyalty and services through vicissitudes and dangers endeared him to the great discoverer, and the account of his exploits will be interesting to all boys. =the making of zimri bunker:= a tale of nantucket. by w. j. long, ph. d. this is a charming story of nantucket folk by a young clergyman who is already well known through his contributions to the _youth's companion_, _st. nicholas_, and other well-known magazines. the story deals with a sturdy american fisher lad, during the war of 1812. =the king of the golden river:= a legend of stiria. by john ruskin. written fifty years or more ago, and not originally intended for publication, this little fairy tale soon became known and made a place for itself. =little peterkin vandike.= by charles stuart pratt. the author's dedication furnishes a key to this charming story: "i dedicate this book, made for the amusement (and perchance instruction) of the boys who may read it, to the memory of one boy, who would have enjoyed as much as peterkin the plays of the poetry party, but who has now marched, as they will march one day, out of the ranks of boyhood into the ranks of young manhood." =will o' the mill.= by robert louis stevenson. an allegorical story by this inimitable and versatile writer. its rare poetic quality, its graceful and delicate fancy, its strange power and fascination, justify its separate publication. books for young people =the little colonel's house party.= by annie fellows johnston. illustrated by louis meynell. one vol., library 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.00 =the little colonel's holidays.= by annie fellows johnston. illustrated by l. j. bridgman. one vol., large 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.50 =the little colonel's hero.= by annie fellows johnston. one vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative, fully illustrated $1.20 _net_ (postage extra) in these three stories mrs. johnston once more introduces us to the "little colonel," the dainty maiden who has already figured as the heroine of two previous stories, "the little colonel" and "two little knights of kentucky," and who has won her way into the hearts of old and young alike. she is more winsome and lovable than ever. since the time of "little women," no juvenile heroine has been better beloved of her child readers than mrs. johnston's "little colonel." =a puritan knight errant.= by edith robinson, author of "a little puritan pioneer," "a little puritan's first christmas," "a little puritan rebel," etc. library 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated $1.20 _net_ (postage extra). the charm of style and historical value of miss robinson's previous stories of child life in puritan days have brought them wide popularity. her latest and most important book appeals to a large juvenile public. the "knight errant" of this story is a little don quixote, whose trials and their ultimate outcome will prove deeply interesting to their reader. =ye lyttle salem maide:= a story of witchcraft. by pauline bradford mackie. _new illustrated edition._ one volume, large 12mo, cloth, gilt top $1.50 a tale of the days of the reign of superstition in new england, and of a brave "lyttle maide," of salem town, whose faith and hope and unyielding adherence to her word of honor form the basis of a most attractive story. a very convincing picture is drawn of puritan life during the latter part of the seventeenth century. =in kings' houses:= a tale of the days of queen anne. by julia c. r. dorr, author of "a cathedral pilgrimage," etc. _new illustrated edition._ one volume, large 12mo, cloth, gilt top $1.50 the story deals with one of the most romantic episodes in english history. queen anne, the last of the reigning stuarts, is described with a strong yet sympathetic touch, and the young duke of gloster, the "little lady," and the hero of the tale, robin sandys, are delightful characterizations. =gulliver's bird book.= being the newly discovered strange adventures of lemuel gulliver, now for the first time described and illustrated. by l. j. bridgman, author of "mother goose and her wild beast show," etc. with upwards of 100 illustrations in color, large quarto, cloth $1.50 this is a most amusing and original book, illustrated with startlingly odd and clever drawings. if we may accept the account given in the preface, that renowned explorer, lemuel gulliver, left behind him certain memoirs which have remained unknown to the public up to the present day. having now been brought to light and given to the world, these records establish beyond a doubt their author's claim to be regarded as the discoverer of the bouncing ballazoon and a host of other creatures unknown to darwin and huxley. ='tilda jane=. by marshall saunders, author of "beautiful joe," etc. one vol., 12mo, fully illustrated, cloth, decorative cover $1.50 "no more amusing and attractive child's story has appeared for a long time than this quaint and curious recital of the adventures of that pitiful and charming little runaway. "it is one of those exquisitely simple and truthful books that win and charm the reader, and i did not put it down until i had finished it--honest! and i am sure that every one, young or old, who reads will be proud and happy to make the acquaintance of the delicious waif. "i cannot think of any better book for children than this. i commend it unreservedly."--_cyrus townsend brady._ =miss gray's girls;= or, summer days in the scottish highlands. by jeannette a. grant. with about sixty illustrations in half-tone and pen and ink sketches of scottish scenery. one vol., large 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.00 a delightfully told story of a summer trip through scotland, somewhat out of the beaten track. a teacher, starting at glasgow, takes a lively party of girls, her pupils, through the trossachs to oban, through the caledonian canal to inverness, and as far north as brora, missing no part of the matchless scenery and no place of historic interest. returning through perth, stirling, edinburgh, melrose, and abbotsford, the enjoyment of the party and the interest of the reader never lag. =chums.= by maria louise pool. illustrated by l. j. bridgman. one vol., large 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.00 "chums" is a girls' book, about girls and for girls. it relates the adventures, in school and during vacation, of two friends. it is full of mingled fun and pathos, and carries the reader along swiftly to the climax, which is reached all too soon. =little bermuda.= by maria louise pool. illustrated by louis meynell. one vol., large 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.00 young people will follow eagerly the adventures of "little bermuda" from her home in the tropics to a fashionable american boarding-school. the resulting conflict between the two elements in her nature, the one inherited from her new england ancestry, and the other developed by her west indian surroundings, gave miss pool unusual opportunity for creating an original and fascinating heroine. =black beauty:= the autobiography of a horse. by anna sewell. _new illustrated edition._ with twenty-five full-page drawings by winifred austin. one vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative, gilt top $1.25 there have been many editions of this classic, but we confidently offer this one as the most appropriate and handsome yet produced. the illustrations are of special value and beauty. mr. austin is a lover of horses, and has delighted in tracing with his pen the beauty and grace of the noble animal. =feats on the fiord:= a tale of norwegian life. by harriet martineau. with about sixty original illustrations and a colored frontispiece. one vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative $1.00 this admirable book deserves to be brought to the attention of parents in search of wholesome reading for their children to-day. it is something more than a juvenile book, being really one of the most instructive books about norway and norwegian life and manners ever written. =timothy dole.= by juniata salsbury. with twenty-five illustrations. one vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative $1.00 the youthful hero starts from home, loses his way, meets with startling adventures, finds friends, kind and many, grows to be a manly man, and is able to devote himself to bettering the condition of the poor in the mining region of pennsylvania. =three children of galilee:= a life of christ for the young. by john gordon. beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred illustrations. one vol., library 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.00 there has long been a need for a life of christ for the young, for parents have recognized that their boys and girls want something more than a bible story, a dry statement of facts, and that, in order to hold the attention of the youthful readers, a book on this subject should have life and movement as well as scrupulous accuracy and religious sentiment. =three little crackers.= from down in dixie. by will allen dromgoole, author of "the farrier's dog," etc., with fifty text and full-page illustrations, by e. b. barry. one vol., library 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.00 a fascinating story for boys and girls, of a family of alabama children who move to florida and grow up in the south. =prince harold, a fairy story.= by l. f. brown. with 60 full-page illustrations by vitry. one vol., large 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.50 a delightful fairy tale for children, dealing with the life of a young prince, who, aided by the moon spirit, discovers, after many adventures, a beautiful girl whom he makes his princess. =the fairy folk of blue hill:= a story of folk-lore. by lily f. wesselhoeft, author of "sparrow the tramp," etc., with fifty-five illustrations from original drawings by alfred c. eastman. one vol., library 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.00 a new volume by mrs. wesselhoeft, well known as one of our best writers for the young, and who has made a host of friends among the young people. =larry hudson's ambition.= by james otis, author of "toby tyler," etc. illustrated by eliot keen. one vol., library 12mo, cloth, decorative cover $1.25 james otis, who has delighted the juvenile public with so many popular stories, has written the story of the rise of the bootblack larry. larry is not only capable of holding his own and coming out with flying colors in the amusing adventures wherein he befriends the family of good deacon doak; he also has the signal ability to know what he wants and to understand that hard work is necessary to win. =the adventures of a boy reporter= in the philippines. by harry steele morrison, author of "a yankee boy's success." one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated $1.25 a true story of the courage and enterprise of an american lad. it is filled with healthy interest, and will tend to stimulate and encourage the proper ambition of the young reader. =the young pearl divers:= a story of australian adventure by land and by sea. by lieut. h. phelps whitmarsh, author of "the mysterious voyage of the _daphne_," etc. illustrated with twelve full-page half-tones by h. burgess. one vol., large 12mo, cloth decorative $1.00 this is a splendid story for boys, by an author who writes in vigorous and interesting language of scenes and adventures with which he is personally acquainted. =the voyage of the avenger:= in the days of the dashing drake. by henry st. john. with twenty-five full-page illustrations by paul hardy. one vol., tall 12mo, cloth decorative, gilt top $1.50 a book of adventure, the scene of which is laid in that stirring period of colonial extension when england's famous naval heroes encountered the ships of spain, both at home and in the west indies. [illustration: cover art] [illustration: title] [frontispiece: fort] [illustration: title page] a tale of the summer holidays by g. mockler thomas nelson and sons. 1899 [illustration: contents headpiece] contents i. the secret meeting ii. a friend in need iii. hal finds a friend iv. disappointed hopes v. the fort in the wilderness [illustration: contents tailpiece] [illustration: drusie with balls] illustrations "_jim scribbled the word 'yes' on his piece of paper._" "_jumbo began to wash his face and ears._" "_i suppose you will own that you really are out this time?_" "_the boy had thrown his lasso with deadly aim._" [illustration: "_jim scribbled the word 'yes' on his piece of paper._"] [illustration: chapter i headpiece] chapter i. the secret meeting. two days after the holidays began, the four younger members of the danvers family received a note summoning them to a secret meeting at half-past seven the next morning in the summer-house. drusie, who had written and delivered the notes, including one to herself, was the first to reach the appointed place; and when, a few minutes later, the other three arrived, they found her seated at the rustic table with a sheet of paper and a pencil before her, and a glass of water at her elbow. "good-morning," she said, rising and shaking hands with them all round. "helen, will you sit facing me, and jim and tommy at either side?" in a solemn silence they obeyed; and then seating herself again, she took a sip of water. not that she was thirsty, but she was rather nervous. it was so long since the last meeting, and hitherto hal had always been the chairman. she stifled a sigh; it seemed so strange to hold a secret meeting without him. "go ahead," said jim, encouragingly; "or would you like me to be chairman, drusie?" "certainly not," she replied hastily. "i am the eldest here, and of course i must be chairman. and you must be serious, jim, for we have got a lot to talk about this morning, and it won't do for hal to come out and find us here." "he is asleep and snoring," said helen, in a tone of great contempt. "he has learned a lot of silly things at school, and one of them is never to get up until he is called." "order, please," said drusie, rapping on the table. "you must not begin to discuss the subject until i have announced it." she rose, gulped down a few mouthfuls of water, and said: "ladies and gentlemen, we are met here this morning to discuss a question of paramount importance." she paused, partly for breath and partly to take note of the effect of her words. she was proud of that beginning, which she had learned from the report of a missionary meeting. she was pleased to observe that helen and tommy looked decidedly impressed, but jim was grinning. frowning at him, she resumed: "i may say that the matter affects us all very seriously, and it is one that ought to be taken up by the nation at large. but i regret to say that the people of england are only too apt to shirk their very obvious, their very obvious--" but at that point she stuck hopelessly fast. though she had carefully avoided glancing at jim, she had seen his face out of the corner of one eye, and the wide, fixed grin that ornamented it had put her out dreadfully. "oh, come," he said, striking in; "aren't you laying it on rather thick? even though hal has come back from school with so much side on that he does not know what to do with himself, i don't see that the nation at large is concerned." "no, of course not," drusie acknowledged; "but it said that in the paper, you know, and it seemed a nice beginning." "well, suppose we skip that part," said jim, "and get to the real business, which is of course about hal." "very well," said drusie, though she rather regretted her long sentences. "i called this meeting to talk about hal," she said, "and to ask what you all thought about the birthday. you know we have been busy making the ammunition to storm the fort with; but if he doesn't want to defend it, it won't be much good preparing any more cannon balls. of course, one of us could defend it; but a fight without hal wouldn't be any fun at all. at least, that is what i think; but what do you say?" this time drusie had been heard with as much attention as she could wish for. the matter really was a very serious one. in two days' time it would be the twins'--hal and drusie's--birthday; and ever since they had been big enough to throw straight, they had always celebrated this double birthday with a big battle, followed by a feast in the summer-house. hal had always defended the fort, while drusie led the attacking party; and this year they had expected to have a really splendid fight, for during the past fortnight they had spent all their spare time in making ammunition, and the supply of cannon balls was larger than ever before. but if hal was not going to take part in the fight, all these preparations would be thrown away. it was really very difficult to know what he would or would not do, for he was so altered by his one term at school that he hardly seemed like the same boy. he did not tease or bully them, but he simply took as little notice as possible, and spoke to them in a lofty, superior sort of way, as though he were a very grown-up person and they very little children. sometimes, however, he quite forgot to be dignified and condescending, and then drusie hoped he meant to take part in the birthday fight as usual. and the awkward part of it was that drusie could not ask him his intentions, as it was against their rules to say one word to him about the fight until the very day on which it was to take place. "i suppose," said helen, with a scornful little sniff, "he has grown too grand to fight. he would call it baby-play." "what about the feast?" asked jim. "weren't you going to say something about that too, drusie?" "oh yes," she said; and after she had drunk a little more water she rose to her feet again. the chairman was always supposed to finish the glass of water, and that was a part of her duties that drusie did not much relish when the meeting was held before breakfast. under pretence of moving it out of her way, jim drew the tumbler towards him, and when she was not looking he filled it up from a jug which he had hidden under the table the evening before. "the feast," she said earnestly, "is going to be a specially nice one. i am making all the wine myself, and i taste it ever so many times a day to see if it is still good. i won't tell you everything that is in it; but you can guess how lovely it will be when i say that it was made from apples, and pears, and prune juice, and sugar, and some tea that i saved from breakfast. there are lots of other things in it, too," she said, interrupting herself; "but that is a secret. the best of my wine is that it hasn't cost anything, and so we shall have more money to spend on other things. it is pocket-money day to-day, and it must all go towards the feast. my sixpence and yours, jim, and helen's and tommy's threepences make one and sixpence. that is a lot of money, and i am sure hal will give us his shilling." "i don't think he will," said jim, biting his lips to keep from laughing as he saw drusie look down with mingled surprise and dismay at her nearly full glass; "he is hard up. he borrowed a penny half-penny from me the other day, and hasn't paid it back yet; and he told me that he had got rather a big bill in the village." "well," drusie continued, after she had bravely gulped down some more water, "it doesn't matter very much if he doesn't give anything. we have plenty. and now we must vote." tearing the sheet of paper into four pieces, she passed them round the table. "if you want to go on preparing for the fight and the feast, you must each write 'yes;' if you don't want to go on, you must write 'no.'" then she sat down, feeling rather proud of the clear way in which she had spoken, and made another attempt to finish her glass of water. without the slightest hesitation jim scribbled the word "yes" on his piece of paper, and when tommy saw what jim had written he put "yes," too. helen took longer to make up her mind. she could not help thinking that if they went on with the preparations for the fight, and hal refused to have anything to do with it, they would look very silly. for at the bottom of her heart helen was rather impressed by the airs that hal gave himself, and would have liked very much to imitate them. but knowing well that the other three would vote for going on with the fight, she, too, wrote "yes," and put her folded slip with the others into the hat which jim passed round. the chairman opened them hastily. "they are all 'yeses,' so we must go on with the preparations just the same," she said, rising once more to address the meeting; "and if hal gives us his shilling after breakfast, it will mean that he is going to defend the fort. that is all, i think. i now declare this meeting ended." "hear, hear!" said jim. "but you must finish your water, drusie. we shan't think anything of you as a chairman if you leave a drop." "i keep on drinking all the time," said poor drusie, giving her tumbler, still nearly full, a glance of strong distaste. "perhaps you only sip it," said jim gravely. "shut your eyes, and take big mouthfuls. you _must_ finish it, you know." the sense of duty was strong in drusie, and so she shut her eyes and made one more heroic effort. the instant her eyes were closed, jim filled up her glass as she drank. he had hoped to make her finish the entire jugful, but he shook so with suppressed laughter that instead of pouring it into her glass he poured it on to her nose. "o jim!" she said reproachfully, as the truth burst upon her; "how much have i drunk?" "four tumblers full," he said triumphantly. "you make a splendid chairman, drusie." she couldn't help laughing, too, when she saw the nearly empty jug. she dried her face, scolded jim, and then forgave him in the same breath, for a sweeter-tempered child than drusie never lived. after that the meeting broke up, and a few minutes later the bell rang for breakfast. hal was already seated at the table when they reached the nursery. he was a nice-looking boy, taller than drusie by a couple of inches, and well grown for his years, which would be twelve on the following tuesday. "hallo!" he said, as they all trooped in; "what have you been up to? i know," he said, catching sight of the tumbler now really empty at last in drusie's hand. "a secret meeting. you might have asked me. what was it about?" [illustration: hal at table] drusie flushed up and looked guilty. she could not tell him that the meeting had been about himself. but just then helen interposed. "why, you wouldn't have cared to come," she said. "you said yesterday that secret meetings were baby things." so he had, but it nevertheless was a pity that helen reminded him of it just then. he had come down to breakfast that morning inclined to drop back into his old place among them, and his tone and manner were friendly and pleasant. but helen's speech rubbed him up the wrong way at once, and in an instant he became the lofty and contemptuous school-boy brother again. "and so they are baby things, miss helen," he said; "but it is rather amusing, you know, to watch babies at play. that is why i should have liked to be told of this important secret meeting in time." that that was not the reason drusie knew as well as he did. and he felt rather ashamed when he saw the hurt expression that came to her face. but helen really must be taught that there was a great difference between a little girl of eight who had never been away from home in her life and a boy of twelve who had been to school. but it was not always easy to snub helen. "you are silly, hal," she said. "just because you have been to school for one term, you fancy that you are too big to play with us. such nonsense." well, of course, that led to a sharp answer from hal. helen replied again, and a hot wrangle went on across the breakfast table. "come, come, master hal," said nurse at last--for though helen had certainly begun this quarrel, it was generally hal who had done so since he came home--"what would your father and mother say if they were at home and heard you? they would not think that you had been very kind to your brothers and sisters since you came back." "i wish they were at home," said hal, suddenly flaming out, "and then i should have my meals with them, instead of being shut up with all of you. i hate having my meals in the nursery. i am not a little boy any longer, and i don't see why i should." there was a moment's dead silence after this outburst, and all the others gazed wonderingly at hal. they were astonished that he should have dared to speak in that rebellious tone to nurse. she, however, looked neither surprised nor angry. "very well, master hal," she said; "if that is all your grievance, it is easily put to rights. you shall have your meals in the schoolroom, if you like. i can't let you have them in the dining-room, because it would make extra work, and the parlour-maid is away. but ann can easily carry in what i send you from here." [illustration: tommy] that was not at all what hal wanted. he was too proud, however, and also far too sulky, to say any more on the subject. he was glad when nurse rose and said grace, and he was at liberty to leave the nursery. "one minute, master hal," she said, as he was hurrying to the door; "have you forgotten that this is saturday and pocket-money day? wait while i get out my purse and pay you all." drusie watched him anxiously. would he remember the birthday feast, and hand her the shilling, or would he keep it himself? alas! jim had been right, and she wrong. he received the shilling with a muttered word of thanks, and slipping it into his pocket left the room. "i wonder," said tommy, in an awestruck, thoughtful voice, "what hal will do with a _whole_ shilling? will he spend it all at once, do you think?" [illustration: chapter i tailpiece] [illustration: chapter ii headpiece] chapter ii. a friend in need. though hal's crossness at breakfast had made drusie feel rather sad, it was impossible for her to unhappy for long on such a beautiful morning; and when helen suggested that they should take a few of the rabbits with them to the clover field she cheerfully agreed. "punch and judy and toby went with us last time," she said, "and they didn't behave very well, so we won't take them with us to-day. let's take jumbo." jumbo was the oldest of all the rabbits, and he belonged to hal, which was perhaps the reason that drusie wished to take him. she thought it would please hal. partly because jumbo was so old, and partly because he was also very bad tempered, he lived by himself in a comfortable, roomy hutch, with a soft bed of hay at one end and a great wide space at the other, in which he took his meals and looked out of the door at the other rabbits. helen, who did not care very much for jumbo, declared that he did that on purpose to aggravate them, for they all finished their food long before he was half-way through his, and then they had nothing else to do but to sit and watch him. and that made them feel hungry again. he was sitting before his door now munching bran and oats, and at the mention of his name he pricked up his long ears and sleepily blinked his eyes. "h'm," said helen, looking at him rather distrustfully; "jumbo too can be dreadfully naughty when he likes, and he rather looks as if he meant it to-day." but that, drusie said laughing, was all nonsense, for no rabbit could have looked meeker or better-behaved than jumbo that morning. so it was decided that he should accompany them; and as punch and judy and toby scratched at their doors when they saw him on the ground, jim said it would be unkind not to take them as well. and drusie declined to leave salt and pepper behind, for they were always good. thus, when the four children started for the clover field, it was a very big party of rabbits that went with them. but as jumbo followed a great deal better than many dogs do, and as all the other rabbits followed jumbo, the children had no trouble at all with them. the way to the clover field lay through their own garden, and then across a big, sunny meadow. by the time they reached the meadow it was growing very hot, and the children sauntered along under the shade of a high hedge, and talked about the fight to be held on the following tuesday. drusie felt more hopeful than she had done before breakfast, and she was perfectly sure that hal would defend the fort. she was full of plans for making the fight a better and more exciting one than any they had yet had, and she was suggesting a scheme by which tommy could act both as scout and advanced outpost, when a strong, delicious scent from the clover field was wafted towards them on the soft summer, breeze. jumbo smelt it, and lifting up his black nose gave one or two sniffs, and then darting past them at a rate surprising in a rabbit of his age made straight for the gap in the hedge; and, of course, after that there was no more time for conversation, for where jumbo went the other rabbits followed. it was quite as much as the children could do to keep them in sight, and when they scrambled through the gap five of the six rabbits were sitting in a row contentedly munching away at the juicy stalks and cool green leaves of the clover. but jumbo would not condescend to eat anything but pink, honey-filled flowers, and going from plant to plant he sat up on his hind legs and bit off the stalk just below the head. "jumbo _is_ a clever rabbit," said helen admiringly; "the others don't know the difference between the flowers and the leaves." then suddenly they all burst out laughing. for jumbo, getting tired perhaps of sitting up so much on his hind legs, tried to support himself against a stalk while he nibbled at the flowers. but the stalk gave way, and jumbo fell heavily across pepper's neck, who, indignant at such a liberty, gave a squeak and darted away. jumbo, trying hard to look as though he had tumbled down on purpose, began to wash his face and ears in a very diligent manner. [illustration: "_jumbo began to wash his face and ears_"] it was some time before the children thought of returning; but presently jim, who never cared to sit still for very long, said that they might as well be going, and added that as the rabbits had been so good they would give them an extra ramble, and take them home by the lane that ran along the top of the hill. but that, as helen remarked, was saying one word for the rabbits and two for himself; for the lane bordered the land belonging to an old gentleman, named grey, who had lately come to live there, and from a gate at the top of the hill a glimpse could be caught of the river, where, too, a lovely pair of swans might be seen. jim took a great interest in these swans, and longed to get down to the water so as to be close to them. but the gamekeeper was a surly fellow, and if he saw the children lingering near he would tell them that his master "couldn't abear boys nor girls either," and always was most severe if any people were caught trespassing on his land. thus jim had never dared to climb the gate. but jumbo this morning was to give him an excuse for so doing. when they reached it, the children paused to gaze down at the river, which there broadened out into a sort of lake, with a grassy islet in the centre. the six rabbits paused also. the clover they had eaten had made them feel rather sleepy, but now they were beginning to recover from the effects of it, and now they suddenly became quite frisky. punch leaped over judy's back, and then chased her into the middle of the road and back again. even old jumbo caught the infection, and though he very seldom condescended to take any notice of the other rabbits, now he gave toby a playful poke with his nose, following it up by a bite on his ear that was not quite so playful. toby gave a loud squeak of pain, and jumbo, afraid perhaps that he might receive a bite in return, jumped through the bars and scampered down the field. he was half-way to the river before the children recovered from their surprise, and shouted to him to come back. but the more they shouted the faster he ran. and that was not the worst either, for the other rabbits were after him in a twinkling. but quick as they were jim was quicker. he had no intention of allowing such an excellent opportunity of exploring the forbidden ground to slip, and crying that it was of no use to call to jumbo he scrambled over the gate and rushed helter-skelter down the field, taking great care, however, not to get in front of jumbo, but running behind him shouting and waving his hands. [illustration: jim climbing gate] to the interested onlookers at the gate, whom an uneasy fear of the gamekeeper kept from entering the field, it really seemed much more as though jim were chasing jumbo down the field than trying to capture him. but, perhaps, even if jim had wished to catch jumbo he could not have done so, for the old rabbit was thoroughly enjoying his scamper, and with his little, short tail cocked up and his long ears streaming behind him he raced along like the wind. and then a dreadful thing happened. some twenty feet from the river the ground sloped very steeply, and such was the rate at which jumbo was going that, when he reached this part, he could not stop himself, but tumbled head over heels, and rolling down the bank disappeared with a big, loud splash into the water. jim uttered a shout of dismay, which was echoed by all the others, who, hastily climbing over the gate, came rushing pell-mell down the field. "oh, where is he? oh, is poor darling jumbo drowned?" drusie gasped. but he was not drowned. even as drusie spoke his soft, black nose came to the surface, and kicking vigorously he struck out for the opposite bank. "why, he can swim!" drusie cried joyfully. "but don't go that way, jumbo; come here. jumbo! jumbo!" [illustration: drusie kneeling on bank of stream] kneeling down on the bank she called to him; but jumbo had quite lost his presence of mind, and, far too bewildered and alarmed to heed the children's cries, he paddled away from them as fast as ever he could. "oh, what shall we do?" drusie cried in great distress. "his long fur will soon get so heavy that he will not be able to keep himself up. o jumbo darling, come here!" jim was quite as frightened as she was. if only he had known how to swim, he would have plunged in to the rescue at once. then, as if matters were not already bad enough, they suddenly became worse. the swans, which jim had been so anxious to see, suddenly sailed majestically round the bend of the small island, and came towards the children, expecting crumbs. [illustration: swans] but none of the children, not even jim, had any attention to spare for them, beautiful though they were. their eyes were fixed on jumbo, whose breath was coming in quick, short pants, and whose poor, short, little legs were growing more and more tired. disappointed at not getting the crumbs, the swans slowly turned round and were sailing away again when they caught sight of jumbo, and with angry hisses and long necks outstretched they bore down upon him as he swam about half-way between the island and the bank. "oh, go to the island; it is nearer!" drusie shrieked; "and o jumbo, make haste!" it almost seemed as if jumbo understood what she said. at any rate he began to swim towards the island as fast as ever he could. but weighted with his long fur, and unaccustomed to swimming--for he had never in his life before been in the water, and how he had learned to swim always remained a mystery to the children--he yet struck out valiantly. he knew that he was swimming for his very life, and he never ceased paddling for one moment. the children watched the race in a state of frantic excitement, while jim ran up and down the bank looking in vain for something to throw at the swans and drive them away. and now came a moment during which the children literally held their breath. jumbo was within two or three yards of the island when the foremost of the two swans stooped its long neck and made a savage grab at his hind legs. it seemed impossible that the cruel beak could miss him, yet it did; for poor jumbo was by that time so exhausted that he suddenly sank and disappeared. the angry, surprised swan dived his head down in search of him; but the current, which swept round here with some force, carried jumbo away, and finally flung him, a bedraggled and most unhappy-looking rabbit, on to a corner of the island. drusie always declared afterwards that jumbo had dived and swum under water; but whether that was true or not, saved he certainly was. luckily for him the swans did not follow him, but contented themselves with sailing majestically up and down between the island and the bank, ready, if he showed the least sign of taking to the water again, to pursue him. but jumbo had had enough of swimming to last him all his life, and preferred to stay where he was rather than venture again into the river. but what was to happen next? they could not go home and leave jumbo on the island, and yet there seemed no way in which they could get at him. and at any moment the cross gamekeeper might appear, and at this thought drusie glanced round uneasily. as she did so she gave a little jump, for running quickly towards them was somebody who, she was afraid at first, might be the gamekeeper himself. but a second glance showed her that the new-comer was only a boy, and a very nice-looking boy too, with merry, dark-blue eyes and a friendly manner. "hallo!" he said, rather breathlessly. "is anything the matter? i heard a lot of shouting, and i came to see if anybody had tumbled into the river. but you are all quite dry." "yes, we are all right," drusie explained hurriedly. "but one of our rabbits--jumbo--has tumbled in, and the swans have chased him on to the island, and we don't know how to get him back again." she pointed as she spoke to the island, and the boy, following the direction of her glance, burst out laughing. "is that a rabbit?" he said. "why, it looks more like a drowned rat than anything else." "jumbo is very handsome when he is dry," drusie said, inclined at first to be a little offended. but his laughter was infectious, and jumbo did after all look so very much like a drowned rat that she could not help laughing too. "i say, what a jolly lot of rabbits you have got!" the boy said, looking down at the other five, who were busy nibbling away at the grass, without seeming to care in the least what happened to jumbo; "but aren't you afraid of their running away?" "they generally behave beautifully," drusie said, who, because the other three were rather shy, was obliged to do all the talking herself; "but something must have startled jumbo when we were at the top of the hill, for he set off at a tremendous scamper, and tumbled in headforemost before we knew what was happening to him." "poor old jumbo!" said the boy, as he looked across at the shivering, melancholy rabbit. "we must rescue him though, and that is easily done." as he spoke he led the way along the bank to a spot where a thick clump of willows grew; and moored to one of these trees was a small, light canoe. "i'll paddle across in less than no time," he said, "and if the swans do not interfere, i'll soon bring him safely back to you." the swans did not interfere, however, and jumbo a minute or two later was clasped in drusie's arms. she almost cried over him in her joy at his safety. sitting down on the bank she began to dry him with her handkerchief; but it was soaked through at once, and the boy suggested that they should rub him with their hands. so drusie placed him tenderly on the grass, and they rubbed him until their arms ached; and no doubt jumbo ached too, for they all rubbed with a will. "but at any rate," drusie said in a tone of satisfaction, "he won't catch cold now, and he is so old that he might have had a dreadful attack of rheumatism." long before jumbo was dry they had all become very friendly with their new acquaintance. jim and helen and tommy forgot to be shy, and they all chatted away together as if they had known each other for quite a long time. it was not until half an hour later, as, with jumbo lying comfortably in drusie's arms, for she said he was too weak to walk, they were all hurrying home, that they remembered they did not even know what their new friend's name was, or where he lived. "perhaps," said helen, "he lives at the grange, and captain grey is his father." [illustration: gamekeeper] "captain grey hasn't any children," drusie said. "i heard nurse say so." "then perhaps he is staying there on a visit," jim said. but drusie did not think that that was likely either, for had not the gamekeeper said that his master "could not abear boys"? and if that was the case, he certainly would not have one staying in the house. but whoever he was, they all four agreed that he was an exceedingly nice boy, and they hoped that they might meet him again. [illustration: chapter ii tailpiece] [illustration: chapter iii headpiece] chapter iii. hal finds a friend. on their way through the garden they met hal. directly they saw him his brothers and sisters rushed up and told him all about jumbo's adventures, and about the boy who had been so kind to them. hal was not greatly interested. he was looking pale and listless, and there were heavy, dark lines about his eyes. when they asked him eagerly if he knew who the boy could be, he shook his head and yawned, and said that he was sure he did not know. "come and have a game of cricket," he said, rousing himself a little. "i have got my bat here, and the ball is somewhere about. just have a look for it, tommy. we won't bother about stumps. this tree will do quite well for the wicket." "all right," drusie said, delighted to find that hal was willing to be friends again. "i should love a game; but we must put jumbo and the other rabbits away first.--come along, jim and helen." she and jim ran off at once, but helen followed more slowly. she had a shrewd suspicion that hal merely wanted them to bowl and field for him, and that he did not intend to allow them to bat. and she did not see the fun of running about in the hot sun after his balls, if she was not going to have any of the batting. but drusie and jim were too excited at the prospect of a game to listen to her words of warning, and as soon as the rabbits had been hastily bundled into their hutches they raced back to the tree where hal was waiting for them. "you shall bowl first, jim," he said.--"drusie, you can stand behind the tree and be wicket-keeper, for, unless jim has improved wonderfully since i went away, most of his balls will be fearful wides.--helen, you go over there, and mind to throw the balls up sharp." "then you are going in first," said helen, "and we are not going to toss?" but hal was busy measuring out the distance at which jim was to stand, and did not hear her question. or if he did, he evidently did not consider it worthy of an answer. "now then," hal said, coming back; "i am ready. i am not going to make any runs, you know, as it is too hot; but you others must send the ball up promptly, or else it makes it slow work for me." jim's bowling was not very difficult to deal with, and hal knocked the balls about pretty much as he pleased, and gave the fielders, and especially helen, plenty of running about. "well, at this rate," drusie said merrily, as she cleverly stopped a ball that was a very bad "wide" indeed, "we shall never get you out." "no, i don't suppose you will," said hal; and then he added ungratefully, "that is the worst of playing with a set of girls; one never gets any practice." whether jim was annoyed at being classed as a girl, and was therefore put on his mettle, cannot be said for certain, but at any rate his very next ball hit the tree fair and square, and with so much violence that a piece of the rough elm bark was knocked off. "hurrah!" shouted drusie, clapping her hands; "bowled at last. who goes in next?" "don't be in such a mighty hurry," said hal, who was looking distinctly angry. "i am not out--not a bit of it. why, that ball was not anything like in the middle of the tree. who ever heard of a wicket a yard and a quarter wide? you'll have to bowl better than that, jim, to get me out." "all right," jim said, recovering himself. he had looked rather blank for a moment when hal declared so emphatically that he was not out. "i suppose that ball was rather to one side of the tree. i will have another try." but helen was not so easily satisfied. "you said, hal, that the tree was to be the wicket; you never said anything about only counting the middle of the tree." "did i say so?" he replied. "well, i made a mistake. of course, it would be rather absurd to count the whole tree. i tell you what i will do. i will hang my cap on this little twig here, and if the ball hits that i am out. now, are you satisfied?" they all, with the exception of helen, hastened to say that they were, and the game went on. a few minutes later he sent an easy catch, and darting forward helen caught the ball. "how about playing with girls now, master hal?" she cried. "i suppose you will own that you are fairly out this time?" but he did nothing of the sort. "pooh!" he said contemptuously; "that was a pure fluke. any one could have caught that; and so it does not count either. i am not going out." "oh, i say," jim said in a remonstrating tone, "is that the way you play at your school?" "of course, it is not," said hal. "don't be a donkey, jim. how often am i to tell you that this is not a regular game, but just a sort of knock up, you know?" "in which you get all the knocking up," helen said indignantly. hal laughed. "now, don't get into a temper, helen. i don't see what girls want to play cricket for. it is not a girls' game. all they are good for is just to field, and that sort of thing." at that helen fairly choked with anger, drusie opened her eyes very wide, and jim lay down on the grass and laughed quietly to himself. considering that both his sisters had been toiling on his behalf for the last half-hour, it certainly was very cool of hal to make such a speech. [illustration: jim and helen] "i knew how it would be," helen exclaimed passionately, as soon as she could find her voice; "and i warned you two others, only you would not listen. i knew perfectly well that hal was not going to let us go in, and i call it downright unfair, and i for one am not going to field for him any more.--and you say," she added, turning indignantly to hal, "that girls can't play cricket. well, they can. father says himself that drusie plays awfully well for a girl, and i suppose he ought to know." "for a girl," hal said slightingly; "yes, that is just it." "please don't quarrel," drusie said quickly. "you may stay in if you like, hal, and i will bowl for you.--jump up, jim, and go and be wicket-keeper." with a scornful sniff for what she considered to be great weakness on drusie's part, helen returned to her place, where, in spite of her declaration that she did not intend to play any more, she continued to field. for a girl drusie did bowl remarkably well, and hal would have been the first to own it, had he not perceived a sort of triumphant "told you so" expression on helen's face, which annoyed him greatly, and made him withhold the praise which drusie would have been so pleased to hear. she exerted herself to do her very best, and before many minutes had passed she clean bowled him. there could be no doubt about it this time, for the twig on which the cap had been hung was broken by the force of the ball, and the cap fell to the ground. "hurrah!" helen shrieked, dancing about and clapping her hands. "how about girls not being able to bowl now, master hal? i suppose you will own that you really are out this time?" [illustration: "_i suppose you will own that you really are out this time?_"] hal looked not only mortified but exceedingly angry into the bargain. "you are a precious set, i must say," he said, looking contemptuously at the excited capers which helen was cutting. "one would think that you had done something awfully wonderful by the way in which you are going on. that is just like a girl. let her do something which she thinks rather clever, and there is no end to her airs." this was really rather severe on drusie, who had neither said nor done anything to justify hal's scornful remarks. but he was too annoyed to be fair, and as a punishment for what he chose to call drusie's bragging, he tucked his bat under his arm, and told them that he was not going to play with them any more. "you can brag by yourselves," he said, "of your wonderful cricket. i am not going to put up with you any longer. i am sick of you all. i must say it is awfully hard on a fellow to come home and find that not one of his brothers or sisters is worth playing with. a more conceited, disagreeable lot i never met with." a dismayed silence followed this abrupt departure. it was broken by a short, quick sigh from drusie. "oh dear, oh dear!" she said, looking after hal as he marched off with as much dignity as he could. "i do wish that i had not bowled him. if i had guessed that it would make him so cross, i would have sent him easy, baby-balls." "and got told for your pains that you could not bowl," helen said with much scorn. "i do wonder how you can be so silly, drusie. i think it serves hal quite right. but i told you how it would be. i knew we should not get our innings. you can't say that i did not warn you." "no, we certainly can't," jim said with a chuckle. "you have had a sort of 'i told you so' expression on your face ever since we began to play. and you know, helen, if you ask me, i think it is all your fault that hal went off in such a huff. he simply couldn't stand your being so awfully delighted when drusie bowled him." if hal's sudden display of temper had struck dismay into the hearts of his brothers and sisters, it had not left him particularly happy either. though he would not own it, even to himself, he had an uncomfortable feeling that it was he who was conceited and disagreeable. he was, however, full of excuses for himself, and when his conscience pricked him he answered impatiently that nobody could be expected to put up with the fearful airs that they had all been giving themselves. then, looking round to see that he was not being followed, he made his way to a hiding-place he had discovered behind the summer-house, and proceeded to employ himself there after a fashion of which nurse would most strongly have disapproved. he remained until the dinner-bell rang, when he crept out with a pale face and with every bit of his appetite gone. he dined alone in the schoolroom, and nurse shook her head as his plates were carried back to the nursery, for he had scarcely touched anything that she had sent in to him. "i hope, master hal, you are not going to be ill," she said, as soon as dinner was over. "what has come to you? you have not eaten anything." "i am not hungry," hal muttered, flushing under her scrutinizing gaze. "i have got rather a headache--that's all." "well, don't run about much in the sun," nurse said, only half satisfied. "you are looking very pale. put on your straw hat too; that little cap is of no use at all. and don't go eating any green apples or gooseberries. i expect you have been in the kitchen-garden this morning, and that is what is the matter with you." but it was neither green apples nor gooseberries which had given hal the very uncomfortable sensations from which he was suffering. that, however, he did not explain to nurse; and feeling very wretched and unhappy he wandered out into the garden, and flung himself under a big, shady elm-tree. the others were nowhere in sight, and he felt injured that they should, even after his conduct of the morning, have left him to himself. "a nice, sociable set they are," he said moodily. "oh dear, how i do wish that i had somebody sensible to play with!" but though he chose to grumble, he knew perfectly well that he was not just then in the humour to appreciate any society, however sensible, and pillowing his head upon his arm he dropped off to sleep. [illustration: hal asleep] meanwhile, drusie had planned a busy afternoon for herself and the others, for they intended to go to the fort and make ammunition for tuesday. few children had nicer grounds to play in than the danvers children. the garden was very large, and besides the lawn and the winding walks among the shrubberies, which afforded such capital hiding-places when they played hide-and-seek, there was the large kitchen-garden as well. beyond the kitchen-garden lay pleasant, sunny fields, at the foot of which flowed a small stream that farther down joined the river in which jumbo had been so nearly drowned. on the other side of the stream lay a long slip of land which mr. danvers always spoke of as a waste piece of ground, and over which he sometimes threatened to send the plough. but partly because the ground was really too poor to be of much good, and partly because the children begged him to leave it alone, it had never yet been disturbed, and the wilderness, as they had named it, remained theirs to all intents and purposes. that the wilderness was a brambly place could not be denied. it had originally been a grove of nut trees, and though some of these still flourished and bore nuts that had not their equal for size and flavour in all the country-side, they had for the most part been strangled by blackberry bushes and briers, and smothered by masses of wild clematis. the fort stood in a corner of the wilderness. within a few yards of it on one side was the stream; on the other and at the back it was surrounded by densely-growing hawthorn bushes. but the front was open and exposed to attack, for a cleared space in which only a few scattered nut trees grew lay before it. this fort had once been a summer-house, but it had long since been disused, and would, no doubt, have fallen into decay, had not the children hit upon the idea of making it the scene of their pitched battles, and had so propped it up and strengthened it that it was impossible to take except by surprise. the door had been nailed up and so had the window, and entrance could only be effected by scrambling up on the flat roof, and dropping through a hole which had been made there for that purpose. even that hole could be closed by a hatch in time of need, and the besieged could lie snugly inside and listen to the heavy firing without, secure in the knowledge that as long as he chose to remain there none of the besiegers could touch him. but then his flag would be in danger; and by their rules of warfare, if the flag were captured or shot down, the fort was held to have capitulated. for more than a week before hal's return from school the others had been busy getting the ammunition ready; they had dug up a quantity of sand from the bed of the stream, which, when mixed with a little clay and moistened with water, represented cannon-balls. as, however, they had no cannon, these balls had to be thrown by hand; and as they scattered when they struck, they appeared more formidable than they really were. but still one had been known to bring down the flag, and so win the day for the besiegers. the fort was mainly defended with a catapult loaded with mud pellets, shot being strictly forbidden as too dangerous. to protect them the besiegers wore a kind of helmet, which, though it gave them a somewhat ludicrous appearance, saved them from many a nasty blow. these helmets were neither more nor less than fine wire-gauze dish-covers, which they tied across their faces and fastened at the back of their heads. but the holder of the fort had to rely chiefly upon capture to win a victory, and when his enemies approached too closely, a bold rush often resulted in one of them being made prisoner. but, of course, even a brief absence from the fort left the flag undefended, and there was always a chance that, while one of the attackers was being pursued, some of the others might steal up and succeed in going off with the flag. so it will be easily understood that courage and skill, combined with a spirit that was bold and yet not too rash, were required to hold the fort. and as none of them possessed these qualities to the same extent as hal, it followed that none of them held the fort as well as he did, or made such a good fight of it. superintended by drusie, they all worked very busily at the ammunition, and as they kneaded cannon-balls and pellets they laid out a plan of attack for the following tuesday. jim was of the opinion that they never took enough advantage of the shelter afforded by the thick and almost impenetrable bushes that grew on one side of the fort, and he proposed that while two of them made an attack in the open air, he or drusie should lie concealed, and if hal could be drawn out in pursuit they might get a chance of slipping in during his absence. "he may have brought back some new dodges," said drusie hopefully. "i wonder if he has ever played a game of this sort at school? do you think he has, jim?" jim thought it was doubtful. "i believe they always play cricket in the summer term," he said. "but this will be a splendid change for him." "i hope it will," said drusie, with a sigh. "but i am simply not going to think what we shall do if, after all our trouble, hal turns up his nose at a fight on tuesday." [illustration: hal running] at tea-time hal did not put in an appearance at all. "he ought to be hungry," nurse said, "for he did not eat much dinner. i wonder where he can be?" tea was over, and they had all gone out into the garden again for a last stroll before bed-time, when they saw him come running across the field, which was separated from the lawn by a sunk fence. leaping this, he rushed towards them, looking brighter and happier than he had done since his return. "i say," he called out; "whom do you think i have met this afternoon? i have had such a splendid time; just guess." they shook their heads; they could form no guess at all. "well, you will hardly believe it, but dodds is down here. dodds major," he added, seeing that somehow his news did not produce as much effect as he had anticipated. "who is dodds major?" drusie asked. "oh, how stupid you are!" hal cried; "why, i have told you about him in my letters lots of times. he is out and away the nicest fellow in our school. a big fellow, too, thirteen and a half, and simply splendid at cricket. he is leaving at christmas, and going to the college." "does he live down here?" said drusie. "no; he is staying at the grange with his uncle, captain grey. he is going to be here the whole holidays. isn't it splendid for me?" "why," said drusie, with a sudden sinking of her heart, "will you be much with him?" "rather," said hal; "as much as ever he will have me. of course," he added, with an important air, "he is jolly glad, too, to find another fellow down here. we are going fishing to-morrow in captain grey's trout stream. dodds says that it is simply packed with fish. won't that be jolly? i was playing cricket with him all this afternoon. he is going to play in a match that some friends of his uncle's are getting up next week, and he says that perhaps he can get me into it too. won't that be jolly?" in short, hal was brimming over with good spirits. when, soon afterwards, nurse called helen and tommy to come to bed, hal invited drusie and jim to come and sit with him while he had his tea, in order that he might chatter to them of his doings that afternoon, and about what he intended to do in future. and, of course, dodds's name figured largely in his conversation, and neither drusie nor jim could help feeling rather glum as they heard how completely they were to be left out in the cold. "it was a lucky chance meeting him," hal rattled on. "after dinner i had a nap, and then i went for a stroll. i crossed over the river and went up the field that lies next to the wilderness, and there, sitting on a gate, i saw dodds. i can tell you i was surprised, and so was he. we talked for a bit, and then he asked me to come and play cricket. we had an awfully jolly afternoon, i can tell you," hal added for the fiftieth time, at least. "i am jolly glad that he is here." "will you ask him to come over here and play?" said drusie. "it would be rather nice to have some cricket with him--wouldn't it, jim?" hal looked as though his ears had been deceiving him. "what?" he said. "ask dodds over here to play with all of you? why, you must be out of your senses, drusie. the idea of dodds playing with a girl! i say, how he would laugh!--we might have you, though, sometimes, jim; you would be useful for fielding. i will ask him to-morrow if he would mind." jim, far from being overwhelmed at the possible honour in store for him, privately made up his mind to decline it with thanks when the time came. while hal had been speaking, a sudden idea had occurred to drusie, and her face lit up with eagerness and excitement. "o hal," she exclaimed, "i believe that dodds major is our boy--the nice boy who rescued jumbo, and who talked to us for such a long time." hal laughed scornfully. "you don't know dodds major," he said. "he is not a bit like that. why, i tell you that he hates girls, and wouldn't take any notice at all of any of you. why, he is older even than i am." "so was this boy," said drusie. "but, of course, if you say that dodds major is not nice, they cannot be the same." "i never said dodds was not nice," hal said impatiently. "i only said that he was not the sort of boy to play with girls. i expect that fellow you met this morning was an awful muff." [illustration: chapter iv headpiece] chapter iv. disappointed hopes. for the next two or three days his family saw little of hal. morning, afternoon, and evening he was over at the greys'. his meals he took in the schoolroom, and though nurse would have allowed him to come back to the nursery, if he had cared to do so, he very much preferred to have them in solitary state. he seemed to see nothing ridiculous in sitting there by himself; indeed, as he confided to drusie, he thought it perfectly absurd that a boy of his age should ever have been expected to take them in the nursery. she and the rest had plenty of time to make all their preparations for the double birthday to be celebrated on tuesday, for hal left them completely to themselves; and when he did see them, he was so full of all that he and dodds major did together that he had no time to show any interest in them. "i should very much like to ask him whether he intends to take part in the fight to-morrow, or whether he means to spend the day as usual with his friend," said helen. it was late on monday evening, and they had brought all their preparations to a satisfactory conclusion. the flag--a bright, new union jack--had been fastened to a long, slender pole, and was quite ready to be hoisted. the ammunition was arranged in a neat, high pile, and the armour lay ready to hand. and in the garden summer-house, where, a few days back, the secret meeting had been held, the materials for a most sumptuous feast were in readiness to refresh the weary warriors when the day's work was done. on previous birthdays they had always been satisfied with lemonade as a drink, but drusie, feeling that this was a special occasion, had considered that lemonade was, perhaps, hardly a suitable form of refreshment; and so, from a recipe which she was proud to think was entirely out of her own head, she had concocted a bottle of red wine. "and i think," she said, as she carefully hid it under the seat--"i think that when you taste it you will say that you never in all your lives before drank anything like it." tartlets and buns and a few other delicacies were to be ordered from the pastry-cook's on the eventful day itself. so, everything being ready, and it wanting still an hour or more till their bedtime, they were rather at a loss to know what to do with themselves; and then it was that helen expressed a desire to know what part hal intended to take in the morrow's proceedings. "no part at all, if you ask me," she added. "i say, drusie, don't you think we might go up to the greys' gate, and see if we can get a look at hal and his precious friend dodds?" "hal would be awfully angry if he saw us," said drusie. "i don't think we should go." but the hesitating tone in which she spoke showed that she was open to persuasion; and when jim added his word to helen's, and said that he thought there would be no harm in just going up and having a look over, she gave way. they soon reached the five-barred gate on which hal had found dodds sitting. neither of them was there, now, however; and so helen proposed that they should climb over, and go down the grassy glade, which would bring them on to a small knoll, from whence they could command a view of the house and the wide lawn that lay in front of it. the temptation to see hal and his friend together was too strong for them to remember that they would be trespassing, and, scrambling over the gate, they made their way cautiously through the wood. it was as well that they went cautiously, for the two boys were much closer to them than they had expected. to the left of the wood was a big level field, and it was here, and not on the lawn, that they were playing. the sound of a voice calling impatiently to hal to hurry up with that ball, and not to be all night about it, was what first drew their attention to his whereabouts; and feeling rather astonished that any one should venture to address him in that imperious way, they crept up to the edge of the wood, and became silent spectators of what was going on. the wicket was pitched in the middle of the field. dodds was batting, but as his back was toward them, the children could not see his face. but they could hear his voice, and a very imperious, commanding voice it was. hal was bowling and fielding as well, and as dodds sent his balls flying to all parts of the field, hal had plenty of work to do. and while he raced about in all directions dodds lay luxuriously on the grass and shouted to him to hurry up. presently hal bowled a ball that very nearly knocked the middle stump flat on its back, and drusie softly clapped her hands, and said "bravo" under her breath. [illustration: dodds laying on grass] "that was a very good ball indeed," they heard dodds say approvingly. "send a few more like that." hal flushed with pride and pleasure at this praise, but the others thought that he looked a shade disappointed as his friend placed himself again in front of the wicket. but he continued to bowl for other ten minutes; then dodds remarked that the light was getting bad, and that they might as well stop. "i would bowl a bit for you," he said. "it is too dark to see the ball properly; i hope you don't mind. i really did mean to let you have some batting to-day." "oh, it does not matter," hal said hurriedly. "any time will do. i don't mind a bit." "still, i don't like to be selfish," said dodds, whose conscience appeared to be pricking him. the unseen listeners among the bushes thought it might have pricked him a little earlier in the day, for they soon learned that neither on this occasion nor on any other had hal been permitted to bat. he had merely bowled and fielded for dodds. when they recovered from their astonishment at this, they could hardly help laughing. it was really rather funny, after all hal's bragging, to find that he was only made use of in the way that he made use of them. and the curious part of it was that hal raised no objection, although it was easy to see that he was feeling a little disappointed this evening. on the other hand, he was so flattered at being allowed to associate, even on these unequal terms, with a boy so much older than himself, that he took care to smother his discontent. "what about to-morrow?" said dodds carelessly. "can you be here pretty early?" hal hesitated for a minute before replying. in spite of helen's assertions to the contrary, he had not forgotten that to-morrow was the day of the storming of the fort. several times, as he had hastened to and from the greys', he had heard them at work there, and had known perfectly well what they were doing. he had even overheard a conversation, in which they discussed the likelihood of his taking part in the fight. and at the time hal, touched to see how much they wanted him, had resolved that he would spend the whole of his birthday with them. "yes," dodds went on; "come as soon after breakfast as you can--it is cooler then--and we will have a regular good go in. i want to make a big score at that match next week. you are coming over to see it, aren't you?" "y-yes," hal stammered. though dodds had not mentioned that cricket match during the last few days, hal had not forgotten his promise to get him included in it if possible. consequently, dodds's careless inquiry as to whether he intended to come over as a mere spectator disconcerted him very much. however, he swallowed his disappointment, and said that he had thought of going. "but about to-morrow," he added. "i don't think i can come--" "oh, but you must," dodds cried out, interrupting him. "i simply can't do without you. look here; if it is the batting that you are feeling sore about, you shall go in first. there! i have promised you that." hal's face brightened. he _did_ wish to show dodds that his batting was very much better than his bowling. and perhaps dodds would be so struck with the brilliancy of his performance that he might after all manage to secure him a place in the match. it would be a real pity, he reflected, to neglect such a chance. after all, the others could very well do without him to-morrow. "well," said dodds impatiently, "what do you say? will you come? or are you going somewhere with your brothers and sisters? you have got some, haven't you?" "yes," said hal; "but i never play with them--not since i have been at school, at least. you see they are all much younger than i am." "oh, a set of kids," said dodds indifferently. "what a nuisance they must be!" but this hal did have the grace to contradict. "oh no, they are not," he said; "but they have kept on liking things that i don't care about, and they get huffy when i don't play with them. of course," he added with an aggrieved air, "it is hardly likely that i should care to mix myself up very much with them now." "i see," said dodds; and though they could not see his face, drusie and jim were sure there must have been a twinkle of merriment in his eyes. "you have grown out of all their games, you mean, and are too old to play with them any more." "yes," said hal eagerly; "that's just it. now, you understand that all right at once, but i cannot get them to see it." "it is wonderful how silly kids can be," said dodds gravely. "but, look here; are you coming or are you not? for, if you are not, i shall ask one of the harveys to spend the day with me." that was enough for hal. throwing his scruples and his half-formed resolution to spend his birthday at home to the winds, he said at once that he would come. "that's right," said dodds in the half-patronizing tone he had used all along. "be here directly after breakfast then, and you shall have first innings; that's a bargain." "i won't forget," said hal in a delighted tone. "i expect i shall be up here about nine o'clock." it was a very melancholy little quartette that presently emerged from the bushes, and took its way home through the woods and the fields. "i never should have believed it of hal--never!" said helen, quite forgetting that she had always warned the others of what they might expect. "to desert us on his birthday, and for a boy that does not care a bit about him, except to make use of him!" "it is funny," said jim thoughtfully. "i never should have thought that hal would have allowed another boy to order him about as dodds does. why, he fags for dodds just as hal would like us to fag for him; only we won't. and he did not seem to mind a bit." but drusie never spoke one single word the whole way home. to think that hal--her own twin--from whom, until a short three months ago, she had been almost inseparable, should arrange to spend the whole of his birthday away from home caused her bitter grief. it was not even that he had forgotten the fact of their birthdays. she knew quite well he remembered, from the momentary hesitation he had shown. no; he had deliberately chosen to desert her, and drusie felt as if she should never get over it. [illustration: chapter iv tailpiece] [illustration: chapter v headpiece] chapter v. the fort in the wilderness. all, the danvers, except, perhaps, tommy, who was too young to take things very much to heart, awoke the next morning with a weight on their minds, and not, as helen said afterwards, "with a bit of birthday feeling about them." hal was ashamed of himself. though he was unaware, of course, that they had overheard his conversation with dodds, he guessed from their downcast faces that they knew that he intended to desert them on his and drusie's birthday, and was not going near the fort. he was more ashamed than ever when, lying beside his plate at breakfast, he found one of the handsomest pocket-knives he had ever seen. it had no less than four blades, besides so many other weapons that, as the man who sold it remarked to drusie and jim, "it was a carpenter's tool-chest in miniature." and a dreadful feeling of remorse came over hal when he remembered that he had neglected to get something for drusie. it was not that he had forgotten her birthday either--seeing that it was on the same day as his own, he could not very well do that; and when he had gone to school he had quite made up his mind to put aside at least half of his pocket-money every week, and save it for her. "it does not matter in the least," drusie said eagerly, when hal began to stammer out his shamefaced apologies. "i don't want a present from you one bit. i know quite well that boys must have a great deal to do with their money at school." at that hal got rather red. he remembered the regular weekly visits to the "tuck-shop;" and he knew that if he had only denied himself a little, drusie might have had her birthday present. "i did ask nurse to advance me some money when i came home," he said in self-defence, "but she would not." drusie assured him again that she had not expected a present, and begged him not to say anything more about it. and so nothing more was said; and although helen was burning to ask him what he had done with his shilling, she remembered her promise to drusie, and did not make any unpleasant inquiries. half an hour later drusie and jim, having fed all the animals, were loitering on the sunny terrace together when hal, looking very spick and span in a clean suit of flannels, came out with his bat under his arm. "i suppose you are going to play cricket," said drusie in a tone from which she tried to keep the wistfulness she felt. "well, yes; i am," said hal, carefully avoiding the reproachful gaze of jim's brown eyes. "dodds wanted me particularly, or else, you know, drusie, i should have stayed with you, and done what we always do on our birthdays." this explanation was meant as a sort of apology, and drusie never could bear any one, especially hal, to apologize to her. "it doesn't matter, hal," she said generously, winking away a troublesome tear that would tremble on her eyelashes. "you have a right to enjoy yourself in your holidays, and, of course, you are bigger than all of us now." "do you mind very much about my going, drusie?" hal said suddenly; "for, if you do, i will throw dodds over, and come and defend the fort." a flash of joy passed over drusie's face, but the next moment it died out, and she shook her head. she knew her brother better than he knew himself, and she was sure that, if he gave up his own wishes for theirs, he would regret it long before the morning was over. "no, hal," she said. "if you promised dodds, you ought to go." "well, don't say that _i_ did not offer," said hal, very much relieved that the offer had not been accepted. "no, i won't; and it was very good of you," said drusie warmly; and hal, feeling that he had behaved very generously, went on his way whistling a cheerful tune. "it is a good thing that helen was not here," said jim, "or master hal would not have got off so easily. i know she is burning to give him a piece of her mind." "oh, i hope she won't," said drusie, in real distress; "and he has been so nice about it. you heard him offering to stay, jim?" "yes," said jim, "i heard him, and i thought you were very wise not to accept. he would have been sorry long before the fight was over." meanwhile hal, feeling very well pleased with himself, hurried on, and reached the cricket field just as a distant church clock was striking nine. dodds had not yet arrived, and hal thought with pleasure of the promise dodds had given him that he should go in first. and he meant to stay in too; dodds should not get him out so easily as he imagined. he only hoped that dodds would not get tired of bowling to him, and turn him out willy nilly. that was the worst, he reflected, of playing with a boy so much older than himself. at school dodds was an immensely popular fellow, and a new and comparatively small boy, as hal was, would have been very much snubbed if he had ventured to say a word against him. but here hal could not help seeing that dodds was rather inclined to be selfish. and hal was quick not only to see but to resent selfishness in other people. he had plenty of time to think over the faults in the character of his friend, for half-past nine and then ten struck, and still he had not put in an appearance. hal began to get impatient, for the sun was gradually getting hotter, and soon it would be too warm to play with any comfort. it really was too bad of dodds to treat him so. he wondered what the others were doing, and whether they had begun their fight. if it had not been for dodds, he might have been with them now, instead of dawdling away the whole of the morning doing nothing. for another half-hour hal waited, and at the end of that time he came to the conclusion that dodds did not intend to turn up at all. "he _is_ selfish," he thought indignantly. "here have i spoiled the whole of my birthday morning waiting for him. i might have been defending the fort all this time and enjoying myself." here his conscience whispered that he might also have been helping his twin sister to enjoy her birthday; and when he remembered how bravely she had concealed her own disappointment, and how unselfishly she had told him to go and spend his birthday in the manner that pleased him best, he began to see how very selfishly he had behaved. "i will go to them now," he thought, starting up; "there are heaps of time to have a rattling good fight before dinner." and so there would have been, but--alas! for his good resolutions--as he jumped to his feet something fell out of his pocket. it was the little packet which he had bought last saturday. for a moment he hesitated; then down he sat, and picked up the packet. "i will have just one," he said, "and then go and play with them." "one" proved to be a cigarette, for cigarettes were what the little packet contained. ever since he came home, he had been trying to master the art of smoking, and had not yet succeeded. each cigarette made him feel worse than before. but with a perseverance worthy of a better cause he would puff steadily on, and try hard to believe that he was enjoying himself. one or two of the elder boys at his school--dodds was not among the number--had boasted that they often smoked in the holidays, and hal had been fired with the idea that it would be a fine thing to be able to say when he went back that he knew how to smoke too. and this was the secret of much of his altered behaviour, of his mysterious absences, and more than all of his frequent pale looks and irritable moods. the discomfort he felt when the cigarette was actually between his lips was nothing compared to the very disagreeable sensations that always followed. he would feel sick and dizzy, and suffer from a headache for hours afterwards; but as soon as he recovered he would return to the charge and refuse to acknowledge himself beaten. this morning he met with no better success. he began to feel ill long before he had half finished his first cigarette, and by the time he was half-way through the second the most painful qualms seized him, and forgetting the fort and the fight and everything else in his extreme misery he rolled over on the grass, and spent a most unhappy morning. at dinner-time he crept into the nursery looking so pale and wretched that nurse was really alarmed. [illustration: hal with cigarette] "i can't think what has come to you, master hal," she said. "you never used to suffer from these dreadful sick headaches. you had better go straight and lie down, and i will have some soup sent up to you." hal was thankful to accept her advice. the sight of the roast mutton, and the currant tart with devonshire cream, which formed the nursery dinner that day, made him shudder; and going to his own room, he flung himself on the bed, and after having taken some of the soup which was brought to him, he fell asleep. "which," said helen, as she and the rest peeped at him through a chink in the doorway, "is _one_ way of spending a birthday." [illustration: helen looking through doorway] "this birthday has been a failure altogether," said jim. "i thought the morning was never coming to an end, and what we are to do this afternoon i am sure i don't know." "you won't take my advice and let us have a fight by ourselves," said helen. "it might not be much fun, but, anyway, it would be much better than dawdling away the whole day." but the others did not agree with her. they felt that without hal the whole thing would be lacking in spirit. "i had meant to order a wagonette and take you all for a nice drive," said nurse, who was sorry for their disappointment. "but now that master hal looks so queer, i don't like to leave him." "hal has spoiled our whole day," said helen in a grumbling tone, as they all sauntered somewhat aimlessly across the garden. "poor hal!" said drusie softly; "if it comes to that, he is not having a very nice day himself, helen." "and he has not spoiled our feast, helen," put in tommy. "we are going to have that all the same--aren't we, drusie?" "oh yes," she said cheerfully; though, to tell the truth, the feast had lost all charms for her. she was not even looking forward to seeing them drink her wonderful wine. though they had not intended when they started to go near the fort, almost without their knowing it their steps led them in the direction of the wilderness, and scrambling over the gap in the hedge, they pushed their way towards the camp. this was a small clearing in the surrounding thicket, which was always used by the attacking party as a meeting-ground and a store-house for ammunition. there it lay ready for use--piles and piles of sandy balls, of all shapes and sizes. they really could not bear to look at them, and turning away they went in single file down to the fort. the flag that had floated so defiantly from its summit all day might as well be hauled down, for if it rained in the night it would be spoiled. a narrow path led from the camp; and when drusie, who was leading the way, came within sight of the fort she paused and gave vent to a mournful sigh. the flag, waving gently in the soft summer breeze, looked so beautiful, and it did seem such a pity that it was to be taken down in so ignominious a manner. she advanced into the open, thinking, as she did so, how, if there had been any one to defend the fort, they would have been obliged to skulk from bush to bush, taking advantage of every scrap of cover. she looked round and smiled to see that, from the mere force of habit, the others were darting cautiously from bush to bush, exposing themselves as little as possible to the imaginary fire from the fort. it would have been well for her had she taken the same precaution, for the next moment a shriek, that was half of pain and half of delight, broke from her. she had received a stinging blow--one that was evidently aimed from a catapult--on her hand. "jim," she cried, "hal _is_ in the fort. hurrah, hurrah! we are going to have a fight after all!" here another bullet, not so well aimed as the last, whizzed past her, and drove her to seek shelter in the nearest bush. "are you better, hal?" she called. "and do you really want to fight?" there was no answer to the first question, but a shot that struck her just above the ankle was a sufficient reply to her second; and, quite regardless of the pain, she gave another loud whoop of joy, in which the other three joined. "we must get back to the camp," jim cried, "and arm ourselves. this is altogether too one-sided an affair." bitterly now did they regret the rashness which had led them to approach in such a confident, careless manner. yet, at the same time, they could not help admiring the wiliness which the enemy had shown in thus reserving his fire. his aim was deadly; but, with a generosity that was truly noble, he did not take advantage of the fact that they were without their armour, and refrained from hitting their faces. almost every shot found its mark on them, and at last, despairing of being able to wriggle away in good order, they rose to their feet and made a dash into the thicket. rushing pell-mell to the camp, they tied their dish-covers over their faces, and, arming themselves with as much ammunition as they could carry, returned to the clearing. but now they were more prudent. silently they stole through the wilderness, advancing with such caution that hardly the creaking of a twig betrayed their advance; and, keeping themselves carefully concealed, they suddenly hurled the big balls at the fort, throwing them high, so that they should drop through the top. a great noise of spluttering, followed by a fit of mingled coughing and choking, told them that their fire had taken ample effect, and had even partially disabled the enemy. "let's rush the fort," cried jim; and breaking into the open, he headed a wild dash. their united attack had quite silenced the fort, and they anticipated an easy victory. springing on to a projecting ledge just outside one of the loopholes, jim's head was already above the level of the summit, and his outstretched arm was within a foot of the flagstaff, when something hurtled through the air, and, to jim's intense astonishment, a coil of rope fell heavily over his shoulders, and slipped to his waist. "a lasso, a lasso!" drusie shrieked. "look out; it is tightening." the warning came just in the nick of time. taken utterly by surprise, jim yet did not lose his presence of mind. grasping the rope with both hands, he kept the knot from growing tighter; then sliding through the noose with the slipperiness of an eel, he dropped to the ground. but unluckily he caught his foot in the noose, and although he immediately twisted it free, he fell sprawling to the ground. in that position he afforded a splendid mark to the enemy, who got two good shots at him before he could move. the others had wisely retreated to the thicket; and there jim, limping somewhat from his fall, joined them. "that lasso is a splendid idea," said drusie enthusiastically. "i wonder how hal ever came to think of it. i don't believe he has been ill at all, but only just pretending, on purpose to give us this lovely surprise." "it was a lovely surprise," said jim, laughing. "i thought i was done for that time. i say, drusie, we shall have to be awfully careful, or we shall be taken prisoners before we know where we are." "the only way is to keep at a safe distance and throw high," said drusie; "for the balls break as they fall, and if they drop on to his head they fill his eyes and his mouth so full of sand that he is obliged to take off his helmet and clear it all out." "well, we can't do better than follow the same plan again," said helen. "only, don't you remember what we did last year? some of us threw high, while some of us aimed at the loophole and blocked it up." "i've got a much better idea than that," said drusie. "i vote that we scatter, and creep as near to the fort as ever we can, and then when i give a low "coo-ee" we will all fire, and make a dash for the fort. and if we do that altogether, hal won't know which to aim at, and so one of us ought to get the flag.--what do you say, jim?" "i approve," he said; "only look out for that lasso trick." then they separated, jim and tommy working their way up the stream, while drusie wriggled through the thick undergrowth, with a view to approaching the fort at the back. to helen was given the easier task of skirting round the clearing, keeping well under cover of the bushes, and holding herself in readiness to dash into the open and fire when the signal was given. it seemed to her a task that was almost too easy, and, as she crouched under a bramble bush, it occurred to her that if she advanced gradually nearer to the fort she would be of much more use to her party than if she merely followed her instructions and remained where she was. accordingly, dropping on her hands and knees, she left the safe shelter of the denser part of the wilderness, and crawled out to a bush. [illustration: helen crouched under bush] encouraged by the dead silence that reigned within the fort, she flattered herself that her stealthy approach was unperceived by the enemy, and so, after pausing for a moment, she advanced still farther and gained another bush. crouching there, she cautiously raised her head a few inches and looked round. five or six yards farther on there was a thick clump of young willows: if she could reach that in safety, it would be a capital place in which to halt until drusie gave her signal. but, unfortunately, between it and where she now lurked grew a thick bed of nettles, which made it impossible to creep thither on her hands and knees. once more she glanced at the fort hal seemed to have gone to sleep, and emboldened by that thought she rose to her feet for a swift, silent rush to the willows. she was half-way across, and was feeling very well pleased, when something hurtled through the air with a loud, swishing sound, and the next moment she was jerked violently to the ground, while an exceedingly uncomfortable sensation round her waist told her that she had been caught by the lasso. hardly had she realized it when the strain on the rope tightened, and she was dragged through the bed of nettles. "help, help!" she shouted; "i am lassoed. drusie!--jim!" instantly the silent wilderness became alive with shouts and cries. "don't let the rope tighten," jim called, bursting through the bushes to her rescue. "slip out of it, helen." that was easier said than done, for her struggles had already drawn the noose so tight that, although she resisted to the utmost of her power, she was being hauled rapidly towards the fort. her captor showed no mercy; he did not even allow her to get to her feet; and though she clutched vainly at brambles and branches, and even at the stalks of the nettles, he was too strong for her. she was within a few yards of the fort when jim reached her side, and grasping the rope with both hands, he was in the act of widening the noose when he was struck heavily across the shoulders by a second lasso, and before he could even throw up his arms they were bound tightly to his side. then he was even in a worse plight than helen, for she, at least, had the use of her hands; and, though he flung himself backwards, and twisted and contorted his body in every conceivable way, he could not release himself. neither could he prevent himself from being drawn helplessly towards the fort; and it occurred to him that hal must have grown wonderfully strong lately, for he seemed to have no difficulty at all in dragging both his captives in together. "drusie, drusie!" he shouted despairingly, as he was flung to the ground, and, fighting every inch of the way, was dragged and bumped nearer and nearer to the fort. with a sound of breaking branches and rending of clothes, drusie was hastening to the rescue. she had not been able to come sooner, because she had penetrated so far into the dense thicket that she could not readily extricate herself. however, by leaving scraps of her clothing on every sharp thorn, and getting her hands and legs terribly scratched, she forced her way out at last; and keeping a wary outlook on the fort, she tried to unloose the knots that bound jim. "once let me get my arms free," he said, "and i shall be all right." it was clear that the fort had exhausted its stock of lassos, for no third coil of rope came flying out. instead, however, the enemy kept up a brisk rain of bullets, which harassed drusie very much, and prevented her from releasing either helen or jim. every now and again the wily enemy would stop firing, and give a tug to the two ropes which bound his unfortunate captives, and they would be jerked a foot or two nearer the fort. drusie was in despair; unless more help could be brought upon the scene, her two best men would be taken prisoners. "i am coming," shouted an eager voice at that moment; and tommy, dripping wet from head to foot, came running up, armed with as many big balls as he could carry. right up to the very walls of the fort he went, and threw his balls into it in quick succession. there was a muffled shout of indignation, which suddenly died away into a smothered choking sound, while, at the same time, the strain on the ropes relaxed. jim and helen did not lose a second in taking advantage of this, and, slipping back the running knots, they freed themselves. "let's capture the ropes," cried drusie, flinging herself upon them. but at this point the enemy, who had been choked and blinded for the moment, evidently recovered himself, for with the rapidity of lightning the two lassos were drawn back again. [illustration: tommy throwing balls] "get back," shouted jim, and, seizing helen by the hand, he retreated with all possible speed. and it was well they did so, for hardly had the lassos been drawn in than they were flung out again with so strong and well-directed an aim that, had jim not set them the example of flying, one or more of them would have been made prisoners again. they did not pause to take breath until they were within the shelter of the wilderness, where they threw themselves, hot and exhausted, on the ground. "this was a failure," said drusie, and she looked severely at helen, "and it was all your fault. you did not obey orders. if it had not been for tommy, the day would have been lost. you ought to be court-martialled, helen, and i daresay you will be later on when the fort is taken." "i am very sorry," said helen in a shamefaced manner, "but i thought it would be such a splendid thing if i could get right up to the fort before the attack began." "you should not think, then," said drusie. "you should only do what you are told.--and, by the way, tommy, what happened to you?" "i fell into the stream," he said ruefully. "helen's shrieks startled me so much that i lost my balance just as i was crossing it." "it was the narrowest escape we have all had yet," said jim. "i vote that we try the same plan again, and whatever you do, helen, don't go and spoil it again by thinking to do something clever." before helen could retort, tommy jumped up with a shout of defiance, and snatching up two balls that lay ready to his hand, discharged them right into the centre of a bush a few yards off. "what on earth are you about?" exclaimed an indignant voice; and hal, his face covered with sand and mud, sprang out of the bushes and made for his younger brother. but jim flung himself between them, and, aided by drusie, they brought hal, kicking and struggling, to the ground, and sat upon him. "the fort is ours," cried drusie joyfully. "run, helen, and get the flag before hal can release himself." helen dashed off to do as she was told, but as she was flying across the clearing she was suddenly brought up by a perfect hailstorm of bullets, which played round her in all directions, and caused her to fly back to the camp with the astounding information that it was not hal who had been defending the fort, but somebody else. "if you had not behaved like a set of duffers who had all lost their heads, i could have told you that myself," said hal crushingly. "but instead of letting me explain, you all flung yourselves upon me as if i were your greatest enemy." "well, of course, we thought that you were," said drusie. "we thought that you had sallied out from the fort to take us all prisoners. but if it is not you who have been in the fort all this time, who is it?" but that was just what none knew; and hal was as much in the dark as the rest. he had awaked a quarter of an hour ago, feeling all right again. "and so, i thought," he added, "that i had been rather a pig about this birthday, and that, if you would have me, i'd come out and defend the fort." "have you?" cried drusie joyfully. "of course, we will--won't we, jim?" "rather," jim said; and that word of assent was heartily echoed by both helen and tommy. "but i say, drusie, if it is not hal in the fort, who on earth can it be?" "i know," drusie said, after a moment of puzzled silence; "it must be our friend--jumbo's boy." when hal heard of the lassos he cried out that it was no less a person than dodds. "i know it is he," he cried excitedly, "for he is awfully keen about lassos. he has been reading about the cowboys in texas, and the other day he was practising on the lawn." "whoever it is," drusie said, "he defends the fort awfully well. i don't believe we shall ever capture it." "oh yes, we shall," said jim, "now that hal has come to help us." "just fancy dodds playing with you kids all the afternoon," hal said in a tone of surprise. "i wonder what ever made him do it." fired with the idea of showing dodds that the attacking party had received a valuable reinforcement, hal threw himself with ardour into the fight, and--drusie having resigned her post as captain in his favour--led sally after sally against the fort. but the aim of the lassos was so deadly, and the hailstorm of bullets so incessant, that time after time they were obliged to retire. once drusie, who had wriggled herself through the thick hawthorns at the back of the fort, was within an ace of taking the flag; but, just as she had climbed up on the roof, the defender, whose face was completely hidden by his helmet, made a grab at her, and she was obliged to fly for her life. "we must alter our tactics," hal said, as, hot and exhausted from the prolonged struggle, he withdrew his little army into the recesses of the wilderness. "we are not a bit nearer taking the fort than when we started." "not so near," said helen; "for our ammunition is giving out. we have only about twenty or thirty balls left. this is quite the hardest fight that we have ever had." "we must get the fort," hal said, setting his teeth. "we are four to one, and it will be a great disgrace to us if we don't." "but that one is such a one," drusie said. "i told you dodds was a splendid fellow, didn't i?" said hal eagerly. "but, all the same, i wish he was not quite as splendid now. but listen; i have got a glorious plan in my head, if we can only carry it out." but at that moment he was interrupted by a loud, piercing scream, which was followed by another and another; and, glancing hastily round, hal saw that tommy was missing from the council. "he was with us only a minute ago," drusie exclaimed. springing to their feet, they all rushed out, and there they saw tommy, bound and helpless, being hauled rapidly up to the very walls of the fort. he had brought his sad fate upon himself. as he was following the others into camp, he had seen the enemy spring out of the fort and run into the bushes, and, quick as thought, tommy had darted off to capture the flag during his absence. had he only reported what he had seen to his commander, a proper attack might have been hastily organized and the fort captured; but tommy was in such a hurry, and so anxious to gain all the glory for himself, that he slipped off without saying a word to the others. and when it was too late he found that the desertion of the fort was only a cleverly-planned trick on the part of its defender, who had crashed noisily into the bushes, in the hope of deceiving the attacking party into the belief that the fort was empty. as soon as he saw that tommy was going to fall into the trap, he slipped quietly back, and, lassoing tommy just outside, dragged him a prisoner into the fort. [illustration: tommy, lassoed] "serves him right," said jim. "he had no business to act on his own account like that." but it was all very well to say "serves him right." perhaps tommy had met with no better fate than he deserved, but he, nevertheless, brought about a very serious check to his party; for, while one of their number was in the hands of the enemy, no attempt to take the flag could be made. the prisoner must first be rescued. sometimes he was ransomed with ammunition. but their store was too low for them to be able to do that now. they could better afford to spare tommy than cannon-balls. meanwhile, complete silence reigned in the fort. the union jack waved triumphantly from the flagstaff, and the captive tommy had disappeared from view. "got you rather neatly, i think," his enemy had said, as he pulled him in. even in that moment of bitter humiliation tommy gave a start of surprise as he recognized his captor. drusie was right, for the defender of the fort was indeed jumbo's boy. "oh," tommy gasped out, as, breathless from the struggle he had just gone through, he stared at his captor, "it is you, is it? hal said he was sure it was dodds, but i am jolly glad that you are not dodds. he is conceited. i should not have liked to have been taken prisoner by him." "oh, you wouldn't, wouldn't you?" said the boy with a twinkle in his eyes. "but who told you that i--that dodds, i mean--was conceited? young danvers, i suppose?" "no; hal didn't. he likes dodds. but we others don't think very much of him." the boy laughed. "dodds is a great friend of mine," he said. "i shall tell him what you have said. but never mind that now. tell me what i am to do. can you be exchanged or ransomed, or are you allowed to escape if you can?" "i don't think they will ransom me," tommy said reflectively. but he was far too wary to tell the enemy why. "and i mayn't try to escape until one of them has touched me; and till i am rescued the fort can't be taken." "that's good news," said the boy. "i shan't let you be taken in a hurry. how will they try to rescue you?" tommy shook his head. he knew better than to allow himself to be drawn into giving any information, and the boy laughed at his caution, and climbing on to one of the two empty orange boxes, which were the only seats that the fort contained, he kept a good lookout. tommy climbed on to the other, and standing on tiptoe was just able to peer over the edge of the fort. the open space that surrounded it was deserted, and although tommy searched the bushes with anxious eyes he could not see any signs of his fellow-besiegers. he knew that hal must be exceedingly angry with him, and that if the attack on the fort could have been carried on while he was a prisoner, he would have been left there as a punishment. but, as it was, he comforted himself with the thought that, for the sake of capturing the flag, they would rescue him as soon as ever they could. presently his sharp eyes caught sight of drusie creeping from bush to bush. he was afraid that the boy had seen her too, for, stepping down, he picked up a lasso and coiled it in readiness. "hi, you," he said, imperiously addressing his prisoner. "you must get down and sit on the floor." "not unless you can make me," retorted tommy; "and if you are holding me down, you won't be able to fight." there was so much truth in that that the boy went back to his box again, and tommy was permitted to remain upon his. and now the situation grew exciting, for the rescuing party advanced in full force and without any real attempt at concealment. tommy wondered what was their plan of attack. the boy was puzzled too, and as they approached he glanced sharply from one to the other. drusie darted from bush to bush, a cannon-ball in either hand. hal, with nothing in his left hand, but with his right concealed in his pocket, followed her, and helen and jim skirmished about in a somewhat aimless fashion on their own account. but all the time they drew steadily nearer to the fort, and tommy watched their movements with the keenest interest, ready to scramble out directly he was rescued. when they were within ten or fifteen yards, hal and drusie paused, and the latter, with all the strength of which she was capable, hurled her cannon-balls in quick succession into the fort. the first was beautifully aimed. it broke on the boy's head, and for a moment choked and blinded him. the second struck tommy on the head, and caused him to tumble down from his box and lie for a moment sprawling on the floor. when he got to his feet again and climbed on to his perch, he saw, to his dismay, that things were apparently going very badly for them. the boy, disabled only for a moment by drusie's ball, had thrown his lasso with his usual sure and deadly aim, and hal was struggling in its noose. [illustration: "the boy had thrown his lasso with deadly aim."] drusie and helen were circling round him, and though their shrill war-whoops echoed through the wilderness, they were making no effort to help hal to escape. and as for jim, he had totally disappeared. tommy, however, knew enough of war to be aware that there was some reason for jim's sudden disappearance; and he presently detected a slight movement among the hawthorn bushes at the back of the fort, and guessed at once that, under cover of the noise that drusie and helen were making, jim was creeping up with the intention of rescuing him. and hal had probably allowed himself to be taken prisoner on purpose to distract attention from this manoeuvre. very gently and gradually, so as not to arouse the suspicions of his captor, tommy edged his box to the corner nearest the bushes, so that jim might give him the touch that would bring freedom with as little danger to himself as possible. meanwhile, hal was making a valiant struggle. as tommy had already guessed, he had allowed himself to be taken prisoner; but, at the same time, he did not wish to be dragged nearer the fort than he could help. and though, to all appearance, he was a prisoner, he held something in his right hand by means of which he hoped to sever his bonds when he chose. he was very nearly as strong as his enemy, and, as he had managed to keep both his arms free, he hauled back the rope with all his might and main. but, in spite of his efforts, he was gradually losing ground, and, quite forgetting how important it was that the enemy should be kept in ignorance of the stratagem that was being carried out in the rear, he shouted to jim to make haste. luckily, however, drusie kept her wits about her, and drowned the latter half of his sentence by a terrific yell, in which helen promptly joined. and under cover of the noise they made jim tore his way through the thicket, and came right up to the very walls of the fort. "rescued!" he shouted, tapping tommy on the arm, and immediately diving back into the bushes. "rescued!" tommy repeated with a glad yell of triumph; and he was over the wall and after jim like a flash. but that his hands were full, the boy would have shaken his fist at his escaping prisoner. as it was, he was obliged to content himself with the thought that his new prisoner was more worth having than his old one. but even as that thought passed through his mind hal whipped out a knife, and, opening the biggest blade, began to hack away at the rope. the rope was thick and the knife was blunt, and though hal sawed away with desperate haste the strands parted with tantalizing slowness; thus, being less able to offer resistance than before, he was hauled rapidly towards the fort. he was barely five yards away from it when the last strand parted, and, with the noose still round his waist, hal scrambled to his feet. ducking to avoid a second lasso, which his disappointed foe hurled after him, he set out at full speed for the camp, and then flung himself exhausted upon the ground. "that was hottish work," he said, glancing round at his little army to see that none were missing, "and we had some tremendously narrow escapes. but the rescue was carried out splendidly. you all did just what you were told, and no more." praise from hal was rare, and the three recipients of it looked exceedingly gratified. and they felt that they deserved the commendation, for drusie and helen were perfectly hoarse with shouting, and jim's face and hands and clothes were torn and scratched by thorns. and tommy, to his secret delight, got off with a very slight reprimand, for they were all so proud of the clever way in which they had rescued him that they forgave him for having allowed himself to be taken prisoner. the news that it was their friend, and not dodds, who was defending the fort was received with satisfaction by drusie and jim, but with incredulity by hal. "why, i know it is dodds," he said. "though his face is hidden by his helmet, i recognized the suit of clothes that he had on." "then, i tell you what it is," drusie cried. "our friend and dodds are the same." "well, we will find out all about that presently," said hal, who was so eager to take the stubborn fort that he did not care very much who held it. "carried the fort must be, and within the next half-hour." "listen," he said, sitting bolt upright; "i have got a rattling good plan in my head, but," throwing a severe glance in tommy's direction, "there must be no more disobedience, or the whole thing will be spoiled." tommy looked properly abashed, and hal went on. "i mean to hose dodds out of the fort." "hose him out!" drusie and jim echoed in astonishment. "what do you mean, hal?" "for goodness' sake, take care," hal remonstrated. "if you shout like that he'll hear, and the whole thing will be spoiled." then hal proceeded to explain in rapid undertones what he meant. "i am going to bring up the water-barrel, pump it full from the stream, fit the biggest hose to it, and let fly into the fort." his four soldiers held their breath for a moment, and gazed at their captain with dumb admiration. "it's a gorgeous plan," said helen at last. "i think it ought to answer," hal said. "i have been thinking it out for some time. i shall go for it, but i will tell you what you have to do while i am away." for the next quarter of an hour silence reigned in the camp--a silence so unbroken that the enemy who lay waiting in the fort became more watchful with every passing moment. he distrusted such a complete cessation of hostilities. it could only mean that an attack of unusual fierceness was being planned; and so, that it might not find him unprepared, he cast an eye round the fort to see if he could strengthen it in any way. but it was already as strong as it could be made; and when he was satisfied on that point, he took stock of his ammunition, and made a fresh noose for the lasso which hal had cut. just as he had finished a beautiful slip knot, his ear was caught by a low whistle. ducking to avoid the shot for which it might be the signal, he listened again. no shot followed; the whistle was twice repeated. standing upright again, the boy glanced hastily round. he fancied that the whistle came from the direction of the stream. he was still wondering what it meant, when another whistle, another, and yet another, and all from different directions, echoed round the fort. each, like the first, was repeated twice, but yet nothing happened. he strained his eyes this way and that, and then suddenly fitted a couple of bullets into his catapult, and fired into some bushes on the left. a sharp but quickly-suppressed squeal of pain was the result. again and again he fired, but only to be met by a heroic silence. either his shots missed or his victim refused to cry out. suddenly hal's voice rang out. "one!" he shouted. there was a pause. "good," thought the boy. "at three the fun begins. kind of them to give me warning." confident that he would have a few moments' breathing space, his watchful vigilance relaxed. instead of keeping a sharp lookout, he ran his eye once more over his defences, and was considering whether it would be better to use the shorter or the longer lasso, when hal's voice made itself heard again. "two!" he shouted with the full force of his lungs, and simultaneously a wild war-whoop went up from his army. there was the sound of breaking branches, and from different quarters of the wood four of the besiegers broke into the open and advanced at the double. this movement was the outcome of a deeply-laid plan of hal's. he knew that if an advance was made at the word "two" the fort would be taken completely by surprise, and under cover of the attack from the front he was, in the meantime, bringing the heavy gun--the water-barrel--into position at the rear. his surmise proved correct. the holder of the fort was taken at a disadvantage; he fired wildly in consequence, and had the mortification of perceiving that not one of his shots took effect. the attacking party, of whom hal was not one, reserved their fire, and seemed bent upon coming to close quarters. grimly determined to make it warm for them when they did close with him, the defender sprang on to the roof, and, regardless of the fact that he was exposing himself recklessly, took up his stand by the flagstaff, and, throwing down his catapult, whirled his lasso wildly round his head. on came the attacking party; he faced them, and with a coolness that did him credit at such a critical moment he picked out the one that he could most easily capture, and was in the act of hurling the lasso, when, up from the very midst of the hawthorn bushes at the back of the fort, hal's voice was heard again. "three!" he shouted: and turning like lightning to meet this fresh foe, who he guessed would prove the most formidable, the boy saw an immense jet of water spurt high into the air. twenty feet it rose, and then descended full and fair upon his head. a mingled shout of defiance and joy told hal that his aim had been good, and he continued to ply the hose. at the same moment eight cannon-balls, five at least of which hit him, were thrown at the harassed defender, whose helmet was now full of sand and water. choking and gasping and almost unable to see, so great was the force with which the stream was playing upon his face, the boy grasped the flag, determined not to surrender. but the enemy now surrounded the fort on all sides, and were already scaling the walls. both jim and drusie were anxious to gain the glory of capturing the flag, and a desperate fight raged round the flagstaff. twice drusie laid hands upon it, and twice she was driven back. the hose played upon besieged and besiegers alike, and all the combatants were being drenched to the skin. but the battle continued to rage, and, though he was hampered by his helmet and sorely outnumbered, the valour displayed by the holder of the fort might yet have gained him the day, if jim, warned by a cry from hal that the water in the barrel was giving out, had not succeeded in grasping the flagstaff. "jump with it, jim, jump!" drusie cried, and flung herself between them. but with one hand the boy tossed her aside, while with the other he clutched at the flag. there was a short tug of war; then a sharp sound of tearing cloth; and while the gallant defender toppled backwards into the stream, carrying the greater part of the flag with him, jim fell down on the other side, bearing with him the flagstaff and the fluttering remnant of the union jack. both sides would certainly have claimed the victory, for both held a portion of the flag, had not drusie, scrambling out of the hawthorn bushes into which she had been tossed, jumped into the middle of the stream, and snatched the part that he still held out of the hand of the prostrate, half-drowned enemy. then the fort had no choice but to capitulate, and the day was won by the besiegers. "you all fought jolly well," said the holder of the fort, calmly sitting upright in the middle of the stream and removing his helmet, thereby disclosing to view the face of the boy who had come to jumbo's rescue. "it has been warm work from first to last. it is quite jolly to sit here and get cool." then hal, jubilant at the success which had attended his manoeuvre, emerged from the hawthorn bushes in which he had been concealed, and congratulated his late enemy on the splendid stand which the fort had made. "it ought not to have been taken," dodds said. "but that hose upset me completely; it came as such a tremendous surprise." "i say," said jim, who was standing on the bank panting from his exertions, "are you really dodds?" "that's my name," said the boy with a polite flourish of his helmet; "and i hear," glancing round at them all with an amused twinkle in his eyes, "that none of you like me." "oh, but we didn't know that you were dodds," drusie hastened to explain. "it was dodds we did not like, not you." "well, as i am dodds, you can't like me if you don't like him," the boy said with a laugh, in which they all were obliged to join, as they realized that they had really been liking dodds all the time without knowing it. "well, as i am cool now," dodds said, getting up and wading to the bank, "i think i'll go and put on some dry things. and i should think that you had better do the same. and then, isn't there a birthday feast to be eaten? i rather think i heard something about it too. you know, i was fishing here one day, and you were all in the fort talking about the fight, and wondering if hal meant to hold it, and it struck me that it would be rather a good idea if i held it in his place. and so i just did. and jolly good fun it has been too.--don't you think so, hal? or do you still think that playing with kids is slow work?" at that hal began to grow red, and drusie, who knew that he was sorry for that and for many other foolish things that he had said, interposed quickly. "i think we had better go home and change too," she said; "and then we will all meet in the summer-house for the feast." "am i asked too?" said dodds, who was not shy. "of course," they all cried. "right you are then," said dodds, shaking himself and squaring his shoulders for a run. "i'll bring some contributions to the feast. let's see who'll get changed and be there first. i bet you i will." but as it happened, his five hosts and hostesses were the first to reach the summer-house; and while they waited for their guest hal took a small baby guinea-pig from his pocket, and gave it to the astonished, delighted drusie. "my birthday present to you, drusie. i got it down at the village this afternoon. isn't it a beauty?" "oh, it's a darling!" drusie cried, covering both the guinea-pig and hal with kisses. "how awfully, awfully good of you, hal! is it really my very, very own?" "yes, rather," said hal, looking very gratified at her delight. "i went down into the village this afternoon and got it. i paid for it too," he added proudly. "nurse advanced me the money." then dodds arrived with a basketful of good things for the feast, and a very merry feast it was. and by the time it was finished drusie and jim wondered how they could ever have thought that dodds was not a nice boy. hal was not surprised that they should like dodds, but he was rather astonished to find how much dodds got to like them. hal had thought that dodds would be far too big and grown up to care about playing with girls; but when he found out that dodds actually enjoyed playing cricket with them, and thought a great deal of drusie's bowling and helen's smart fielding, he began to think that he had made a mistake in supposing that he had grown too old for them. so he ceased to speak to them as if he were years and years older than all of them put together, and remembered that he was drusie's twin-brother, and that he was very fond of her. the end. [transcriber's note: bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and italic text is surrounded by _underscores_.] our little canadian cousin the little cousin series (trade mark) each volume illustrated with six or more full-page plates in tint. cloth, 12mo, with decorative cover, per volume, 60 cents list of titles by mary hazelton wade (unless otherwise indicated) =our little african cousin= =our little alaskan cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little arabian cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little armenian cousin= by constance f. curlewis =our little australian cousin= =our little brazilian cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little brown cousin= =our little canadian cousin= by elizabeth r. macdonald =our little chinese cousin= by isaac taylor headland =our little cuban cousin= =our little dutch cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little egyptian cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little english cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little eskimo cousin= =our little french cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little german cousin= =our little greek cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little hawaiian cousin= =our little hindu cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little indian cousin= =our little irish cousin= =our little italian cousin= =our little japanese cousin= =our little jewish cousin= =our little korean cousin= by h. lee m. pike =our little mexican cousin= by edward c. butler =our little norwegian cousin= =our little panama cousin= by h. lee m. pike =our little philippine cousin= =our little porto rican cousin= =our little russian cousin= =our little scotch cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little siamese cousin= =our little spanish cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little swedish cousin= by claire m. coburn =our little swiss cousin= =our little turkish cousin= l. c. page & company new england building, boston, mass. [illustration: "two children sat on the grass under the lilacs" (_see page 2_)] our little canadian cousin by elizabeth roberts macdonald _illustrated by_ l. j. bridgman [illustration] boston l. c. page & company _publishers_ _copyright, 1904_ by l. c. page & company (incorporated) _all rights reserved_ published july, 1904 fifth impression, june, 1908 preface in "our little canadian cousin," my intention has been to tell, in a general way, although with a defined local setting, the story of canadian home life. to canadians, _home life_ means not merely sitting at a huge fireplace, or brewing and baking in a wide country kitchen, or dancing of an evening, or teaching, or sewing; but it means the great outdoor life--sleighing, skating, snow-shoeing, hunting, canoeing, and, above all, "camping out"--the joys that belong to a vast, uncrowded country, where there is "room to play." this wide and beautiful canadian dominion possesses, of course, a great variety of climate and of scenery. to treat at all adequately of those things, or of the country's picturesque and romantic history, would require far more scope than is afforded by this one small story. list of illustrations page "two children sat on the grass under the lilacs" (_see page 2_) _frontispiece_ fredericton 22 in the government house grounds 28 "the tree-clad shores wore a fairy glamour" 47 "a great bonfire was built" 64 "nothing, dora thought, could be more beautiful than those woods in winter" 99 our little canadian cousin chapter i. it was the very first day of the loveliest month in the year. i suppose every month has its defenders, or, at least, its apologists, but june--june in canada--has surely no need of either. and this particular morning was of the best and brightest. the garden at the back of mr. merrithew's house was sweet with the scent of newly blossomed lilacs, and the freshness of young grass. the light green of the elms was as yet undimmed by the dust of summer, and the air was like the elixir of life. two children sat on the grass under the lilacs, making dandelion chains and talking happily. jack, a little fair-haired boy of six, was noted for his queer speeches and quaint ideas. his sister marjorie was just twice his age, but they were closest chums, and delighted in building all sorts of air-castles together. this afternoon, when she had finished a chain of marvellous length, she leant back against the lilac-trees and said, with a sigh of happiness: "now, jack, let's make plans!" "all right," jack answered, solemnly. "let's plan about going to quebec next winter." "oh, jackie! don't let's plan about winter on the first day of june! there's all the lovely, lovely summer to talk about,--and i know two fine things that are going to happen." "all right!" said jackie again. it was his favourite expression. "i know one of them; daddy told me this morning. it's about cousin dora coming to stay with us." "yes--isn't it good? she's coming for a whole year, while uncle and aunt go out to british columbia,--to make him well, you know." "i wish she was a little boy," said jackie, thoughtfully. "but if she's like you, she'll be all right, margie. what's the other nice thing you know?" "oh, you must try to guess, dear! come up in the summer-house; it's so cosy there, and i'll give you three guesses. it's something that will happen in july or august, and we are _all_ in it, father and mother and you and cousin dora, and a few other people." they strolled up to the vine-covered summer-house, and settled down on its broad seat, while jack cudgelled his brains for an idea as to a possible good time. "is it a picnic?" he asked at last. marjorie laughed. "oh, ever so much better than that," she cried. "try again." "is it--is it--a visit to the seaside?" "no; even better than that." "is it a pony to take us all driving?" "no, no. that's your last guess. shall i tell you?" "ah, yes, please do!" "well,--mother says, if we do well at school till the holidays, and everything turns out right, she and father--will--take us camping!" "camping? camping out? really in tents? oh, good, good!" and jackie, the solemn, was moved to the extent of executing a little dance of glee on the garden path. "camping out" is a favourite way of spending the summer holiday-time among canadians. many, being luxurious in their tastes, build tiny houses and call them camps, but the true and only genuine "camping" is done under canvas, and its devotees care not for other kinds. as our little new brunswickers were talking of all its possible joys, a sweet voice called them from the door of the big brick house. "marjorie! jack! do you want to come for a walk with mother?" there was no hesitation in answering this invitation. the children rushed pell-mell down the garden path, endangering the swaying buds of the long-stemmed lilies on either side. mrs. merrithew stood waiting for them, a tall, plump lady in gray, with quantities of beautiful brown hair. she carried a small basket and trowel, at sight of which the children clapped their hands. "are we going to the woods, mother?" marjorie cried, and "may i take my cart and my spade?" asked jackie. "yes, dearies," mrs. merrithew answered. "we have three hours before tea-time, and saturday wouldn't be much of a holiday without the woods. put on your big hats, and jack can bring his cart and spade, and marjorie can carry the cookies." "oh, please let me haul the cookies in my cart," said jack. "gentlemen shouldn't let ladies carry things, father says,--but margie, you _may_ carry the spade if you want something in your hands very much!" "all right, boy," laughed marjorie. "i certainly do like something in my hands, and a spade will look much more ladylike than a cooky-bag!" the big brick house from which mrs. merrithew and the children set out on their walk stood on one of the back streets of a little new brunswick city,--a very small but beautiful city, built on a wooded point that juts out into the bright waters of the st. john river. of this river the little canadian cousins are justly proud, for, from its source in the wilds of quebec to its outlet on the bay of fundy, it is indeed "a thing of beauty and a joy for ever." our little party soon left the streets, went through a wide green space covered with venerable maples, crossed a tiny stream and a railway track, and entered the woods that almost covered the low hill behind the town. though it was really but one hill, the various roads that subdivided it gave it various names, some derived from the settlements they led to, and some from buildings on the way. it was through the woods of "college hill" that marjorie and jack and their mother wandered. being all good walkers, they were soon back of the fine old college, which stands looking gravely out over the tree-embowered town to the broad blue river. when the delicious green and amber shadows of the woods were reached, little jack at once began to search for fairies. marjorie contented herself with looking for wild flowers, and mrs. merrithew sought for ferns young enough to transplant to her garden. "i am afraid i have left it rather late," she said at last. "they are all rather too well-grown to stand moving. but i will try a few of the smallest. what luck have my chicks had? any fairies, jackie?" jackie lifted a flushed face from its inspection of a tiny hole in the trunk of a fir-tree. "no fairies _yet_, mother; but i think one lives in here, only she won't come out while i am watching." mrs. merrithew smiled sympathetically. she heartily agreed with the writer (though she could not remember who it was) who said: "i always expect to find something wonderful, unheard-of, in a wood." "in olden days," she said, "people believed that there were beautiful wood-spirits, called dryads, who had their homes in trees. they were larger than most fairies, and yet they were a kind of fairy." "please tell more about them, mother," said marjorie, coming up with her hands full of yellow, speckled adder's-tongue. "i know very little more, i am sorry to say," their mother answered, laughing. "like jackie with _his_ fairies, i have always hoped to see one, but never have as yet." "are they good things?" jackie asked, "or would they frighten little boys?" "oh, my dear, they were always said to be kind and beautiful, and rather timid, more apt to be frightened themselves than to frighten any one else. but remember, dears, mother did not say there _were_ such things, but only that people used to think so." "please tell us a story about one, mother," jack pleaded. but mrs. merrithew shook her head. "we will keep the story for some other time," she said. "let us have a cooky now, and a little rest, before we go home." this proposal was readily agreed to. they chose a comfortable spot where a little group of white birches gave them backs on which to lean, opened the precious bag, and were soon well occupied with its crisp and toothsome contents. mrs. merrithew, knowing well that little folk are generally troubled with a wonderful thirst, had also brought a cup and a bottle of lemonade. how doubly delicious things tasted in the clear, spicy air of the woods! by the time jack had disposed of his sixth cooky he felt ready for conversation. "mother," he said, "i wish you would tell us all about dora." "all about dora, dearie? that would take a long time, i expect. but it would _not_ take long to tell you all that i know about her. i have only seen her twice, and on one of those occasions she was a baby a month old, and the next time only two years,--and as she is now, i do not know her at all." "but--oh, you know, mother--tell us about her father and mother, and her home, and everything like that. it makes her more interesting," urged marjorie. mrs. merrithew saw that she was to be beguiled into a story in any case, so she smiled and resigned herself to her fate. "well, my dears, i know a great many things about dora's father, for he is my only brother, and we were together almost constantly until we were both grown up. then your uncle archie, who had studied electrical engineering, went up to montreal, and there secured a good position. he had only been there a short time when he met a very charming young lady" ("_this_ sounds quite like a book-story," marjorie here interposed) "by whom he was greatly attracted. she was partly french, her mother having been a lady of old french family. but her father was an english officer, of the strongest english feelings, so this charming young lady (whose name was denise allingham) combined the characteristics--at least all the best characteristics--of both races. do you know what that means, jackie?" jack nodded, thoughtfully. "i think so, mother. i think it means that she--that young lady--had all the nicenesses of the french and all the goodnesses of the english." "that is just it, my dear, and a very delicate distinction, too," cried his mother, clapping her hands in approval, while jackie beamed with delight. "well, to continue: miss denise allingham, when your uncle archie met her, was an orphan, and not well off. she was teaching in an english family, and not, i think, very happy in her work. she and your uncle had only known each other about a year when they were married." "and lived happily ever after?" marjorie asked. mrs. merrithew considered a moment, then: "yes, i am sure i can say so," she answered. "they have had some business troubles, and a good deal of sickness, but still they have been happy through it all. and they have one dear little daughter, whom they love devotedly, and who is named 'dora denise,' after her mother and--who else?" "you, mother, you," both children exclaimed. "the chief trouble this happy trio has had," mrs. merrithew continued, "has been the delicate health of your uncle. for the last four years he has not been strong. twice they have all three gone away for his health, and now the doctors have ordered him to try the delightful climate of british columbia, and to spend at least a year there if it agrees with him. he needs all his wife's attention this time, and that, my dears, is why little dora denise carman is coming to spend a year with her new brunswick relations. "and now, chicks, look at that slanting, golden light through the trees. that means tea-time, and homeward-bound!" chapter ii. it was a tired and homesick little girl that mr. merrithew helped out of the coach and led up the steps of his house, about a fortnight after our story opens. the journey from montreal had been long and lonely, the parting from her parents hard, and the thought of meeting the unknown relatives had weighed upon her mind and helped to make her unusually subdued. but when the door of the big brick house (which had been named by the neighbours when it was the only brick house on the street, and the largest one in town) opened, and her aunt's motherly arms closed around her, while marjorie's rosy, laughing face and jackie's fair, cherubic one beamed on her in greeting, her spirits began to revive. the greeting was so warm and kind, and the joy at her coming so genuine, that her fatigue seemed turned, as by magic, to a pleasant restfulness, and her homesickness was lost in this bright home atmosphere. mrs. merrithew took the little newcomer to her room, had her trunks settled conveniently, and then left her to prepare for the late tea which was waiting for them all. when dora was ready, she sat down in the little armchair that stood near a table piled with books, and looked about her contentedly. there was an air of solid comfort and cosiness about this house that rested her. this room--which her aunt had told her was just opposite marjorie's--was all furnished in the softest shades of brown and blue, her favourite colours. the carpet was brown, with a very small spray of blue here and there; the wallpaper was lighter, almost creamy, brown, with a dainty harebell pattern, and the curtains had a rich brown background with various persian stripes, in which blue and cream and gold predominated. the bed, to her great delight, had a top-piece, and a canopy of blue-flowered chintz, and the little dressing-table was draped to match it. just over the side of the bed was a book-shelf, quite empty, waiting for her favourite books. while she sat and looked about in admiration, the door was pushed gently open, and a plump maltese kitten came in, gazed at her doubtfully a moment, and then climbed on her lap. then marjorie's bright face appeared at the door, and, "may i come in?" she asked. "oh, please do," dora cried. "kitty has made friends with me already, and i think that must be a good omen." marjorie laughed, as she patted the little bunch of blue-gray fur in dora's lap. "_jackie_ has made friends with you already," she said, "and i think that is a better omen still. he told mother he thought you were 'the beautifulest girl he ever saw.'" dora's eyes opened wide with astonishment. "it is the first time i ever was called beautiful," she said, "let alone 'beautifulest.' what a dear boy jack must be." then they both laughed, and marjorie, obeying one of her sudden impulses, threw her arms around dora's neck and gave her a cousinly hug. "you and i will be friends, too," she said. "i knew it as soon as i looked at you." dora's dark brown eyes looked gravely into marjorie's blue ones. she seemed to be taking the proposition very seriously. "i have always wished for a real friend, or a twin sister," she said, thoughtfully. "the twin sister is an impossibility, and i have never before seen a girl that i wanted for a great, _great_ friend. but you,--ah, yes! you are like my father, and besides, we are cousins, and that makes us understand each other. let us be friends." she held out her hand with a little gesture which reminded marjorie that this pale, dark-haired cousin was the descendant of many french _grandes dames_. she clasped the slender hand with her own plump fingers, and shook it heartily. so, in girlish romance and sudden resolution, the little maids sealed a compact which was never broken, and began a friendship which lasted and grew in beauty and strength all through their lives. at the breakfast-table the next morning there was a merry discussion as to what should be done first to amuse dora. jackie, who had invited her to sit beside him and beamed at her approvingly over his porridge and cream, suggested a walk to his favourite candy-store and the purchase of some sticks of "pure chocolate." marjorie proposed a picnic at old government house. this was approved of, but postponed for a day or two to allow for preparations and invitations. mr. merrithew said "let us go shooting bears," but even jackie did not second this astounding proposition. as usual, it was "mother" who offered the most feasible plan. "suppose, this morning," she said, "you just help dora unpack, and make her thoroughly at home in the house and garden; then this afternoon perhaps your father will take you for a walk, and show dora the house where mrs. ewing lived, and any other interesting places. that would do for to-day, wouldn't it? then, day after to-morrow we could have the picnic; and for the next week i have a magnificent idea, but i want to talk it over with your father," and she nodded and smiled at that gentleman in a way which made him almost as curious as the children. "that's the way with mother," marjorie said to dora after breakfast. "she never ends things up. there is always another lovely plan just ahead, no matter how many you know about already." and mr. merrithew, who overheard the remark, thought that perhaps this was part of the secret of his wife's unfailing youthfulness both in looks and spirits. the walk that afternoon was one which dora always remembered. mr. merrithew had, as jackie said, "the splendidest way of splaining things," and found something of interest to relate about almost every street of the little city. they went through the beautiful cathedral, and he told them how it had been built through the earnest efforts of the well-known and venerated bishop medley, who was afterward metropolitan of canada. then they wandered down the street along the river, and saw the double house where mrs. ewing (whose stories are loved as much in the united states and in canada as they are in england) lived for a time, and where she wrote. [illustration: fredericton] she had called this house "rika dom," which means "river house," and had written in many of her letters of the beautiful river on which it looked, and the gnarled old willows on the bank just in front of her windows. these willows she had often sketched, and dora carried away a spray of the pale gray-green leaves, in memory of her favourite story-writer. it was one of dora's ambitions, kept secret hitherto, but now confided to marjorie, to write stories "something like mrs. ewing's." they saw, too, the picturesque cottage in which a certain quaint old lady had attained to the ripe age of a hundred and six years,--a record of which fredericton was justly proud. this venerable dame had been addicted to the unlimited eating of apples, and her motto--she was not a grammatical old lady!--had been (according to tradition), "apples never hurts nobody." they spent some time in the legislative library, where was enshrined a treasure in the shape of a magnificent copy of audubon's books of birds. then in the departmental buildings, near by, there was a small but well-arranged museum of stuffed birds and beasts, all canadian, and most of them from new brunswick. there were other things, too, to see, and many anecdotes to hear, so that it was a somewhat tired, though happy and hungry party which trudged home just in time for tea. and such a tea, suited to hearty outdoor appetites born of the good canadian air! there were fresh eggs, made into a white and golden omelette by mrs. merrithew's own hands; for even debby, who had cooked for the family all their lives, owned that an omelette like mrs. merrithew's she could not manage,--"no, _sir_, not if i was to cook day and night." there was golden honey in the comb; there was johnny-cake, hot and yellow and melting in your mouth; strawberry jam that tasted almost as good as the fresh fruit itself; ginger-cake, dark and rich and spicy; milk that was almost cream for the children, and steaming fragrant coffee for their elders. "it is rather nice to get _good and hungry_," jackie gravely observed,--"that is, if you have plenty in the house to eat. i think life would be very dull without meals." these philosophical remarks rather astonished dora, who was not yet accustomed to the contrast between jack's sage reflections and his tender years. just now they seemed especially funny, because he was almost falling asleep while he talked. when mrs. merrithew saw him nodding, she rang, and the nurse--who, like debby, was a family institution--came in and carried him off in her stalwart arms, to his little white bed. when his mother stole up a little later to give him a final good-night kiss, she heard susan singing and paused at the door to listen. "now the day is over" was ended, and then a drowsy voice murmured: "now, susan, my very favourite song!" and then susan sang, in her soft, crooning voice "the maple-leaf, the maple-leaf, the maple-leaf for ever!" chapter iii. the day of the picnic was hot, very hot, for june, but that did not discourage the younger picnickers at all. "it will be pretty warm on the river," mr. merrithew remarked, tentatively, as they sat at dinner. the dining-room windows were open, and the soft air, sweet with the scent of lilacs, blew the white curtains into the room with lazy puffs. "it will be so lovely when we get to government house, though," marjorie cried. "there is always a breeze up there, father, and there are plenty of trees, and three summer-houses, and that big veranda. oh, i think it will be perfect." "yes, daddy, i do, too! i think it will be _gorlious_!" said jackie. when, after much hurrying about, telephoning to tardy members of the party, and good-natured discussion as to the arrangement of the canoe-loads, they were at last afloat on the blue, shining river, they all agreed with jack. dora was charmed with the slender milicete canoes. she had seen chiefly canvas and wooden ones. her father, indeed, had owned a bark canoe, but it was of much heavier and broader build than these slim beauties, that glided through the water like fairy craft, impelled this way or that by the slightest turn of the steersman's wrist. [illustration: in the government house grounds] they landed just back of government house, the grounds of which sloped down to the water. the house is a long, stone building, with a broad veranda at the back, and in front nearly covered with virginia creeper. at the time of the picnic it was empty, and in charge of a caretaker, who lived in a small cottage on the grounds. when a suitable spot had been chosen for tea, and the baskets piled close by, mrs. merrithew proposed an excursion through the house, and mr. merrithew went with jackie to procure the key. when he returned, they all trooped merrily up the front steps, and soon were dispersed through the great echoing halls and lofty rooms. most of the grown people of the party had danced here at many a stately ball, for in those days government house had been kept up in the good old-fashioned way. marjorie and jack delighted in hearing their mother tell of her "coming out" at one of these balls, and how she had been so proud of her first train that she had danced without holding it up, which must have been trying for her partners. dora was greatly interested in seeing the room where king edward, then the slim young prince of wales, had slept, on the occasion of his visit to fredericton. when the furniture of government house was auctioned, a few years before our story opens, the pieces from this room, which should have been kept together as of historic interest, were scattered about among various private purchasers. mrs. merrithew described them to dora, who wished she could have seen the great bed, so wide that it was almost square, with its canopy and drapings of rich crimson, and its gilt "prince of wales feathers," and heavy gold cords and tassels. when they came out of the dim, cool house into the warm air, the elders looked apprehensively at the heavy black clouds which had gathered in the west. "that looks ominous," one of the gentlemen said. "there will certainly be thunder before night." thunder! that was marjorie's horror! her round, rosy face grew pale, and she clung tightly to her mother's arm. the men and matrons held a hurried consultation, and decided that the storm was probably not very near, and that it would be safe to wait for tea if they hurried things a little. it would be a terrible disappointment to the children (all, at least, but marjorie!) to be hurried away without "the picnic part of the picnic." so they all bustled about, and in a short time the cloth was spread, and well covered with good things. the fire behaved well, as if knowing the need of haste, and the coffee was soon made, and as delicious as picnic coffee, by some apparent miracle, generally is. by the time the repast was over, the clouds had drawn closer, the air was more sultry, and even the most optimistic admitted that it was high time to start for home. the canoes were quickly loaded, the best canoe-men took the paddles, and soon they were darting swiftly down-river, running a race with the clouds. in spite of their best speed, however, the storm broke before they reached their journey's end. the thunder growled and muttered, a few bright flashes lit up the sultry sky, and just as they landed a tremendous peal caused the most courageous to look grave, while poor marjorie could scarcely breathe from terror. then the rain came, and the pretty muslin dresses and flower-trimmed hats looked very dejected before their wearers were safely housed! still, no one was the worse for that little wetting, marjorie recovered from her fright as soon as she could nestle down in a dark room with her head in her mother's lap, and they all agreed with jackie that it _had_ been "a gorlious time." before the children went to bed mrs. merrithew told them about the plan which she had mentioned two days before, and to which mr. merrithew had heartily consented. he was to take a whole holiday, on thursday of the following week, and drive them all up to the indian village, about thirteen miles above town, to see the corpus christi celebrations. corpus christi, a well-known festival in the roman catholic church, is one which has been chosen by the indians for special celebration. as it comes in june, and that is such a pleasant time for little excursions, many drive to the indian village from fredericton and from the surrounding country, to see the milicetes in their holiday mood. the day being fresh and lovely, with no clouds but tiny white ones in the sky, mr. and mrs. merrithew and the three children set off early on thursday morning. they had a roomy two-seated carriage, and two big brisk, white horses, plenty of wraps and umbrellas in case history should repeat itself with another storm, and an ample basket of dainties. the road, winding along the river-bank most of the the way, was excellent, and the scenery dora thought prettier than any she had seen. the river was smooth as a mirror, reflecting every tree and bush on its banks. little islands, green and tree-crested, were scattered all along its shining length. it was almost time for the service when they reached the picturesque little village which went climbing bravely up its hill to the chapel and priest's house near the top. the horses were taken charge of by a sedate young half-breed, evidently proud of his office as the "priest's man," and our party at once filed into the chapel. a plain enough little structure in itself, to-day it was beautiful with green boughs, ferns, and flowers. the congregation consisted chiefly of indians and half-breeds, with a scattering of interested visitors. most of the natives were clad in gorgeous finery, some of the older ones having really handsome beaded suits and beautifully worked moccasins, while others were grotesque in their queer combination of the clothes of civilization and savagery. the priest, a tall, good-looking man with piercing eyes, sang high mass, and then the procession formed. first came an altar-boy carrying a cross, then six boys with lighted tapers, and two walking backward scattering boughs. these were followed by the priest bearing the host and sheltered by a canopy which four altar-boys carried. these boys were all indians, and the mild well-featured milicete faces had lost their stolidity, and were lit up with an expression of half-mystic adoration. after them came the congregation, bare-headed, and singing as they walked. marjorie and dora clasped hands as they followed, their eyes shining with excitement. they went down the road and entered a schoolhouse not far from the church, where the host was placed in a little tabernacle of green boughs while the service was continued. then the procession re-formed and went back to the church. after they had disbanded, the indians scattered to their houses to prepare for the various other events of the day. mr. and mrs. merrithew and the children were carried off by the priest (whom mr. merrithew knew well) to have dinner with him in his house near the chapel. the children stood a little in awe of him at first, but he was so companionable and kind that they were soon quite at their ease. his mother, who kept house for him, was evidently very proud of her son, and did her best to entertain his visitors worthily. the house was rather bare, but clean as wax and the perfection of neatness, while the repast, spread on the whitest of linen, was excellent, and not without some rather unusual dainties,--such as candied fruits of many colours for the children, and guava jelly brought out especially in mrs. merrithew's honour. after dinner the good father offered to show them through the village, and they set out together on a tour of inspection. all the full-grown indians, the priest told them, were holding a pow-wow in the schoolhouse, for the purpose of electing a chief. "there is no need of my being there this afternoon," he said, in answer to mr. merrithew's inquiry; "but this evening, when they have their feast and their games,--ah, then i will keep my eye on them!" evidently this priest held very parental relations toward his people. the visitors noticed that some boys playing baseball on the green eagerly referred their disputes to him and accepted his word as final. he took them into several of the little wooden houses, all of which, probably in honour of the day, were in splendid order. in one they found twin papooses, brown as autumn beech-leaves, sleeping side by side in a basket of their mother's making. in another a wrinkled old squaw had most dainty moccasins to sell, the milicete slipper-moccasins, with velvet toe-pieces beautifully beaded. mr. merrithew bought a pair for each of his party (himself excepted), letting them choose their own. mrs. merrithew promptly selected a pair with yellow velvet on the toes; dora's choice had crimson, and marjorie's blue, while jackie's tiny pair was adorned with the same colour as his mother's. "you see, mother dear," he said quite seriously, "yours are a _little_ larger, so we won't be mixing them up!" then, being in a gift-making mood, mr. merrithew bought them each a quaint and pretty basket, besides a big substantial scrap-basket for his own study, and handkerchief-cases, gorgeous in pink and green, for susan and debby. the small baskets all had broad bands of the fragrant "sweet hay" which grows on many islands of the st. john, but which very few white people can find. dora was much interested in the milicete women, with their soft voices and kind, quiet faces. she tried to learn some of their words, and won their hearts by singing two or three songs in french, a language which they all understood, though they spoke it in a peculiar patois of their own. the bright summer afternoon went all too quickly. mrs. merrithew was anxious to reach home before too late an hour, so at five o'clock, after tea and cakes, they "reembarked" for the return trip. the horses were fresh, the roads good, the children just pleasantly tired. as they drove on and on through magic sunset light and fragrant summer dusk, dora thought drowsily that this was a day she would always remember, even if she lived to be as old as the dame who ate the innumerable apples. "i will have such lovely things to write to father and mother about," she murmured, in sleepy tones,--and those were the last words she said till the carriage stopped at the door of "the big brick house," and she and jackie were tenderly lifted out and half led, half carried up the steps. then she opened her eyes very wide and looked about her in wonder. "why, i believe i _nearly_ went to sleep for a moment," she said. and even jackie woke up enough to laugh at that! chapter iv. the day before they left for camp, dora received a letter from her mother, telling something of their surroundings and of the beauties of the western land. as the others were keenly interested, she read them many extracts, which even jackie enjoyed. "we are now," her mother wrote, after describing the journey by the great canadian pacific railway, and speaking encouragingly of the invalid's condition, "comfortably settled in victoria--which, as of course you know, dear, is the capital city of british columbia. it is a truly beautiful spot, and the climate is delightful. there are great varieties of climate, we hear, in this maritime province of the west; victoria is supposed to enjoy a very mild and even one, with roses and geraniums blooming outdoors in december, and the cold weather confined almost entirely to parts of january and february. there is another delightful part of the country which we may visit later; it is in one of the valleys which cut across the coast range of mountains. these deep valleys are entirely shut off from the north winds, and freely admit the warm breezes from the coast, while the rays of the sun are concentrated on their steep sides, helping to make, at times, almost tropical weather. we may spend part of next winter there, as it is even drier than victoria, and that is very important for your father. some of our new acquaintances have recommended the southern part of alberta, where the winter is shortened and made almost balmy by the wonderful chinook winds--so named from the chinook indians, who used to occupy that part of the country from which they blow. these west winds, coming from the mountains across the plains, are warm and particularly drying. when they melt the light and infrequent snowfalls of the winter, they also dry the ground almost immediately, so that even the hollows and ravines are free from dampness. your father is greatly interested in these 'warm chinooks,' and we are almost sure to try their effect later. another pleasure to which we look forward, when he grows a little stronger, is a trip by boat along the coast. the fiords of british columbia are said to resemble those of norway, and the whole coast, with its wooded shores, snowy mountain-peaks, and flashing cataracts, is marvellously beautiful." dora went to sleep that night with her mother's letter under her pillow, and dreamt that they were camping out on the shore of a british columbian fiord, when a warm wind came and blew all the tents into little boats, in which they went sailing away to some wonderful country, where no one would ever be sick, and where no winds blew but balmy west ones. she had nearly reached the land, when a soft touch woke her, and she found marjorie's happy face bending over her. "hurry up, dear! hurrah for camp! we want to start by ten at the latest, and it is seven now, and such a perfect day. mother says we can take kitty with us; won't that be fun?" and marjorie was off without waiting for an answer. dora heard her singing, laughing, chatting, as she flashed here and there, helping and hindering in about equal proportions. the whole house was filled with the pleasant bustle of preparation. mr. merrithew was as much of a boy, in the matter of high spirits, as the youngest of the party. mrs. merrithew, blithe and serene, had everything perfectly planned, and engineered the carrying out of the plans with quiet skill. it was she who remembered where everything was, thought of everything that ought to be taken, and saw that every one of the party was properly clad. the party, by the way, was quite a large one, consisting of another whole family (the greys) besides the merrithews, will graham, a young collegian who was a friend of mr. merrithew's, and miss covert, a rather delicate and very quiet little school-teacher whom mrs. merrithew had taken under her wing from sheer kindness, but who proved a charming addition to the party. the greys were six in number: doctor grey, a grave professor; mrs. grey, a tiny, vivacious brunette, who had been mrs. merrithew's "chum" since their schoolgirl days; carl and hugh, twin boys of fourteen; and two girls, edith, just jackie's age, and alice, so much older than the rest that she was "almost grown-up," and marjorie and dora looked upon her with admiring awe. doctor grey, both mammas, susan (who was to do the cooking, as debby did not dare venture on anything so wild as sleeping out-of-doors), jackie, little edith grey, and all the provisions, tents, and bedding, were to go by stage, while mr. merrithew, will graham, and the twins were to divide the charge of three canoes and the four girls. at ten o'clock the big lumbering stage rattled up to the door, and the canoeists saw the others properly packed and waved them a cheerful adieu. then they gathered up paddles, wraps, and lunch-baskets, and hastened gaily off to the boat-house on the river-bank. here the work of embarking was quickly accomplished, and the four slender birches shot out into the stream, turned, and swept upward, propelled against the current by vigorous arms. "please sing, daddy," marjorie begged, and mr. merrithew promptly began an old favourite, but could get no further than the first verse. "in the days when we went gypsying, a long time ago, the lads and lasses in their best were dressed from top to toe--" so far he sang, and then declared that both memory and breath had given out, and that the ladies, who had no work to do, must forthwith provide the music. after a little hesitation and some coaxing from marjorie, dora sang, in a clear, sweet treble, the well-known and much-loved "en roulant ma boule" ("rolling my ball"). then some one started "tenting on the old camp ground," and all, even the paddlers, joined in, the little school-teacher providing a rich alto that took them all by surprise. [illustration: "the tree-clad shores wore a fairy glamour"] the river was deep-blue, reflecting the little clouds that floated in the azure overhead. near the town the river was very broad; as they forged upward, it gradually narrowed, and was thickly studded with islands. they passed government house, left the ruined hermitage behind, and then began to feel that they were at last out of civilization, and nearing the goal of summer quiet that they sought. it was slow work, this paddling against the current, but the time went in a sort of enchanted way; the tree-clad shores wore a fairy glamour, and the islands, where masses of grape-vine and clematis were tangled over the bushes, might have been each the home of an enchanted princess, a dryad, or any of the many "fair forms of old romance." when about five miles had been covered, they heard the rush of water hurrying over shallows and nagging at the rocks. this was what the children delighted to call "the rapids," but old canoemen simply dubbed it "a stretch of swift water." but by whichever name it went, it called for strong and skilful paddling, and mr. merrithew proposed that, before they undertook it, they should land and fortify themselves with lunch. this suggestion met with great favour; the canoes were swiftly beached, and soon a merry little picnic party sat under a clump of gray shore-willows, while sandwiches, tarts, and cakes of many kinds, vanished as if by magic. success to the camp was drunk in lemonade--_not_ ice-cold--and speeches were made that proved the good spirits, if not the oratorical gifts, of the group. they rested here for an hour, for one of the camp mottoes was, "time was made for slaves," and they knew that the ones who had gone on by stage were resting comfortably in a farmhouse, just opposite their destination, till the canoeing party should come to ferry them over. the farmhouse was owned by old friends with whom mrs. merrithew and mrs. grey would be glad to spend a little time, and for jack and edith the whole place would be full of wonders. when it came to actually facing the rapids, dora's heart failed her; her cheeks paled, and her eyes grew very large and dark; but she held on tight to both sides of the canoe, fixed her eyes on marjorie's back, and said not a word. she tried hard not to see the swirling water and the scowling rocks, but no effort could shut out the confused seething noises that made her feel as if nothing in the world was stable or solid. when at last the rush was over, the sounds grew softer, and the triumphant canoemen drew their good craft in to shore, and paused to rest their tired muscles, dora gave a deep sigh of relief. marjorie turned a beaming face to see what ever was the matter. "_frightened_, dear?" she said. "i forgot that you have not had much canoeing. it's too bad." but dora laughed, and the colour came back to her face. "i ought not to mind," she said, "for i have shot the lachine rapids. but i think being in a large boat gives one a feeling of safety. i know i wasn't half so afraid then as i was to-day. it seemed to me there was nothing between me and the dreadful confusion." "shooting the lachine rapids is a great experience," mr. merrithew said. "i must confess i would not like to try those in a canoe, as champlain did! but now, boys, let us set off briskly, or we won't get things comfortable before night." and they did hurry, but for all their speed it was nearly dusk by the time the five white tents were pitched on saunder's island. this was a fairly large island, ringed by a sandy beach from which the ground rose steeply to a green bank on which elms, white birches, and maples stood, with a tangle of raspberry-bushes, and flowering shrubs among them. inside the belt of trees was a broad sweep of rich meadow-land, with here and there a row of feathery elms or a cluster of choke-cherry-trees. toward the upper end of the island stood an old stone house, empty and almost a ruin; not far from this house were two barns, kept in good repair for the storing of the sweet island hay. the tents were pitched about a hundred yards from the house, just inside the tall bordering trees, so that part of the day they would be in the shade. these trees, too, would make ideal places for slinging the numerous hammocks which mrs. merrithew and mrs. grey had brought. dora and marjorie greatly enjoyed watching the speed with which the tent-poles--two stout uprights and a horizontal ridge-pole--were got into position, and the skill with which the white canvas was spread over them and stretched and pegged down and made into a cosy shelter. there was a tiny "a tent" tucked away in the shadiest spot for the provisions, and a large tent in a central position which mr. grey named "rainy-day house," and which was to be used as dining-room and parlour in case of severe rains; then the other three were called respectively, "the chaperons' tent," "the boys' tent," and "the girls' tent." the chaperons' abode was inhabited by mrs. merrithew, mrs. grey, susan, jackie, edith, and the kitten; "the boys' tent" was well filled by mr. merrithew and doctor grey (who insisted on being boys for the occasion), will graham, and the twins; and "the girls' tent" sheltered miss katherine covert, alice grey, marjorie, and dora. the beds were of hay, liberally provided by the friendly farmer,--the owner, by the way, of island, house, and barns. under each bed was spread either a rubber sheet or a piece of table oilcloth, then over the hay a thick gray blanket was laid. there was another thick blanket to wrap around each person, and still another to put over him, or her, as the case might be. in the chaperons' tent only were they more luxurious; there, two large mattresses took the place of the hay, and made a delightfully comfortable couch for three grown-ups and two children. while the tents and beds were being attended to, susan, with a little help from mrs. merrithew, had succeeded in getting tea without waiting for any sort of a fireplace to be constructed. she was rather anxious about the reception of this first meal, as it had been cooked under difficulties. but when she saw the speed with which her fried beans disappeared, and found mrs. grey taking a third cup of tea, her spirits rose, and she decided that campers were thoroughly satisfactory people for whom to cook! after tea was over, and all the dishes were washed, one of the old campers proposed the usual big bonfire, whereby to sit and sing, but every one was too sleepy, and it was unanimously resolved that just this once the delightful evening of song and story must be omitted. hearty "good-nights" were exchanged, and soon each tent for a brief while shone, like that in the "princess," "lamp-lit from the inner,"--to be more absolutely accurate, lantern-lit; but what is a trifle of one word, that it should be allowed to spoil a quotation? then gently, sweetly, silence settled down over the little encampment; silence, save for the soft murmur of the river in its sleep, and sometimes the drowsy chirping of a bird among the branches. chapter v. jack was the first to wake in the delicious stillness of the morning. when his mother opened her eyes a little later, she found him sitting up beside her with a look of delight and wonder on his face. "the river talks in its sleep," he said, leaning over her with shining eyes. "what does it say, jackie-boy?" mrs. merrithew asked. "i don't know the words,--yet," he answered, "but i will some day." "yes, i believe you will, dear," his mother said, with a smile and a sigh, for she firmly believed that her boy, with his vivid imagination and quick apprehension, had the life of a poet before him. just then a shout from the boys' tent proclaimed that the twins were awake; then mr. merrithew's cheery voice was heard, and soon the camp was alive with greetings and laughter. under mr. merrithew's direction (and with his active assistance), a cooking-place was soon made, and a bright fire inviting to preparations for breakfast. the device for cooking consisted of two strong upright sticks with forked tops, and a heavy horizontal pole resting upon them. on this pole two pothooks were fastened, from which hung the pot and kettle, and the fire was kindled under it. then a little circle of flat stones was made for the frying-pan, the pot and kettle were filled with fresh water, and susan's outfit was complete. pending the erection of a "camp wash-stand," and the choice of a safe and suitable bathing-place, faces and hands were washed in the river amid much laughter, and with careful balancing on stones in the shallows. the toilets were barely completed when three toots on the horn announced that breakfast was ready. a long table and benches were among the furniture which doctor grey and mr. merrithew had planned to make; until their construction, they were glad to group themselves, picnic-fashion, around a table-cloth on the ground. the way that breakfast was disposed of showed that the true camp appetites had begun already to assert themselves. porridge and molasses, beans, bacon and eggs, and great piles of brown bread and butter, vanished like smoke. jackie astonished the party (and alarmed his mother) by quietly disposing of a cup of strong coffee, passed to him by mistake, and handing it back to be refilled with the comment that it was "much more satisfyinger than milk." after breakfast they all set to work with enthusiasm to make camp more comfortable. susan washed dishes and arranged the provision tent with housewifely zeal; mrs. merrithew and mrs. grey brought the blankets out, and spread them on the grass to air, drove shingle-nails far up on the tent-poles to hold watches, pin-cushions, and innumerable small but necessary articles, and superintended the stretching of a rope from one pole to another, about a foot from the ridge-pole. this last arrangement proved most useful, all the garments not in use being hung over it, so that the chaperons' tent, at least, was kept in good order. the gentlemen busied themselves in building the promised table and seats. mr. andrews had told them to make use of anything they wanted on his island, so the twins had hunted about till they discovered a pile of boards near one of the barns. these served admirably for the necessary furniture, and after that was finished several cosy seats were made, by degrees, in favourite nooks along the bank. the morning passed with almost incredible swiftness, and even the youngest (and hungriest) of the campers could scarcely believe their ears when the horn blew for dinner. in the afternoon some, bearing cushions and shawls, chose shady spots for a read and a doze; some set off in the canoes for a lazy paddle; and others organized themselves into an exploring party to visit the deserted house. marjorie and dora, miss covert, and will graham formed the latter group. the stone house was a curious structure, with an air of solidity about it even in its neglected and failing condition. it had been built many years before by an englishman, who did not know the river's possibilities in the way of spring freshets. when he found that he had built his house too near the shore, and that april brought water, ice, and debris of many sorts knocking at his doors and battering in his windows, he promptly, if ruefully, abandoned it to time and the elements. it might, long ago, have been so arranged and protected as to make it a very pleasant summer residence, but, instead, it was now used only for a week or two in haying-time, when the haymakers slept and ate in its basement,--for this quaint little house had a basement, with a kitchen, dining-room, and storeroom. our visitors, having gained entrance to the hall by a very ruinous flight of steps and a battered door, descended to the basement first, admired the fireplace in the kitchen, and looked rather askance at the deep pile of straw in the dining-room, where the haymakers had slept. there was a rough table in one corner of the room, and on it some tin cups and plates and a piece of very dry bread. the haying on the island was about half-done; there was a short intermission in the work now, but it was to begin again very soon. they found nothing else of especial interest in the basement, so went to the hall above. here were two good-sized rooms, one on each side of the hall. each had a fine, deep fireplace, and in one were two old-fashioned wooden armchairs and a long table. the windows--two in each room--were narrow and high, and had small panes and deep window-seats. "oh, what fun it would be to play keeping-house here, dora!" marjorie cried. "wouldn't it!" dora answered. "let us, marjorie! let us pretend it is ours, and choose our rooms, and furnish it!" "that will be fine," marjorie answered, fervently, and soon the little girls were deep in a most delightful air-castle. "let us play, too," said will, persuasively, and katherine answered without hesitation: "yes, let us! i feel just like a child here, and could play with a doll if i had one!" "well,--let me see; we will begin by deciding about the rooms," said will. "let us have this for the study,--shall we?--and put the books all along this wall opposite the windows!" and so these two "children of a larger growth" played house with almost as much zest as marjorie and dora,--and greatly to the amusement and delight of the latter couple when they caught a word or two of their murmured conversation. up-stairs were four rather small rooms with sloping ceilings, and in the middle of the house, just over the front door, a dear little room without the slope, and with a dormer-window. "this shall be our boudoir," dora said, as they entered, and then stopped and exclaimed in surprise, for against one wall stood a piano! almost the ghost of a piano, or the skeleton, rather,--at the very best, a piano in the last stage of decrepitude, but still a piano. its rosewood frame had been whittled, chopped, and generally ill-treated, and more than half its yellow keys were gone, but oh, wonder of wonders, some of those remaining gave a thin, unearthly sound when struck! it seemed almost like something alive that had been deserted, and the little group gathered around it with sympathetic exclamations. while they were talking and wondering about it, lively voices proclaimed the approach of the twins. "we won't say anything about our housekeeping play," said dora, hastily, turning to mr. graham, and marjorie loyally added, "except to mother." "all right, if you like," the student agreed, and miss covert quickly added her assent. the twins admired the stone house, the fireplaces, and the piano, but with rather an abstracted manner. soon the cause of their absent-mindedness transpired. mr. merrithew had met some indians that afternoon, when they were out paddling, and had bought a salmon from them. this had led to a conversation about salmon-spearing, and the indians had promised to come the following night, and show them how it was done. they could take one person in each canoe, and mr. merrithew had said that carl and hugh should be the ones. of course they were greatly excited over this prospect, and chattered about it all the way back to the tents. [illustration: "a great bonfire was built"] that evening, when dusk had settled down, a great bonfire was built, and they all sat around it on rugs and shawls, in genuine camp-fashion. first, some of the favourite games were played,--proverbs, "coffee-pot," characters, and then rigmarole, most fascinating of all. rigmarole, be it known, is a tale told "from mouth to mouth," one beginning it and telling till his invention begins to flag or he thinks his time is up, then stopping suddenly and handing it on to his next neighbour. the result is generally a very funny, and sometimes quite exciting, medley. to-night mr. merrithew began the story, and his contribution (wherein figured a dragon, an enchanted princess, and a deaf-and-dumb knight) was so absorbing that there was a general protest when he stopped. but the romancer was quite relentless, and his next neighbour had to continue as best he could. even jackie contributed some startling incidents to the narrative, and when at last mrs. grey ended it with the time-honoured (and just at present, most unfortunately, out-of-fashion!) assurance that they all, even the dragon, "lived happy ever after," there was a burst of laughter and applause. then some one began to sing, and one after another the dear old songs rose through the balmy night. sometimes there were solos, but every now and then a chorus in which all could join. dora sang every french song she knew,--"a la claire fontaine" ("at the clear fountain"), "malbrouck," and "entre paris et saint-denis" ("between paris and st. denis") proving the favourites. mrs. grey, who declared she had not sung for years, ventured on "the canadian boat-song" and "her bright smile haunts me still." at last, when voices began to grow drowsy and the fire burned low, they sang, "the maple-leaf for ever" and "our own canadian home," then rose and joined in the camp-hymn,--"for ever with the lord," with its: "and nightly pitch our moving tents a day's march nearer home." the next day seemed to fly, to every one, at least, but carl and hugh. their hearts were so set on the salmon-spearing that for them the time went slowly enough till night brought the four indians with their torches and spears. doctor grey and mr. merrithew walked along the shore to see what they could of the proceedings, but the rest--and even will--were content to sit around the fire as before. carl sat in the middle of one canoe, and hugh in the other, both greatly excited and both trying to think themselves quite cool. only the steersmen paddled,--the bowmen kneeling erect and watchful, with their spears in readiness. (the salmon-spear is a long ash shaft, with two wooden prongs and a metal barb between them. the spearing of salmon, by the way, is restricted by law to the indians, and any white man who undertakes it is liable to a fine.) sticking up in the bow of each canoe was a torch, made of a roll of birch-bark fastened in the end of a split stick. the red-gold flare of these torches threw a crimson reflection on the dark water, and shone on the yellow sides of the birches, and the intent, dusky faces of the fishermen watching for their prey. slowly, silently, they paddled up the stream, till at last the silvery sides of a magnificent fish gleamed in the red light. then, like a flash, a spear struck down, there was a brief struggle, and the captive lay gasping in the foremost canoe. it was too much for hugh. he had enjoyed with all his boyish heart the beauty and the weirdness of the scene, but the beautiful great fish, with the spear-wound in his back,--well, that was different. he was not sorry that the indians met with no more luck, and was very silent when the others questioned them, on their return, as to the joys of salmon-spearing. when he confided to carl his hatred of the "sport," the latter shook his head doubtfully. "but you will help eat that salmon to-morrow," he said. "well,--perhaps," hugh answered, "but, all the same, it's no fun to see things killed, and i'm not going to if i can help it!" the fortnight of camp life passed like a dream, and it is hard to tell who was most sorry when the day of departure came. dora, who had written a regular diary-letter to her father and mother, and begun one of the stories that were to be like mrs. ewing's, said that never in all her life had she had such a beautiful time. katherine covert, with life-long friends to "remember camp by," and all sorts of happy possibilities in her once gray life, bore the same testimony with more, if more quiet, fervour. mr. merrithew said that he was ten years younger, and jackie opined that, in that case, they must have been living on an enchanted island,--but added, that he was very glad _he_ had not been made ten years younger, like daddy! brown and plump and strong of arm, the campers brought back with them hearty appetites, delightful recollections, and inexhaustible material for dream and plan and castles in the air. many pleasant things were waiting to be done on their return; first and foremost, miss covert had come to live at the big brick house, to teach the children when holiday time should be over, and to be a help generally to mrs. merrithew. also, according to mrs. merrithew's plans, to have a little real home life and happiness,--for katherine had been an orphan since her childhood, and for five years had taught school steadily, although it was work that she did not greatly like, and that kept her in a state of perpetual nervous strain. teaching a few well-bred and considerate children, whom she already loved, would be quite different, and almost entirely a pleasure. chapter vi. in the delightful autumn days that followed, the children, accompanied sometimes by mrs. merrithew, sometimes by katherine, spent much of their time in the woods, and taking long strolls on the country roads. in october the woods were a blaze of colour,--clear gold, scarlet, crimson, coppery brown, and amber. the children brought home great bunches of the brilliant leaves, and some they pressed and varnished, while others katherine dipped in melted wax. they found that the latter way was the best for keeping the colours, but it was rather troublesome to do. they pressed many ferns, also, and, when the frosts became keener, collected numbers of white ferns, delicately lovely. most of these treasures, with baskets full of velvety moss and yards of fairy-like wild vines, were stowed away in a cool storeroom to be used later in the christmas decorations. when the last of october drew near, mrs. merrithew made up her mind to give a little hallow-eve party. she let the children name the friends they wished her to ask, and added a few of her own; then they all busied themselves in preparations, and in making lists of hallow-eve games and tricks. at last came the eventful evening, and with it about thirty merry people, old and young, but chiefly young. all of the greys were there, of course; also mr. will graham, who was taking his last year at college, and who spent most of his spare time at mr. merrithew's. so the whole camping-party met again, and the camp-days, dear and fleeting, came back in vivid pictures to their minds. in the big brick house was a large room known as "the inner kitchen," but used as a kitchen only in the winter. this room mrs. merrithew had given up to the entertainment of the hallow-eve party. it was lighted--chiefly, that is, for a few ordinary lamps helped out the illumination--by lanterns made of hollowed pumpkins. ears of corn hung around the mantel, and a pyramid of rosy apples was piled high upon it. there was a great old-fashioned fireplace here, and a merry fire sparkled behind the gleaming brass andirons. every trick that their hostess's brain could conjure up was tried. those who cared to, bobbed for apples in a tub of water, and some were lucky enough to find five-cent pieces in their russets and pippins. an apple was hung on a string from the middle of a doorway, then set swinging, and two contestants tried which could get the first bite,--and this first bite, gentle reader, is not so easy as you might imagine! a pretty little ring was laid on a mound of flour, and whoever could lift it out between their lips, without breaking down the mound, was to win the ring. this necessitated a great many remouldings of the flour,--but finally the prize was captured by miss covert. a little later, dora noticed it hanging on mr. graham's watch-guard. some of the braver spirits took turns in walking backward down the garden steps, and to the end of the middle path, a looking-glass in one hand and a lamp in the other. what each one saw in the looking-glass, or whether, indeed, they saw anything, was, in most cases, kept a secret, or confided only to the very especial chum! then there were fortunes told by means of cabbages,--a vegetable not usually surrounded with romantic associations. marjorie was the first to try this mode of divination. well-blindfolded, she ventured alone into the garden, and came back soon with a long, lean, straggly cabbage with a great deal of earth attached to its roots. this foretold that her husband would be tall and thin, and very rich! there were many other quaint methods of fortune-telling, most of them derived from scottish sources. after these had been tried, amid much merriment, they played some of the old-fashioned games dear to children everywhere,--blind-man's buff, hunt-the-feather, post-towns, and other favourites. by and by, when the fun began to flag, and one or two little mouths were seen to yawn, a long table was brought in and soon spread with a hearty (but judiciously chosen) hallow-eve supper. when the days began to grow short and bleak, and the evenings long and cosey, the children were thrown more and more upon indoor occupations for their entertainment. it was on one of these bleak days, when a few white flakes were falling in a half-hearted way, and the sky was gray and gloomy, that jackie had a brilliant idea. four of them--katherine, marjorie, dora, and jackie himself--were sitting by the fire in mrs. merrithew's "den," the very cosiest room in the house. mr. merrithew had a den, too, but he called his a study. somehow it looked too much like an office to suit the children very well. most of the volumes on his shelves, too, were clumsy law-books; all the books that any one wanted to read, except the children's own, were in "mother's den." then, one could come to mother's room at any hour of the day or night, while sometimes no one, excepting mrs. merrithew, was admitted to the study. on this particular day katherine was reading "rob roy," and jack building a castle of blocks, while dora dreamed in the window-seat, watching the scanty flakes, and marjorie, on the hearth-rug, tried to teach reluctant kitty grey to beg. now jack had accompanied his mother on the previous sunday to the anniversary service of the sons of england, a well-known patriotic society. he had been greatly impressed by the procession, the hymns, and the sermon, and on coming home had asked his father many questions as to the "why and wherefore" of the society. it was this episode which suggested the bright idea to his active little brain. "aunt kathie," he said,--for miss covert was now a fully accepted adopted aunt,--"why couldn't _we_ form a patriarchal society?" "a _what_, dear?" said kathie, in rather startled tones, laying "rob roy" on the table, for she liked to give her whole mind to jackie's propositions and queries. "a patri--oh, you know what; like the sons of england, you know!" "oh, yes! _patriotic_, dearie; a patriotic society. you know a patriot is one who loves his country. what sort of a patriotic society would you like to have, jack?" "oh, pure canadian, of course! let me see,--we couldn't be the sons of canada, because we are not all sons." "not _quite_ all," murmured dora, with drowsy sarcasm, from the window. "why not children of canada?" suggested kathie. "no, aunt kathie, that would never do at all, for mother and daddy and you must be in it, and you _couldn't_ be called children,--though, of course, you're not so _very_ old," he added, as if fearing he had hurt her feelings. "well," said marjorie, thoughtfully, "how would the maple-leaves, or the beavers, do?" but jackie scorned this suggestion. "_those_ are names that baseball clubs have," he said. "no; i believe 'the sons and daughters of canada' would be the best of all, because everybody is either a son _or_ a daughter, even twins!" this statement, and the name, were accepted with acclamation, and the quartette, entering thoroughly into the spirit of jackie's plan, helped him zealously to put it into execution. they insisted that he should be president, and requested him to choose the other officers. so he made his father and mother the honourable patrons, dora and marjorie vice-presidents, and kathie secretary-treasurer. this office, i may mention, she nobly filled, and also the informal one of general adviser, suggester, and planner. it was she who proposed the twins, alice and edith, as members, and the president gave his consent, though he considered edith rather too young! "for my part," he said, "i should like mr. will graham, if none of you would mind!" no one seemed to mind, so mr. graham's name was added to the list, which katherine was making out beautifully, with gothic capitals in red ink, on her very best paper. her next proposal was a regular course of study in canadian history and literature, and this was enthusiastically received. when mr. and mrs. merrithew came home at tea-time, they found a well-organized "sons and daughters of canada" club, and miss covert already engaged in composing an article on "the beginnings of canadian history,"--with jackie in her mind as an important member of her future audience, and therefore an earnest effort to make it simple in language and clear in construction. all through the winter the club flourished, and indeed for a much longer time. the members met every week, and the history and literature proved so absorbing that the s. a. d. o. c. night came to be looked forward to as eagerly by the older as by the younger sons and daughters. kathie had the gift of making scenes and people of long-past days live before one, and cartier and champlain, la salle and de maisonneuve, and many another hero became the companions of our patriotic students, both waking and in their dreams. the works of canadian poets and novelists began to fill their book-shelves, and pictures of these celebrities to adorn their walls. they had regular weekly meetings, at which there were readings and recitations, and always one short historical sketch. even jack learnt his "piece" each time, and said it with a severe gravity which seemed to defy any one to smile at a mispronunciation! mrs. merrithew designed their badges,--maple-leaf pins in coloured enamel, with a little gilt beaver on each leaf,--and mr. merrithew had them made in montreal. but perhaps the proudest achievement of the club was alice grey's "sons and daughters of canada march," which was played at the opening and closing of every meeting. so much pleasure and profit, many happy evenings, and an ever deeper love for their country, were some of the results of jackie's bright idea. chapter vii. now there came, warming the frosty heart of december, that delightful atmosphere of mystery and expectation which forms one pleasure of the great yule-tide festival. the big brick house seemed particularly full of this happy spirit of the season. there were many mysterious shopping excursions, and much whispering in corners,--a thing not usual in this united family. jackie showed a sudden and severe self-denial in the matter of sticks of pure chocolate, and was soon, therefore, able to proudly flourish a purse containing, he told his mother, "a dollar all but eighty-five cents," saved toward buying his presents for the family. he also spent much time at a little table in his own room, cutting out pictures and pasting them into a scrap-book for a little lame boy of his acquaintance. mrs. merrithew and kathie had each, besides innumerable other matters, a water-colour painting on hand. each picture, strange to say, was of a house. mrs. merrithew's, the big brick house itself, with its trees and vines, was clearly intended for daddy; but for whom, the children wondered, was aunt kathie's? it was a spirited little view of the old stone house on saunder's island; not so pretty a subject as mrs. merrithew's, but set in such a delicate atmosphere of early morning light that even the sombre gray of the stone seemed etherialized and made poetic. while marjorie and dora wondered for whom it was meant, jackie promptly inquired,--but she, his dear aunt kathie, who had never refused to answer question of his before, only laughed and shook her head, and said that every one had secrets at christmas-time. marjorie and dora did not, as was their wont, spend all of their time together, for each was making a present for the other. marjorie was working hard over a portfolio, which she knew was one of the things dora wanted. she had carefully constructed and joined the stiff cardboard covers, and plentifully provided them with blotting-paper, and now she was embroidering the linen cover with autumnal maple-leaves in dora's favourite colour, a rich, vivid red. as for dora, though she had no love for needlework, she was laboriously making a cushion of soft, old-blue felt for marjorie's cosey-corner, working it with a griffin pattern in golden-brown silks. marjorie had a particular fancy for griffins,--partly, perhaps, because a griffin was the chief feature of the family crest. as the long-looked-for day drew nearer, there was other work to do, almost the pleasantest christmas work of all, dora thought,--the making wreaths out of fir and hemlock and fragrant spruce. they worked two or three hours of each day at the decorations for the beautiful little parish church which they all attended, and which, being very small, was much easier than the cathedral or the other large churches to transform into a sweet-smelling tabernacle of green. then they trimmed the big brick house almost from attic to cellar. the drawing-rooms were hung with heavy wreaths, with bunches of red cranberries here and there, making a beautiful contrast to the green. in the other rooms there were boughs over every picture, and autumn leaves, ferns, and dried grasses here and there. mr. merrithew was sure to buy some holly and mistletoe at the florist's on christmas eve, so places of honour were reserved for these two plants, which have become so closely entwined with all our thoughts of christmas and its festivities. the holly would adorn the old oil-painting of mrs. merrithew's great-aunt, lady loveday gostwycke, which hung over the mantelpiece in the front drawing-room. as for the pearly white berries of the mistletoe, they were to hang from the chandelier in the hall, where people might be expected forgetfully to pass beneath them. jackie, who was very useful in breaking twigs for the wreath-making, begged a few fine wreaths as a reward, and carried them off to decorate little lame philip's room. these lengths of aromatic greenery gave the greatest pleasure to the invalid, and scarcely less to his mother, who spent the greater part of her time in that one room. besides all these pleasant doings, there were great things going on in the kitchen. such baking and steaming and frying as debby revelled in! such spicy and savoury odours as pervaded the house when the kitchen door was opened! marjorie and dora liked to help, whenever debby would let them, with these proceedings. it was great fun to shred citron and turn the raisin-stoner, and help chop the mince-meat, in the big kitchen, with its shining tins, and general air of comfort. jackie liked to take a share in the cooking, too, and as he was deborah's pet, he generally got the wherewithal to make a tiny cake or pudding of his own. when it came to the making of the big plum pudding, all the family by turns had to stir it, according to a time-honoured institution. then mr. merrithew would make his expected contribution to its ingredients,--five shining five-cent pieces, to be stirred through the mixture and left to form an element of special interest to the children at the christmas dinner. besides this big pudding, there were always three or four smaller ones (without any silver plums, but very rich and good), for distribution among some of mrs. merrithew's protã©gã©s. on christmas day all the old customs were faithfully observed. it was the rule that whoever woke first in the morning should call the others, and on this occasion it was jackie who, as the great clock in the hall struck six, came running from room to room in his moccasin slippers and little blue dressing-gown, shouting "merry christmas, merry christmas," at the top of his voice. every one tumbled out of bed, as in duty bound, and soon a wrappered and slippered group, all exchanging christmas wishes, met in mrs. merrithew's den. here a fire glowed in the grate, and here, too, mysterious and delightful, hung a long row of very fat white pillow-cases! these were hung by long cords from hooks on the curtain-pole. each pillow-case bore a paper with the name of its owner written on it in large letters, and they were arranged in order of age, from jackie up to mr. merrithew. this had been the invariable method of giving the christmas presents in this particular family for as long as any of them could remember. armchairs and sofas were drawn near the fire, and the party grouped themselves comfortably; then mr. merrithew lifted down jackie's pillow-case and laid it beside him, as he sat with his mother in the largest of the chairs. every one looked on with intensest interest while, with shining eyes, and cheeks red with excitement, he opened his parcels, and exclaimed over their contents. truly a fortunate little boy was jack! there were books--the very books he wanted,--games, a top, the dearest little snow-shoes, a great box of blocks,--evidently santa claus knew what a tireless architect this small boy was,--a bugle, drum, and sword, a dainty cup and saucer, a picture for his room, and, too large for the pillow-case, but carefully propped beneath it, a fine sled, all painted in blue and gold and crimson, beautiful to behold! when jackie had looked at every one of his presents, it was marjorie's turn, and she was just as fortunate as her brother. so it went on up the scale, till they had all enjoyed their gifts to the very last of mr. merrithew's, and every box of candy had been sampled. and still aunt kathie's picture of the little stone house had not appeared! when at last, a merry party, they went down to breakfast, deborah and susan came forward with christmas greetings, and thanks for the well-filled pillow-cases which they had found beside their beds. the dining-room in its festal array looked even cheerier than was its wont. by every plate there lay a spray of holly, to be worn during the rest of the day. the breakfast-set was a wonderful one of blue and gold, an heirloom, which was only used on very special occasions. in the centre of the table stood a large pot of white and purple hyacinths in full bloom, the fourth or fifth of mr. merrithew's presents that morning to his wife. at eleven o'clock there was the beautiful christmas service, which all the family attended, with the exception of jackie. he was considered too young to be kept still for so long a time; so he stayed at home with susan, trying all the new toys and having samples read aloud from each new book. kitty grey, decorated with a blue ribbon and a tiny gilt bell, also kept him company, and seemed to take great pleasure in knocking his block castles down with her soft silvery paws. when the churchgoers returned there was lunch; then, for the children, a long, cosey afternoon with their presents. mrs. merrithew and katherine early disappeared into the regions of the kitchen and dining-room, for the six o'clock dinner was to have several guests, and there was much to be arranged and overseen. but by half-past five the whole family was assembled in the big drawing-room, and neither mrs. merrithew nor kathie looked as if they had ever seen the inside of a kitchen. mrs. merrithew wore her loveliest gown, a shimmering silver-gray silk with lace sleeves and fichu, and lilies-of-the-valley at her neck and in her abundant hair. as for katherine, in her fawn-coloured dress with trimmings of yellow beads, and deep yellow roses, jackie said she looked like a fairy lady,--and on the subject of fairies he was an authority. the little girls were in pure white, with sashes of their favourite colours, and the gold and coral necklaces which had been among their gifts; while jackie, in his red velvet suit and broad lace collar, looked not unlike the picture of leonard in "the story of a short life." presently the guests began to arrive. first came miss bell, a second cousin of mr. merrithew's, and the nearest relative he had in fredericton. she was very tall, very thin, quite on the shady side of fifty, and a little deaf. nevertheless, she was decidedly handsome, with her white hair, bright, dark eyes, and beautifully arched brows. she was a great favourite with the children, and always carried some little surprise for them in her pocket. a little later came a widowed aunt of mrs. merrithew's, fair, fat, and frivolous; and a bachelor uncle, who came next in the esteem of the children to cousin sophia bell. two young normal school students, sisters, who were not able to go home for the holidays, soon swelled the party, and last, but not least, came mr. will graham, looking very handsome in his evening clothes. when they went out to dinner jackie escorted cousin sophia, and marjorie overheard him saying, in urgent tones: "i _wish_ that you and uncle bob would come and live with us,--but i _don't_ want aunt fairley; she is too funny all the time!" the christmas dinner was much like other christmas dinners, except that debby's cooking was unsurpassable. after every one had tasted everything, and three of the five-cent pieces had come to light, the chairs were pushed back a little, and while nuts and raisins were being discussed, they had also catches, rounds, and choruses. each person with any pretence to a voice was expected to give one solo at least. jackie, who had a very sweet little voice, sang "god save the king," with great fervour. but the favourite of the evening was the beautiful "under the holly bough," with the words of which they were all familiar. presently, jackie, who had been promised that he should choose his own bedtime that night, was found to be fast asleep with his head on his green-leaf dessert plate, and a bunch of raisins clasped tightly in one hand. he was tenderly carried away, undressed, and tucked into bed, without once opening an eye. as kathie turned to leave him, she picked up one of his best-beloved new books,--"off to fairyland," in blue and gold covers, with daintily coloured pictures,--and laid it beside him for a pleasant waking sight the next morning. down-stairs she found the rest of the party gathered around the fire, telling stories of auld lang syne. as almost every one had been up early that morning, no very lively games seemed to appeal to them; but the children thought no game could be so interesting as these sprightly anecdotes and rose-leaf-scented romances that were being recalled and recounted to-night. "do you remember--" cousin sophia would say; then would follow some entrancing memories, to which mr. and mrs. merrithew, uncle bob, and mrs. fairley would contribute a running comment of "yes, yes! she was a lovely girl!" "he never held up his head after she died!" and so on. then mrs. fairley would hum an old-time waltz, and branch off into reminiscences of balls,--and of one in particular at government house, where she had lost her satin slipper, and the governor's son had brought it to her, and called her cinderella. she put out a satin-shod foot as she talked, and marjorie thought that, though it certainly was tiny, it was not at all a pretty shape, and began to understand why her mother made her wear her boots so loose. about ten, susan brought tea and plum-cake, and when this had been disposed of, they all, according to another time-honoured custom, gathered around the piano, and sang the grand old words that unnumbered thousands of voices had sung that day: "oh, come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant; oh, come ye, oh, come ye to bethlehem! come and behold him born the king of angels; oh, come let us adore him, christ the lord!" [illustration: "nothing, dora thought, could be more beautiful than those woods in winter"] chapter viii. snow-shoeing is one of the national sports of canada, in which most canadians, big and little, are proficient. marjorie and her cousin were no exception to the rule, and jackie proved a very apt pupil. he soon learned to avoid striking one snow-shoe against the other, and fell quickly into that long, easy swing, which makes the snowy miles go by so quickly. sometimes the three children tramped on the broad, frozen river, but that was a cold place when there was any wind, so they generally chose the hill-roads or the woods. nothing, dora thought, could be more beautiful than those woods in winter, with the white drifts around the grayish tree-trunks, the firs and hemlocks rising like green islands out of a snowy sea, and the wonderful tracery of brown boughs against the pale blue of the sky. once, mr. and mrs. merrithew went with them for a moonlight tramp, and that was something never to be forgotten. it was just after a heavy snowfall, and the evergreens were weighed down with a white covering that sparkled and glittered as with innumerable jewels. another favourite amusement was coasting,--not tobogganing, but good, old-fashioned coasting, generally on college hill, but sometimes down the steep bank of the river. coasting parties were frequent, and it was a pretty sight to see the hill dotted with blanket-coated and toqued or tam-o'-shantered figures, and pleasant to hear the merry voices and laughter as the sleds skimmed swiftly down the road. the winters in eastern canada, though cold, are wonderfully bright and clear, and the air is so free from dampness that one does not realize how cold it sometimes becomes, unless one consults the thermometer. canadians, as a rule, spend a great deal of time in the open air in winter as well as summer, and are as hardy a race as can be found anywhere, but when they _are_ indoors they like their houses good and warm,--no half-measures, no chilly passages and draughty bedrooms for them! mr. merrithew did not keep horses, but occasionally he would hire a big three-seated sleigh and take the family for a delightful spin. they would all be warmly wrapped in woollens and furs, and snuggled in buffalo-robes; the bells would jingle merrily, the snow would "skreak" under the horses' feet, and the white world slip by them like a dream. one day, about the middle of february, mrs. merrithew announced, at breakfast, that it was high time for the drive to hemlock point, which mr. merrithew had been promising them all winter. as the latter quite agreed with this idea, they decided to go on the following morning, spend a long day with the friends they always visited there, and return by moonlight. hemlock point was somewhere between ten and twenty miles up-river,--it does not always do to be too exact,--and their friends lived in a quaint old farmhouse, on high ground, well back from the river-bank. that evening, when they sat in the den after lessons were done, marjorie told dora about the good folk who lived there,--an old bachelor farmer, the most kind-hearted and generous of men, but as bashful as a boy; his two unmarried sisters, who managed his house and thought they managed him, but really spoilt him to his heart's content; and an orphan niece, who had lived with them for several years, and who was the only modern element in their lives. she graphically described the old loom, the big and little spinning-wheels, and the egg-shell china, till dora was as anxious as jackie for to-morrow to come. the three-seated sleigh and the prancing horses were at the door of the big brick house by eight the next morning, for the drive would be long and the load heavy, and it was well to be early on the way. the girls and jackie wore their blanket-suits,--dora's and jackie's crimson and marjorie's bright blue,--and mrs. merrithew herself, snugly wrapped in furs, brought a grand supply of extra cloaks and shawls. she was always prepared for any emergency. mr. merrithew said that he never knew her fail to produce pins, rope, a knife, and hammer and nails, if they were needed. but the hammer and nails she repudiated, and said it was twine, not rope, she carried! the sky was a little overcast when they started, but the prospect of a snow-storm did not daunt them in the least. the bells, of which there were a great many on the harness, kept up a musical, silvery accompaniment to the conversation, as the horses swung at a good speed along the level. when the hills began to rise, the pace slackened, and the passengers had a better chance to enjoy the beauties spread on both sides of the road. "but oh, you ought to see it in summer!" marjorie said, when dora praised the varied and lovely landscapes. "there are so many things yet for you to see all around here. you will have to stay two or three years more at least!" but dora laughed at this. "what about all the things there are for you to see in montreal?" she said. "what about the ice palace, and--" "please tell about the ice palace, dora," jack interrupted. "that must be a gorlious sight!" so dora tried to give her cousins some idea of the great palace of glittering ice, and the hundreds of snow-shoers, in bright costumes and carrying torches, gathered together to storm this fairylike fortress. "it must be fine," said marjorie, when the story was done, "but i'd rather storm hemlock point, and get fried chicken and buttermilk as the spoils of war." marjorie, being a tremendous home-girl, generally tried to change the subject if dora made any allusions to a possible visit of marjorie alone to montreal. she could not bear the thought of parting with dora, but to part with mother and daddy and jack would be three times worse! the last part of the road was decidedly hilly, and the horses took such advantage of mr. merrithew's consideration for their feelings, that jackie, lulled by the slow motion and the sound of the bells, fell asleep against his mother's shoulder, and knew no more till he woke on a couch in miss grier's sitting-room. the oldest miss grier--whom every one called miss prudence--was bustling about, helping marjorie and dora off with their things, and giving advice to miss alma, who was hastening to start a fire in the great old-fashioned franklin. miss dean, the niece, was taking off mrs. merrithew's overboots, in spite of her polite protests. jackie's eyes were open for some moments before any one noticed him; then he startled them by saying, in perfectly wide-awake tones: "i think, miss lois dean, you are the very littlest lady in the world!" miss dean, who certainly could not well be smaller and be called grown-up at all, and whose small head was almost weighted down by its mass of light hair, looked at her favourite with twinkling eyes. "never mind, jackie, the best goods are often done up in small parcels; and i'm big enough to hold you on my lap while i tell you stories, which is the main thing, isn't it?" "yes, indeed," jack cried, jumping up to hug her, which resulted in the pretty hair getting loosened from its fastenings and tumbling in wild confusion around the "littlest lady," where she sat on the floor. "now you are a fairy godmother! now you are a fairy godmother!" exclaimed jackie, dancing around her. "then i will put a charm upon you at once," lois said. "no more dancing, no more noise, no more _anything_, until we get the wraps all off and put away; then you and i will go and--fry chicken--and sausages--for dinner!" the last part of the sentence was whispered in jack's ear, and caused him to smile contentedly, and to submit without a murmur to the process of unwrapping. after dinner,--which did great credit to lois and her assistant,--they gathered around the franklin in the sitting-room, with plates of "sops-of-wine" and golden pippins within easy reach, and mr. grier and mr. merrithew talked farming and politics, while miss prudence recounted any episodes of interest that had taken place at or near hemlock point during the past year. mrs. merrithew, who had spent her summers here as a girl, knew every one for miles around, and loved to hear the annals of the neighbourhood, told in miss prudence's picturesque way, with an occasional pithy comment from miss alma. dora sat, taking in with eager eyes the view of hill and intervale, island and ice-bound river; then turning back to the cosey interior, with its home-made carpet, bright curtains, and large bookcase with glass doors. after a little while lois, who saw that the children were growing weary of sitting still, proposed a stroll through the house, to which they gladly consented. katherine asked if she might go with them, and they left "the enchanted circle around the fire," and crossed the hall to the "best parlour,"--which miss prudence always wished to throw open in mrs. merrithew's honour, and which the latter always refused to sit in, because, as she frankly said, it gave her the shivers. this was not on account of any ill-taste in the furnishing, but because it was always kept dark and shut up, and mrs. merrithew said it could not be made cheery all of a sudden. the children, however, loved the long room, and the mysterious feeling it gave them when they first went in, and had to grope their way to the windows, draw back the curtains, and put up the yellow venetian blinds, letting the clear, wintry light into this shadowy domain. this light brought out the rich, dark colours of the carpet, and showed the treasures of chairs and tables that would have made a collector's mouth water. there was a round table of polished mahogany in the centre of the room, a tiny butternut sewing-table in one corner, and against the wall, on opposite sides of the room, two rosewood tables, with quaint carved legs, and feet of shining brass. on the tables lay many curious shells, big lumps of coral, and rare, many-coloured seaweeds,--for there had been a sailor-uncle in the family,--annuals and beauty-books in gorgeous bindings, albums through which the children looked with never-failing delight, work-boxes and portfolios inlaid with mother-of-pearl; almost all the treasures of the family, in fact, laid away here in state, like jean ingelow's dead year, "shut in a sacred gloom." when this room had been inspected and admired, they lowered the blinds, drew the curtains, and left it again to its solitude. the rest of the house was much less awe-inspiring, but it was all delightful. the loom, now seldom or never used, stood in one corner of the kitchen. not far away was the big spinning-wheel. miss dean tried to teach them to spin, and when they found it was not so easy as it looked, gave them a specimen of how it should be done that seemed almost magical. there is, indeed, something that suggests magic about spinning,--the rhythmically stepping figure, the whirling brown wheel, the rolls of wool, changed by a perfectly measured twirl and pull into lengths of snow-white yarn, and the soothing, drowsy hum, the most restful sound that labour can produce. then there was the up-stairs to visit. the chief thing of interest there was the tiny flax-wheel which stood in the upper hall, and which certainly looked, as jack said, as if _it_ ought to belong to a fairy godmother. in the attic, great bunches of herbs hung drying from the rafters, and the air was sweet with the scent of them. there were sage, summer-savoury, sweet marjoram, sweet basil, mint, and many more, with names as fragrant as their leaves. on the floor, near one of the chimneys, was spread a good supply of butternuts, and strings of dried apples stretched from wall to wall at the coolest end of the one big room. "if i lived in this house," dora said, "i would come up here often and write,--try to write, i mean!" "i come up here often and read," miss dean said, with a quick glance of comprehension at the little girl's eager face. "i love it! and sometimes, when i feel another way and it's not too cold, i put up one blind in the best parlour, and sit in there." "i wish you were coming down to sit in mother's den, and read--and talk--and everything!" said marjorie, and the others echoed the wish. "so i am, some time or other," lois answered. "mrs. merrithew has asked me, and now it's just a question of how soon aunt prudence can spare me. that may be next week,--or it may be next winter!" "it may be for years and it may be for ever," dora quoted, laughing, and jackie added, "and then--when you do come--we will make you a son and daughter of canada right away!" the search for the egg-shell china took them back to the sitting-room, where lois begged miss prudence to exhibit this most fragile of her belongings. with natural pride, that lady unlocked a china-closet, and brought out specimens of the beautiful delicate ware which their grandmother had brought over with her from ireland, and of which, in all these years, only three articles had been broken. it certainly was exquisite stuff, delicately thin, of a rich cream-colour, and with gilt lines and tiny wreaths of pink and crimson roses. "i thought we would have them out for tea," miss alma suggested, but mrs. merrithew, with three children, all rather hasty in their movements, to look after, begged her not to think of such a thing. "your white and gold china is pretty enough for any one;" she said, "and, my dear prudence, if you are determined to give us tea after that big dinner, we will have to ask for it soon, or we will be spending most of the night on the road." "dear, dear!" said miss prudence, putting back her treasures tenderly, "it does seem as if you'd been here about half an hour, and i do hate to have you go! but i know how you feel about being out late with the children, and you won't stay all night. come along, alma, let's hustle up some tea, and let lois talk to mrs. merrithew awhile." and "hustle" they certainly did, spreading a board that groaned with the good old-fashioned dainties, for the cooking of which miss prudence was noted throughout the country. then the horses were brought to the door, tossing their heads in haste to be off, wraps were snugly adjusted, good-byes said many times, and they were off. "i believe grier has given these horses nothing but oats all day," mr. merrithew muttered, as the pretty beasts strained and tugged in their anxiety to run down-hill; but when it came to the up-hill stretches, they soon sobered down, and were content with a reasonable pace. warm and cosey, nestled against his mother, jackie soon slept as before; but the others, with rather a reckless disregard of their throats, sang song after song, in spite of the frosty air, and dashed up to the door of the big brick house, at last, to the sound of: "'twas from aunt dinah's quilting party i was seeing nellie home." chapter ix. to invalids, or to the really destitute, canadian winters, clear and bright though they are, may seem unduly long; but for our little canadian cousins, warmly clad, warmly housed, and revelling in the season's healthful sports, the months went by as if on wings. with march, though the winds were strong, the sun began to show his power, and by the middle of the month the sap was running, and the maple-sugar-making had begun. jackie persuaded his father to take him out one morning to the woods, and to help him tap a number of trees. when they went back later and collected the tin cups which they had left under the holes in the trees, they found altogether about a pint of sap. this they took carefully home, and jack persuaded every one to taste it, then boiled the remainder until it thickened a little,--a very little, it is true,--and the family manfully ate it with their muffins for tea, though mrs. merrithew declared that she believed they had tapped any tree they came across, instead of keeping to sugar-maples. toward the end of the month mrs. grey got up a driving-party to one of the sugar-camps, and though it was chiefly for grown people, mrs. merrithew allowed dora and marjorie to go. the drive was long, and rather tiring, as the roads were beginning to get "slumpy," and here and there would come a place where the runners scraped bare ground. but when they reached the camp they were given a hearty welcome, allowed to picnic in the camp-house, and treated to unlimited maple-syrup, sugar, and candy. the process of sugar-making has lost much of its picturesqueness, since the more convenient modern methods have come into use. mrs. grey remembered vividly when there were no camp-houses, with their big furnaces and evaporating pans, and no little metal "spiles" to conduct the sap from the trees to the tins beneath. in those days the spiles, about a foot in length, were made of cedar, leading to wooden troughs,--which, she maintained, gave the juice an added and delicious flavour. but this their host of the sugar-camp would not admit, though he agreed with her that the process of boiling must have been much more interesting to watch when it was done in big cauldrons hung over bonfires in the snowy woods. when the visitors left camp, each one carried a little bark dish (called a "cosseau") of maple-candy, presented by the owner of the camp, and most of them had bought quantities of the delicious fresh sugar. april brought soft breezes, warmer sunshine and melting snow. it seemed to dora that people thought of scarcely anything but the condition of the ice, and the quantity of snow in the woods. then they began to say that there would be a freshet, and debby, who was apt to forebode the worst, announced that the bridges would go this time, sure! mr. merrithew only laughed when marjorie asked him about it, and said that this prophecy had been made every year since the bridges were built, and that there was no more danger this year than any other. but mrs. merrithew, though she could not be said to worry, still quietly decided what things she would carry with her in case of a flight to the hills! the freshet which was talked about so much was, in spite of mr. merrithew's laughter, a remote possibility; certainly not a probability. in his own and mrs. merrithew's youth, it had been so imminent that people actually _had_ gone to the hills. a tremendous jam had been formed a few miles above town; but a few days of hot sun had opened the river farther down, and the danger had passed. since the two bridges, however, had been built, some people thought that there was a chance of the ice jamming above the upper bridge. usually the worst jams were between the islands, not far above town. each day some fresh word was brought in as to the river's condition. "the river st. john is like a sick person, isn't it?" dora said one afternoon. "the first thing every one says in the morning is, 'i wonder how the river is to-day.'" the words were scarcely out of her mouth when mr. merrithew came in hastily, calling out: "come, people, if you want to see the ice go out. the jam by vine island is broken. come quick. it's piling up finely!" in a very few minutes the whole family answered to his summons, and they set out in great excitement to watch their dear river shake off its fetters. they made their way quickly to the wooden bridge, and found a good share of the population of fredericton there assembled. it was truly a sight well worth going to see. below the bridge the dark water was running swiftly, bearing blocks of ice, bits of board, and logs,--indeed, a fine medley of things. but _above_ the bridge! jackie clapped his hands with delight, as he watched the ice, pushed by the masses behind it, throw itself against the mighty stone piers, and break and fall back, while the bridge quivered afresh at each onslaught. it was truly grand to see, and they stayed watching it for more than an hour; stayed till jackie began to shiver, and mrs. merrithew hurried them home. by the next morning the river was rapidly clearing, so that some reckless spirits ventured to cross in boats and canoes, dodging the ice-cakes with skill worthy to be employed in a better cause. in a day or two more the deep whistle of the river-boat was heard; a sound that brings summer near, though not a leaf be on the trees. but it was not until the ice had entirely ceased running, and the river had begun to go down, that really warm weather could begin, for, until then, there was always a chill air from the water. but after that,--ah, then spring came in earnest, with balmy airs and singing birds, pussy-willows, silver gray, beside the brooks, and little waterfalls laughing down the hills. then came the greening fields, the trees throwing deeper shadows, and the mayflowers, pink and pearly and perfect, hiding under their own leaves in damp woodland hollows! the children made many excursions to gather these fragrant blooms, and kept quantities of them in the den until the season was over. it would be hard, mrs. merrithew thought, to find anything more lovely, and to show how thoroughly she appreciated their attention, she made for each child a little mayflower picture in water-colours. in marjorie's the flowers were in a large blue bowl, on a table covered with an old-blue cloth; for jackie she painted them in a dainty shallow basket, just as he had brought them from the woods; and for dora there was a shadowy green bit of the woodland itself, and a few of the braver blossoms just showing among leaves and moss. chapter x. once more the lilacs were in blossom in the garden of the big brick house. the blackbirds called and chuckled in the lofty branches of the elms, and robins hopped about the lawns, seemingly with the express purpose of tantalizing kitty grey. on the lawn, where the hammocks hung, a happy group was gathered. mr. and mrs. merrithew were there, marjorie and dora, katherine and jack, and two others who evidently formed the centre of attraction. of these, one was a tall, thin man, with a frame that must once have been athletic, and a pathetic stoop in the broad shoulders. he sat in a deep armchair, with dora contentedly nestled on his knee. in a hammock near him sat a lady, with a dark, lovely face, beautifully arched brows, and soft eyes, so like dora's that a stranger might have guessed their relationship. mr. carman, though still an invalid, was wonderfully better, and both he and his wife were full of praises of the great, beautiful west, its scenery, its climate, and its possibilities. "i have come to the conclusion," mr. carman said, after an enthusiastic description of a sunset in the rocky mountains, "that it is no wonder we canadians are proud of our country." "then you and aunt denise shall be 'sons and daughters,'" cried jackie, "and you can read a paper about the west at our very next meeting. that _will_ be fine!" and uncle archie and aunt denise were accepted then and there as members of the s. a. d. o. c. the travellers had only arrived the day before, so there was still much to ask and tell; but dora and her parents had already had a long talk as to plans and prospects, and the little girl was radiant with delight over the arrangements that were decided upon. marjorie, who could not help being a little cast down at the prospect of a separation from her cousin, wondered that dora did not seem to mind at all. but when, by and by, they strolled off together to the grape-arbour for a talk, she understood the reason of this cheerfulness. "i want to tell you all about our plans," dora began, as soon as they were seated in their favourite nook. "you see, mother says that dear father, though he is certainly better, won't be able to work for a long, long time. next winter they will probably go to barbadoes, where some friends of mother's are living; and if they do, i am to stay with you _all winter_ again,--if you will have me, marjorie! your mother says _she_ will!" "_have_ you!" marjorie exclaimed. "oh, but i am glad! i don't know what i will do without you all summer, but it is fine to know that at least we will have the winter together." then dora burst into a peal of laughter, and clapped her hands over the news that she had to tell. "oh, i've got the best to tell you yet," she said. "father and mother have quite decided to stay _here_, in fredericton, all summer! they want to rent a furnished house, just as close to this one as they possibly can; and then we will be together almost every minute, just as we are now. _won't_ it be lovely?" marjorie sat quiet for a minute, and thought it over with shining eyes. then she gave dora a regular "bear-hug," and cried: "i feel just like jackie does when he dances a war-dance! i was going to say that it was too good to be true, but mother says she doesn't like that saying, for there is nothing too good to come true sometime, if it isn't already. come and tell jack and aunt kathie, quick! they will be almost as glad as i am!" so these little canadian cousins went hand in hand down the garden-path, full of happy thoughts of the long bright summer days that spread before them. the end. the little cousin series the most delightful and interesting accounts possible of child life in other lands, filled with quaint sayings, doings, and adventures. each one vol., 12mo, decorative cover, cloth, with six or more full-page illustrations in color. price per volume $0.60 _by mary hazelton wade (unless otherwise indicated)_ =our little african cousin our little alaskan cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little arabian cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little armenian cousin= =our little brown cousin our little canadian cousin= by elizabeth r. macdonald =our little chinese cousin= by isaac taylor headland =our little cuban cousin our little dutch cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little english cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little eskimo cousin= =our little french cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little german cousin= =our little hawaiian cousin= =our little hindu cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little indian cousin= =our little irish cousin= =our little italian cousin= =our little japanese cousin= =our little jewish cousin= =our little korean cousin= by h. lee m. pike =our little mexican cousin= by edward c. butler =our little norwegian cousin= =our little panama cousin= by h. lee m. pike =our little philippine cousin= =our little porto rican cousin= =our little russian cousin= =our little scotch cousin= by blanche mcmanus =our little siamese cousin= =our little spanish cousin= by mary f. nixon-roulet =our little swedish cousin= by claire m. coburn =our little swiss cousin= =our little turkish cousin= the goldenrod library the goldenrod library contains stories which appeal alike both to children and to their parents and guardians. each volume is well illustrated from drawings by competent artists, which, together with their handsomely decorated uniform binding, showing the goldenrod, usually considered the emblem of america, is a feature of their manufacture. each one volume, small 12mo, illustrated $0.35 list of titles =aunt nabby's children.= by frances hodges white. =child's dream of a star, the.= by charles dickens. =flight of rosy dawn, the.= by pauline bradford mackie. =findelkind.= by ouida. =fairy of the rhone, the.= by a. comyns carr. =gatty and i.= by frances e. crompton. =helena's wonderworld.= by frances hodges white. =jerry's reward.= by evelyn snead barnett. =la belle nivernaise.= by alphonse daudet. =little king davie.= by nellie hellis. =little peterkin vandike.= by charles stuart pratt. =little professor, the.= by ida horton cash. =peggy's trial.= by mary knight potter. =prince yellowtop.= by kate whiting patch. =provence rose, a.= by ouida. =seventh daughter, a.= by grace wickham curran. =sleeping beauty, the.= by martha baker dunn. =small, small child, a.= by e. livingston prescott. =susanne.= by frances j. delano. =water people, the.= by charles lee sleight. =young archer, the.= by charles e. brimblecom. cosy corner series it is the intention of the publishers that this series shall contain only the very highest and purest literature,--stories that shall not only appeal to the children themselves, but be appreciated by all those who feel with them in their joys and sorrows. the numerous illustrations in each book are by well-known artists, and each volume has a separate attractive cover design. each 1 vol., 16mo, cloth $0.50 _by annie fellows johnston_ =the little colonel.= (trade mark.) the scene of this story is laid in kentucky. its heroine is a small girl, who is known as the little colonel, on account of her fancied resemblance to an old-school southern gentleman, whose fine estate and old family are famous in the region. =the giant scissors.= this is the story of joyce and of her adventures in france. joyce is a great friend of the little colonel, and in later volumes shares with her the delightful experiences of the "house party" and the "holidays." =two little knights of kentucky.= who were the little colonel's neighbors. in this volume the little colonel returns to us like an old friend, but with added grace and charm. she is not, however, the central figure of the story, that place being taken by the "two little knights." =mildred's inheritance.= a delightful little story of a lonely english girl who comes to america and is befriended by a sympathetic american family who are attracted by her beautiful speaking voice. by means of this one gift she is enabled to help a school-girl who has temporarily lost the use of her eyes, and thus finally her life becomes a busy, happy one. =cicely and other stories for girls.= the readers of mrs. johnston's charming juveniles will be glad to learn of the issue of this volume for young people. =aunt 'liza's hero and other stories.= a collection of six bright little stories, which will appeal to all boys and most girls. =big brother.= a story of two boys. the devotion and care of steven, himself a small boy, for his baby brother, is the theme of the simple tale. =ole mammy's torment.= "ole mammy's torment" has been fitly called "a classic of southern life." it relates the haps and mishaps of a small negro lad, and tells how he was led by love and kindness to a knowledge of the right. =the story of dago.= in this story mrs. johnston relates the story of dago, a pet monkey, owned jointly by two brothers. dago tells his own story, and the account of his haps and mishaps is both interesting and amusing. =the quilt that jack built.= a pleasant little story of a boy's labor of love, and how it changed the course of his life many years after it was accomplished. =flip's islands of providence.= a story of a boy's life battle, his early defeat, and his final triumph, well worth the reading. _by edith robinson_ =a little puritan's first christmas.= a story of colonial times in boston, telling how christmas was invented by betty sewall, a typical child of the puritans, aided by her brother sam. =a little daughter of liberty.= the author introduces this story as follows: "one ride is memorable in the early history of the american revolution, the well-known ride of paul revere. equally deserving of commendation is another ride,--the ride of anthony severn,--which was no less historic in its action or memorable in its consequences." =a loyal little maid.= a delightful and interesting story of revolutionary days, in which the child heroine, betsey schuyler, renders important services to george washington. =a little puritan rebel.= this is an historical tale of a real girl, during the time when the gallant sir harry vane was governor of massachusetts. =a little puritan pioneer.= the scene of this story is laid in the puritan settlement at charlestown. =a little puritan bound girl.= a story of boston in puritan days, which is of great interest to youthful readers. =a little puritan cavalier.= the story of a "little puritan cavalier" who tried with all his boyish enthusiasm to emulate the spirit and ideals of the dead crusaders. =a puritan knight errant.= the story tells of a young lad in colonial times who endeavored to carry out the high ideals of the knights of olden days. _by ouida (louise de la ramã©e)_ =a dog of flanders:= a christmas story. too well and favorably known to require description. =the nurnberg stove.= this beautiful story has never before been published at a popular price. _by frances margaret fox_ =the little giant's neighbours.= a charming nature story of a "little giant" whose neighbours were the creatures of the field and garden. =farmer brown and the birds.= a little story which teaches children that the birds are man's best friends. =betty of old mackinaw.= a charming story of child-life, appealing especially to the little readers who like stories of "real people." =brother billy.= the story of betty's brother, and some further adventures of betty herself. =mother nature's little ones.= curious little sketches describing the early lifetime, or "childhood," of the little creatures out-of-doors. =how christmas came to the mulvaneys.= a bright, lifelike little story of a family of poor children, with an unlimited capacity for fun and mischief. the wonderful never-to-be forgotten christmas that came to them is the climax of a series of exciting incidents. * * * * * transcriber's note: obvious punctuation errors repaired. [illustration: "edith was busy taking their photographs". page 41.] little prudy's children jimmy, lucy, and all by sophie may author of "little prudy stories" "dotty dimple stories" "little prudy's flyaway series" "flaxie frizzle series" "the quinnebasset series" etc. boston lee and shepard publishers 1900 copyright, 1900, by lee and shepard. _all rights reserved._ jimmy, lucy, and all. norwood press j.s. cushing & co.--berwick & smith norwood mass. u.s.a. contents chapter i. the tallyho ii. the first dinner iii. lucy's gold mine iv. "the knitting-woman" v. the air-castle vi. "grandma graymouse" vii. the zebra kitten viii. stealing a chimney ix. "chicken little" and joe x. the thief found xi. begging pardon xii. "the little schoolma'am's earthquake" xiii. nate's cave xiv. jimmy's good luck list of illustrations "edith was busy taking their photographs" "'it is perfectly awful!' said aunt lucy" edith painting the cherub for mrs. mcquilken "'james s. dunlee, will--you--forgive me?'" jimmy, lucy, and all i the tallyho "i never saw a gold mine in my life; and now i'm going to see one," cried lucy, skipping along in advance of the others. it was quite a large party; the whole dunlee family, with the two sanfords,--uncle james and aunt vi,--making ten in all, counting maggie, the maid. they had alighted from the cars at a way-station, and were walking along the platform toward the tallyho coach which was waiting for them. lucy was firmly impressed with the idea that they were starting for the gold mines. the truth was, they were on their way to an old mining-town high up in the cuyamaca mountains, called castle cliff; but there had been no gold there for a great many years. mr. dunlee was in rather poor health, and had been "ordered" to the mountains. the others were perfectly well and had not been "ordered" anywhere: they were going merely because they wanted to have a good time. "papa would be so lonesome without us children," said edith, "he needs us all for company." he was to have still more company. mr. and mrs. hale were coming to-morrow to join the party, bringing their little daughter barbara, lucy's dearest friend. they could not come to-day; there would have been hardly room for them in the tallyho. with all "the bonnie dunlees,"--as uncle james called the children,--and all the boxes, baskets, and bundles, the carriage was about as full as it could hold. it was seldom that the driver used this tallyho. he was quite choice of it, and generally drove an old stage, unless, as happened just now, he was taking a large party. it was a very gay tallyho, as yellow as the famous pumpkin coach of cinderella, only that the spokes of the wheels were striped off with scarlet. there were four white horses, and every horse sported two tiny american flags, one in each ear. "all aboard!" called out the driver, a brown-faced, broad-shouldered man, with a twinkle in his eye. "all aboard!" responded mr. sanford, echoed by jimmy-boy. whereupon crack went the driver's long whip, round went the red and yellow wheels, and off sped the white horses as freely as if they were thinking of lucy's gold mine and longing to show it to her, and didn't care how many miles they had to travel to reach it. but this was all lucy's fancy. they were thinking of oats, not gold mines. these bright horses knew they were not going very far up the mountain. they would soon stop to rest in a good stable, and other horses not so handsome would take their places. it was a very hard road, and grew harder and harder, and the driver always changed horses twice before he got to the end of the journey. as the tallyho rattled along, the older people in it fell to talking; and the children looked at the country they were passing, sang snatches of songs, and gave little exclamations of delight. edith threw one arm around her older sister katharine, saying:-"o kyzie, aren't you glad you live in california? how sweet the air is, and how high the mountains look all around! when we were east last summer didn't you pity the people? only think, they never saw any lemons and oranges growing! they don't know much about roses either; they only have roses once a year." "that's true," replied kyzie. "let me button your gloves, edy, you'll be dropping them off." "see those butterflies! i'd be happy if bab was only in here," murmured a little voice from under lucy's hat. "bab didn't want to come with her papa and mamma; she wanted to come with _me_!" "now, lucy, don't be foolish," said edith. "where could we have put bab? there's not room enough in this coach, unless one of the rest of us had got out. you'll see bab to-morrow, and she'll be in castle cliff all summer; so you needn't complain." "_i_ wasn't complaining, no indeed! only i don't want to go down in the gold mine till bab comes. i s'pose they'll put us down in a bucket, won't they? i want uncle james to go with us." jimmy-boy laughed and threw himself about in quite a gale. he often found his little sister very amusing. "excuse me, lucy," said he; "but i do think you're very ignorant! that mine up there is all played out, and uncle james has told us so ever so many times. didn't you hear him? the shaft is more than half full of muddy water. i'd like to see you going down in a bucket!" "well, then, jimmy dunlee, what _shall_ we do at castle cliff?" "we've brought a tent with us, and for one thing i'm going to camp out," replied jimmy. "that's a grand thing, they say." "don't! there'll be something come and eat you up, sure as you live," said lucy, who had a vague notion that camping out was connected in some way with wild animals, such as coyotes and mountain lions. "poh! you don't know the least thing about castle cliff, lucy! and uncle james has talked and talked! tell me what he said, now do." uncle james was seated nearly opposite, for the two long seats of the tallyho faced each other. lucy spoke in a low tone, not wishing him to overhear. "he said we were going to board at a big house pretty near the old mine." "yes, mr. templeton's." "and he said somebody had a white spanish rabbit with reddish brown eyes and its mouth all a-quiver." "yes, i heard him say that about the rabbit. and what are those things that come and walk on top of the house in the morning?" "i know. they are woodpeckers. they tap on the roof, and the noise sounds like 'jacob, jacob, wake up, jacob!' uncle james says when strangers hear it they think somebody is calling, and they say, 'oh, yes, we're coming!' i shan't say that; i shall know it's woodpeckers. tell some more, jimmy." "yes" said eddo, leaving maggie and wedging himself between lucy and jimmy. "tell some more, jimmum!" "well, there's a post-office in town and there's a telephone, and mr. templeton has lots of things brought up to castle cliff from the city; so we shall have plenty to eat; chicken and ice-cream and things. that makes me think, i'm hungry. wouldn't they let us open a luncheon basket?" kyzie thought not; so jimmy went on telling lucy what he knew of castle cliff. "it's named for an air-castle there is up there; it's a thing they _call_ an air-castle anyway. a man built it in the hollow of some trees, away up, up, up. i'm going to climb up there to see it." "so'm i," said lucy. "ho, you can't climb worth a cent; you're only a girl!" "but she has an older brother; and sometimes older brothers are kind enough to help their little sisters," remarked kyzie, with a meaning smile toward jimmy; but jimmy was looking another way. "uncle james told a funny story about that air-castle," went on kyzie. "did you hear him tell of sitting up there one day and seeing a little toad help another toad--a lame one--up the trunk of the tree?" "no, i didn't hear," said lucy. "how did the toad do it?" "i'll let you all guess." "pushed him?" said edith. "no." "took him up pickaback," suggested lucy. "nothing of the sort. he just took his friend's lame foot in his mouth, and the two toads hopped along together! uncle james said it probably wasn't the first time, for they kept step as if they were used to it." "wasn't that cunning?" said edith. and jimmy remarked after a pause, "if lucy wants to go up to that castle, maybe i could steady her along; only there's bab. she'd have to go too. and i don't believe it's any place for girls!" the ride was a long one, forty miles at least. the passengers had dinner at a little inn, the elegant horses were placed in a stable; and the tallyho started again at one o'clock with a black horse, a sorrel horse, and two gray ones. the afternoon wore on. the horses climbed upward at every step; and though the journey was delightful, the passengers were growing rather tired. "wish i could sit on the seat with the king-ductor," besought little eddo, moving about uneasily. "that isn't a conductor, it's a driver. conductors are the men that go on the steam-cars,--the 'choo choo cars,'" explained jimmum. then in a lower tone, "they don't have any cars up at castle cliff, and i'm glad of it." lucy did not understand why he should be glad, and jimmy added in a lower tone:-"because--don't you remember how some little folks used to act about steam-engines? they might do it again, you know." "yes, i 'member now. but that was a long time ago, jimmy. he wouldn't run after engines now." "who wouldn't?" inquired young master eddo, forgetting the "king-ductor" and turning about to face his elder brother. "who wouldn't run after the engine, jimmum?" "nobody--i mean _you_ wouldn't." "no, no, not me," assented eddo, shaking his flaxen head. and there the matter would have ended, if lucy had not added most unluckily: "'twas when you were only a baby that you did it, eddo. you said to the engine, 'come here, little choo choo, eddo won't hurt oo.' _you_ didn't know any better." "_'course_ i knew better," said eddo, shaking his head again, but this time with an air of bewilderment. "_i_ didn't say, 'come here, little choo choo.' no, no, not me!" "oh, but you did, darling," persisted lucy. "you were just a tiny bit of a boy. you stood right on the track, and the engine was coming, 'puff, puff,' and you said, 'come here, little choo choo, eddo won't hurt oo!'" "i didn't! oh! oh! oh! _when'd_ i say that? _did_ the engine hurt me? _where_ did it hurt me? say, jimmum, where did the engine hurt me?" putting his hand to his throat, to his ears, to his side. the more he thought of it, the worse he felt; till appalled by the idea of what he must have suffered he finally fell to sobbing in his mother's arms, and she soothed his imaginary woes with kisses and cookies. for the remainder of the journey he was in pretty good spirits and found much diversion in watching the gambols of the two dogs following the tallyho. one was a castle cliff dog, black and shaggy, named slam; the other, yellow and smooth, belonged to the "king-ductor" or driver, and was called bang. slam and bang often darted off for a race and eddo nearly gave them up for lost; but they always came back wagging their tails and capering about as if to say:-"hello, eddo, we ran away just to scare you, and we'll do it again if we please!" it was a great day for dogs. ever so many dogs ran out to meet slam and bang. they always bit their ears for a "how d'ye do?" and then trotted along beside them just for company. eddo found it quite exciting. one was a mexican dog, without a particle of hair, but he did not seem to be in the least ashamed of his singular appearance. edith said it was an "empty country," and indeed there were few houses; but there must have been more dogs than houses, for the whole journey had a running accompaniment of "bow-wow-wows." the farther up hill the road wound the steeper it grew; and jimmy exclaimed more than once:-"this coach is standing up straight on its hind feet, papa! just look! 'twill spill us all out backward!" but it did nothing of the sort. it took them straight to castle cliff, "nearly six thousand feet above the level of the sea," and there it stopped, before the front door of the hotel. it was about half-past five o'clock in the afternoon, and mr. templeton, who had been looking out for the tallyho, came down the steps to meet his guests. ii the first dinner mr. templeton's wife was just behind him. they both greeted the party as if they had all been old friends. the house, a large white one, stood as if in the act of climbing the hill. in front was a sloping lawn full of brilliant flowers, bordered with house-leek, or "old hen and chickens," a plant running over with pink blossoms. kyzie had not expected to see a garden like this on the mountain. at one side of the house, between two black oak trees, was a hammock, and near it a large stone trough, into which water dripped from a faucet. two birds, called red-hammers, were sipping the water with their bills, not at all disturbed by the arrival of strangers. it was a small settlement. the hotel, by far the largest house in castle cliff, looked down with a grand air upon the few cottages in sight. these tiny cottages were not at all pretty, and had no grass or lawns in front, but people from the city were keeping house in them for the summer; and besides there were tents scattered all about, full of "campers." as the "bonnie dunlees" and their elders entered the hotel, a merry voice called out:-"a hearty welcome to you, my friends, and three cheers for castle cliff!" mr. and mrs. dunlee and the sanfords walked on smiling, and the children lingered awhile outside; but it was a full minute before any of them discovered that the cheery voice belonged to a parrot, whose cage swung from a tall sycamore overhead. "polly's pretty sociable," laughed mr. templeton. "do you like animals, young ladies? if so, please stand up here in a group, and you shall have another welcome." then he clapped his hands and called out "thistleblow!" and immediately a pretty red pony came frisking along and began to caper around the young people with regular dancing steps, making at the same time the most graceful salaams, pausing now and then to sway himself as if he were courtesying. it was a charming performance. the little creature had once belonged to a band of gypsies, who had given him a regular course of training. "he is trying to tell you how glad he is to see you," said mr. templeton, as the children shouted and clapped their hands. "oh, won't bab like it, though!" cried lucy. "seems as if i couldn't wait till to-morrow for bab to get here, for then the good times will begin." but for kyzie and edith and jimmy the good times had begun already. the five dunlees entered the house, little eddo clinging fast to jimmum's forefinger. they passed an old lady who sat on the veranda knitting. she gazed after them through her spectacles, and said to mr. templeton in a tone of inquiry:-"boarders?" "yes," he replied, rubbing his chin, "and they have lots of jingle in 'em too; they're just the kind i like." "well, i hope they won't get into any mischief up here, that's all i've got to say. nobody wants to take children to board anyway, but you can't always seem to help it." and then the old lady turned to her knitting again; indeed her fingers had been flying all the while she talked. mr. templeton looked at her curiously, and wondered if she disliked children. "i'd as lief have 'em 'round the house as her birds and kittens anyway," he reflected; for she kept a magpie, three cats and a canary; and these pets had not been always agreeable guests at the hotel. it was now nearly six o'clock, and savory odors from the kitchen mingled with the balmy breath of the flowers stealing in from the lawn. the dunlee party had barely time for hasty toilets when the gong sounded for dinner. the templeton dining-room was large and held several tables. the dunlees had the longest of these, the one near the west window. there were twelve plates set, though only nine were needed to-night. the three extra plates had been placed there for the hale family, who were expected to-morrow. mrs. dunlee had told the landlord that she would like the hales at her table. "and bab will sit side o' me," said lucy. "oh, won't we be happy?" as the dunlees took their seats to-night and looked around the room they saw a droll sight. the old lady, who had been knitting on the veranda, was seated at a small table in one corner; and on each side of her in a chair sat a cat! one cat was a gray "coon," the other an angora; and both of them sat up as grave as judges, nibbling bits of cheese. mrs. mcquilken herself, dressed in a very odd style, was knitting again. she was a remarkably industrious woman, and as it would be perhaps three or four minutes before the soup came in, she could not bear to waste the time in idleness. her head-dress was odd enough. it was just a strip of white muslin wound around the head like an east indian puggaree. mrs. mcquilken had many outlandish fashions. she was the widow of a sea-captain and had been abroad most of her life. the children could hardly help staring at her. even after they had learned to know her pretty well they still wanted to stare; and not being able to remember her name they spoke of her as "the knitting-woman." "look, lucy," whispered jimmy; "there's a boy i know over there at that little table. it's nate pollard." he waved his hand toward him and nate waved in reply. at home jimmy had not known nate very well, for he was older than himself and in higher classes; but here among strangers jimmy-boy was glad to see a familiar face. mr. and mrs. pollard were with their son. perhaps they had all come for the summer. jimmy hoped so. there were two colored servants gliding about the room, and a pretty waiting-maid. "o dear, no cook from cathay," whispered kyzie to edith. "i don't know what you mean." "i mean i wanted a cook from cathay or cipango," went on kyzie, laughing behind her napkin. "i'm going to shake you," said edith, who suddenly bethought herself that cathay and cipango were the old names for china and japan. this had been part of her history lesson a few days ago. how kyzie did remember everything! at that moment the colored man from georgia stood at her elbow with a steaming plate of soup. lucy looked at him askance. why couldn't he have been a chinaman with a pigtail? she had told bab she was almost sure there would be a "china cook" at the mountains, and when he passed the soup he would say, "have soup-ee?" bab had been in europe and in maine and in california, but knew very little of chinamen and had often said she "wanted to eat china cooking." the dinner was excellent. eddo enjoyed it very much for a while; then his head began to nod over his plate, his spoon waved uncertainly in the air, and maggie had to be sent for to take him away from the table. the ride up the mountain had been so fatiguing that by eight o'clock all the dunlees, little and big, were glad to find themselves snugly in bed. they slept late, every one of them, and even the woodpeckers, tapping on the roof next morning, failed to arouse them with their "jacob, jacob, wake up, wake up, jacob!" after breakfast edith happened to leave the dining-room just behind mrs. mcquilken, who held her two cats cuddled up in her arms like babies, and was kissing their foreheads and calling them "mamma's precious darlings." as edith heard this she could not help smiling, and mrs. mcquilken paused in the entry a moment to say:-"i guess you like cats." "i do, ma'am. oh, yes, very much." "that's right. i like to see children fond of animals. now, i've got a new kitty upstairs, a zebra kitty, that you'd be pleased with. it's a beauty, and _such_ a tail! come up to my room and see it if you want to. my room's number five. but don't you come now; i shall be busy an hour and a half. remember, an hour and a half." edith thanked her and ran to tell kyzie what the "knitting-woman" had been saying. "go get your kodak," said kyzie. "nate pollard is going to take us all out on an exploring expedition. you know he has been in castle cliff a whole week, and knows the places." "first thing i want to see is that mine," said lucy, as they all met outside the hotel. "the mine?" repeated kyzie, and looked at eddo. "i'm afraid it isn't quite safe to take little bits of people to such a place as that. do you think it is, nate?" "rather risky," replied nate. eddo had caught the words, "little bits of people," and his eyes opened wide. "what does _mine_ mean, jimmum?" "a great big hole, i guess. see here, eddo, let's go in the house and find maggie." "yes," chimed in edith, "let's go find maggie. there's a _beau_-tiful picture book in mamma's drawer. you just ask maggie and she'll show you the picture of those nice little guinea-pigs." though very young, eddo was acute enough to see through this little manoeuvre. it was not the first time the other children had tried to get him out of the way. they wanted to go to see a charming "great big hole" somewhere, and they thought he would fall into it and get hurt. they were always thinking such things--so stupid of them! they thought he used to run after "choo choos" and talk to them, when of course he never did it; 'twas some other little boy. "i want to go with jimmum," said he, stoutly. "you ought to not go 'thout me! _i_ shan't talk to that mine. _i_ shan't say, 'come, little mine, eddo won't hurt oo.' no, no, not me! i shan't say nuffin', and i shan't fall in the hole needer. so there! h'm! 'm! 'm!" it was not easy to resist his pleading. perhaps aunt vi saw how matters were, for she appeared just then, bearing the news that she and uncle james were going to drive, and would like to take one of the children. "and eddo is the one we want. he is so small that he can sit on the seat between us. aren't the rest of you willing to give him up just for this morning? he can go to walk with you another time." so they all said they would try to give him up, and he bounded away with aunt vi, his dear little face beaming with proud satisfaction. iii lucy's gold mine the other children strolled leisurely along toward a place that looked like a long strip of sand. "a sand beach," said kyzie. "no," said nate; "it isn't a beach and it isn't sand." "what _can_ you mean? what else is it, pray?" she stooped and took up a handful of something that certainly looked like sand. the others did the same. "what do you call that?" they all asked, as they sifted it through their fingers. nate smiled in a superior way. "well, i don't call it sand, because it isn't sand. i thought it was when i first saw it; i got cheated, same as you. but there's no sand to it; it's just _tailings_." "what in the world is tailings?" asked kyzie, taking up another handful and looking it over very carefully. strange if she, a girl in her teens, couldn't tell sand when she saw it! but she politely refrained from making any more remarks, and waited for nate to answer her question. he was an intelligent boy, between eleven and twelve. "well, tailings are just powdered rocks," said nate. "powdered rocks? who powdered them? what for?" asked edith. "why, the miners did it years ago. they ground up the rocks in the mine into powder just as fine as they could, and then washed the powder to get the gold out." "oh, i see," said edith. "so these tailings are what's left after the gold's washed out." "yes, they brought 'em and spread 'em 'round here to get rid of 'em i suppose." "is the gold all washed out, every bit?" asked jimmy. "seems as if i could see a little shine to it now." "well, they got out all they could. there may be a little dust of it left though. mr. templeton says the folks in 'frisco that own the mine think there's _some_ left, and the tailings ought to be sent to san diego and worked over." jimmy took up another handful. yes, there was a faint shine to it; it began to look precious. "well, there's a heap of it anyway. it goes ever so far down," said he, thrusting in a stick. "it's from ten to twelve feet deep," replied nate, proud of his knowledge; "and see how long and wide!" "_i_ don't see how they ever ground up rocks so fine," said kyzie. "exactly like sand. and it stretches out so far that you'd think 'twas a sand beach by the sea,--only there isn't any sea." "well, it's just as good as a beach anyway," said nate. "just as good for picnics and the like of that. when there's anything going on, they get out the brass band and have fireworks and bring chairs and benches and sit round here. i tell you it's great!" "there are lots of benches here now," remarked edith. "and what's that long wooden thing?" "that's a staging. that's where they have the brass band sit; that's where they send up the fireworks." "oh, i hope they'll have fireworks while we're here, and picnics." "of course they will. they're always having 'em. and i heard somebody say they're talking of a barbecue." edith clapped her hands. she did not know what a barbecue might be, but it sounded wild and jolly. "what a long stretch of mud-puddle right here by the tailings," said kyzie. nate laughed. "it _is_ a damp spot, that's a fact!" they all wondered what he was laughing at. "i guess there used to be water here once," said jimmy at a venture. "there's water here now standing round in spots. and,--why, it's _fishes_!" lucy stooped all of a sudden and picked up a dead fish. "ugh! i never caught a fish before!" but next moment she threw it away in disgust. "how did dead fishes ever get into this mud-puddle?" queried edith. "well, they used to live in it before it dried up," replied nate. "fact is, this is a _lake_!" everybody exclaimed in surprise; and kyzie said:-"it doesn't seem possible; but then things are so queer up here that you can believe almost anything." "really it is a lake. it's all right in the winter, and swells tremendously then; but this is a dry year, you know, and it's all dried up." kyzie forgave the lake for drying up, but pitied the fishes. edith thought castle cliff was "a funny place anyway." "what little bits of houses! did they dry up too?" "oh, those are just the cabins and bunk-houses that were built for the miners, ever so long ago when the mine was going. fixed up into cottages now for summer boarders. do you want to see the mine?" they went around behind the shaft-house and beyond the old saw-mill. "o my senses!" cried edith, "is that the old gold mine, that monstrous great thing? isn't it horrid?" they all agreed that it was "perfectly awful and dreadful," and that it made you shudder to look into it; and that they were glad baby eddo was safely out of the way. the mine was a deep, irregular chasm, full of dirty water and rocks. it had a hungry, cruel look; you could almost fancy it was waiting in wicked glee to swallow up thoughtless little children. "it doesn't seem as if anybody could ever have dug for gold in that horrid ditch," exclaimed kyzie. "you'd better believe they did, though," said the young guide. "they used to get it out in nuggets, cart-loads of it." he was not quite sure of the nuggets, but liked the sound of the word. "yes, cart-loads of it. i tell you 'twas the richest mine in the whole cuyamaca mountains." "too bad the gold gave out," said kyzie, gazing regretfully into the watery depths. "but it didn't give out! why, there's gold enough left down there to buy up the whole united states! they lost the vein, that's all" "the vein? what's a vein?" asked edith. "well, you see," replied the guide, "gold goes along underground in streaks; they call it veins. the miners had to stop digging here because they lost track of the streak. but they'll find it again." "how do _you_ know?" asked jimmy-boy, who thought nate was putting on too many airs. "because mr. templeton said so. they've sent for colonel somebody from i--forget where. he's a splendid mining engineer, great for finding lost veins. he'll be here next week and bring a lot of men." "whoop-ee!" cried jimmy, "he'll find the vein and things, and we'll be having gold as plenty as blackberries!" "just what i was talking about yesterday when you laughed," broke in lucy. "i said i'd go down in a bucket; don't you know i did?" edith was gazing spellbound at the yawning chasm. "look at those rickety steps! the men will get killed! 'twill all cave in!" "no danger," said nate, "there are walls down there, stone walls, papa says, that keep it all safe." he meant "galleries," but had forgotten the word. "well, i don't care if there are five hundred stone walls, i guess the men could drown all the same!" said edith. "that water ought to be let out, nate pollard! if the colonel is coming next week why don't they let out the water this very day and give the place a chance to dry off." she spoke in a tone of the gravest anxiety, as if she understood the matter perfectly, and felt the whole care of the mine. indeed, the mine had become suddenly very interesting to all the children. it certainly looked like a rough, wild, frightful hole; nothing more than a hole; but if there were gold down there in "nuggets," why, that was quite another matter; it became at once an enchanted hole; it was as delightful as a fairy story. "i hope it's true that they've sent for that colonel," said kyzie. "of course it's true," replied nate, who did not like to have his word doubted. "i s'pose there are buckets 'round here. oh, aren't you glad we came to castle cliff?" said lucy, pirouetting around jimmy. "bab will be glad, too," she thought. for lucy never could look forward to any pleasure without wishing her darling "niece" to share it with her. "well, i guess we've seen everything there is to see," remarked nate, who had now told all he knew and was ready to go. while they still wandered about, talking of "tailings" and "nuggets," they were startled by the peal of a bell. "twelve o'clock! two minutes ahead of time though," said nate, taking from his pocket a handsome gold watch which jimmy had always admired. "what bell is that? where is it?" they all asked. "and what is it ringing for?" "it's on top of the schoolhouse and it's ringing for noon. 'twill ring again in the evening at nine o'clock. but i can tell 'em they ought to set it back two minutes." "a nine o'clock bell? why, that's a _curfew_ bell! how romantic!" cried kyzie. she had read of "the mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells," but had never heard it. "let's go to the schoolhouse." as luncheon at the templeton house would not be served for an hour yet, they kept on to the hollow where the schoolhouse stood. it was a small, unpainted building in the shade of three pine trees. "just wait a minute right here," said edith, the young artist, unstrapping her kodak. "i want a snap-shot at it. stand there by that tree, jimmum. put your foot out just so. i wish you were barefooted!" just then, as if they had overheard the wish, two little boys came running down the hill, and one of them was barefooted. moreover, when kyzie asked if they would stand for a picture, they consented at once. "my name's joseph rolfe," said the elder, twitching off his hat, "and his name,"--pointing to his companion with a chuckle,--"his name is chicken little." "no such a thing! now you quit!" retorted the younger lad in a choked voice, digging his toes into the dirt, "quit a-plaguing me! my name's henry small and you know it!" while edith was busy taking their photographs, kyzie thanked the urchins very pleasantly. they both gazed at her with admiration. "see here," said joe rolfe, twitching off his hat again very respectfully, "are you going to keep school in the schoolhouse? i wish you would!" at this remarkable speech jimmy and edith fell to laughing; but kyzie only blushed a little, and smiled. how very grown-up she must seem to joe if he could think of her as a teacher! she was now a tall girl of fourteen, with a fine strong face and an earnest manner. she was beginning to tire of being classed among little girls, and it was delightful to find herself looked upon for the first time in her life as a young lady. but she only said:-"oh, no, joe, people don't teach school in summer! summer is vacation." "well, but they do sometimes," persisted joe; "there was a girl kep' this school last summer. she called it 'vacation school.' but we didn't like her; she licked like fury." "so she did," echoed chicken little, "licked and pulled ears. kep' a stick on the desk." and with these last words both the little boys took their leave, running up hill with great speed, as if they thought that standing for a picture had been a great waste of time. "that chicken boy is the biggest cry-baby," said nate. "the boys like to plague him to see him cry. joe rolfe has some sense." as the little party walked on, miss katharine turned her head more than once for another look at the schoolhouse. "wouldn't it be fun, edy, to teach school in there and ring that 'lin-lan-lone bell' to call in the scholars? i'd make you study botany harder'n you ever did before." "no, thank you, miss dunlee," replied edith, courtesying. "you'll not get me to worrying over botany. i studied it a month once, but when i go up in the mountains i go to have a good time." she pursed her pretty mouth as she spoke. her sister katharine was by far the best botanist in her class, and was always tearing up flowers in the most wasteful manner. worse than that, she expected edith to do the same thing and learn the hard names of the poor little withered pieces. "you don't love flowers as well as i do, kyzie, or you couldn't abuse them so!" this is what she often said to her learned sister after kyzie had made "a little preach" about the beauties of botany. as they entered the hotel for luncheon, kyzie was still thinking of the schoolhouse and the sweet-toned bell and the singular speech of joe rolfe, about wanting her for a teacher. what came of these thoughts you shall hear later on. "well, i declare, i forgot all about that zebra kitty," said edith. "what will the knitting-woman think of such actions?" iv the "knitting-woman" the "knitting-woman" met edith at the dining-room door after luncheon, and said to her rather sharply:-"well, little girl, i thought you liked kittens?" "i do, mrs.--madam, i certainly do," replied edith feeling guilty and ashamed. "but nate pollard took us to see the gold mine and the schoolhouse and we've just got back." "oh, that's it! i thought 'twas very still around here--i missed the noise of the _boyoes_.--you don't know what i mean by boyoes," she added, smiling. "i picked up the word in ireland. i'm always picking up words. it means _boys_." "i understand; oh, yes." "well, 'twas a little trouble to me, your not coming when i expected you; but you may come this afternoon. i'll be ready in ten minutes." "yes, madam, thank you." edith ran to her mother laughing. "oh, mamma, she is the queerest woman! calls boys _boyoes_! i must go to see her kitten whether i want to or not--in just ten minutes! i wish i could take kyzie with me; would you dare?" "certainly not. katharine has not been invited. and don't make a long call, edith." "no, mamma, i'll not even sit down. i'll just look at the zebra kitty and come right away." mrs. dunlee smiled. if there were many pets at number five it was not likely that edith would hasten away. "remember, daughter, fifteen minutes is long enough for a call on an entire stranger. you don't wish to annoy mrs. mcquilken; but if you should happen to forget, you'll hear this little bell tinkle, and that will remind you to leave." number five was a very interesting room, about as full as it could hold of oddities from various countries, together with four cats, a canary, and a mocking-bird. "if you had come this morning you would have seen mag, that's the magpie," said mrs. mcquilken. "she's off now, pretty creature. she likes to be picking a fuss with the chickens." the good lady had been knitting, but she dropped her work into the large pocket of her black apron, and moved up an easy-chair for her guest. edith forgot to take it. her eyes were roving about the room, attracted by the curiosities, though she dared not ask a single question. "that nest on the wall looks odd to you, i dare say," said mrs. mcquilken. "the twigs are woven together so closely that it looks nice enough for a lady's work-bag, now doesn't it?" edith said she thought it did. "well, that's the magpie's nest. she laid seven eggs in it once. i keep it now for her to sleep in; it's mag's cot-bed." edith's eyes, still roving, espied a handsome kitty asleep on the lounge. it must be the zebra kitty because of its black and dove-colored stripes. most remarkable stripes, so regular and distinct, yet so softly shaded. the face was black, with whiskers snow-white. how odd! edith had never seen white whiskers on a kitten. and then the long, sweeping black tail! mrs. mcquilken watched the little girl's face and no longer doubted her fondness for kittens. "i call her zee for short. look at that now!" and mrs. mcquilken straightened out the tail which was coiled around zee's back. "oh, how beautifully long!" cried edith. "long? i should say so! there was a cat-show at los angeles last fall, and one cat took a prize for a tail not so long as this by three-quarters of an inch! and zee only six months old!" the kitty, wide awake by this time, was holding high revel with a ball of yarn which the tortoise-shell cat had purloined from her mistress's basket. "dear thing! oh, isn't she sweet?" said edith, dropping on her knees before the graceful creature. mrs. mcquilken enjoyed seeing the child go off into small raptures; edith was fast winning her heart. "does your mother like cats?" she suddenly inquired. "not particularly," replied edith, clapping her hands, as zee with a quick dash bore away the ball out of the very paws of the coon cat. "mamma thinks cats are cold-hearted," said she, hugging zee to her bosom. "she says they don't love anybody." "i deny it!" exclaimed mrs. mcquilken, indignantly. "tell your mother to make a study of cats and she'll know better." edith looked rather frightened. "yes'm, i'll tell her." "they have very deep feelings and folks ought to know it. now, listen, little girl. i had two maltese kittens once. they were sisters and loved each other better than any girl sisters _you_ ever saw. one of the kittens got caught in a trap and we had to kill her. and the other one went round mewing and couldn't be comforted. she pined away, that kitty did, and in three days she died. now i know that for a fact." "poor child!" said edith, much touched. "_she_ wasn't cold-hearted, i'll tell mamma about that." "well, if she doesn't like 'em perhaps it wouldn't do any good; but while you're about it you might tell her of two tortoise-shell cats i had. they were sisters too. whiff had four kittens and puff had one and lost it. and the way whiff comforted puff! she took her right home into her own basket and they brought up the four kittens together. wasn't that lovely?" "oh, wasn't it, though?" said edith. "cats have hearts, i always knew they did." "that shows you're a sensible little girl," returned the old lady approvingly. "but you haven't told me yet what your name is?" "edith dunlee." "i knew 'twas dunlee--that's a scotch name; but i didn't know about the edith. well, edith, so you've been to see the gold mine? pokerish place, isn't it? i hear they're going to bring down the engine from the big plant and try to start it up again." edith had no idea what she meant by the "big plant," so made no reply. mrs. mcquilken went back to the subject of cats. "did you know the egyptians used to worship cats? well, sometimes they did. and when their cats died they went into mourning for them." "how queer!" "it does seem so, but it's just as you look at it, edith. cats are a sight of company. i didn't care so much about them or about birds either when my husband was alive and my little children, but now--" again she paused, and this time she did not go on again. some one out of doors laughed; it was jimmy dunlee, and the mocking-bird took up the merry sound and echoed it to perfection. "doesn't that seem human?" cried mrs. mcquilken. and really it did. it was exactly the laugh of a human boy, though it came from the throat of a tiny bird. "my little boys, pitt and roscoe, liked to hear him do that," said mrs. mcquilken. edith observed that she did not say "my boyoes." "pitt, the one that died in japan, doted on the mocking-bird. the other boy, roscoe, was all bound up in the canary." "does the canary sing?" "yes, he's a grand singer. just you wait till he pipes up. you'll be surprised. but you remember what i was saying a little while ago about your mother? that zebra kitty--" before she could finish the sentence edith heard the warning tinkle of the tea-bell, and sprang up suddenly, exclaiming: "good-by, mrs.--good-by, _madam_, i must go now. you've been very kind, thank you. good-by." and out of the door and away she skipped, leaving her hostess, who had not heard the bell, to wonder at her haste. "she went like a shot off a shovel," said the good lady, taking up her knitting-work. "she seemed to be such a well-mannered little girl, too! what got into her all at once? she acted as if she was 'possessed of the fox.'" this is a common expression in japan, and naturally mrs. mcquilken had caught it up, as she had caught up other odd things in her travels. she was something of a mocking-bird in her way, was the captain's widow. "i've taken quite a fancy to edith," she added, "a minute more and i should have offered to give her the zebra kitty. but there, i shouldn't want to make a fuss in the family. that woman, her mother, to think of her talking so hard about cats! she doesn't _look_ like that kind of a woman. i'm surprised." edith ran back to her mother breathless. "oh, mamma, i was having such a good time! and she didn't appear to be 'annoyed,' she talked just as fast all the time! but the bell rang while she was saying something and i had to run." "had to run? i hope you were not abrupt, my child?" "oh, no, mamma, not at all. i said 'good-by' twice, and thanked her and told her she had been very kind. that wasn't abrupt, was it? but oh, that kitty's tail! i forget how many inches and a quarter longer than any other kitty's tail in this state! and they are not cold-hearted,--i mean cats,--i promised to tell you." here followed an account of the two cat-sisters, who loved each other better than girl-sisters. "and think of one of them dying of grief, the sweet thing! human people don't die of grief, do they, mamma?" "not often, edith. such instances have been known, but they are very rare." "well," struck in wee lucy, who had been listening to the touching story, "well, i guess some folks would! bab would die for grief of me, and i would die for grief of bab; we _said_ we would!" she made this absurd little speech with tears in her eyes; but kyzie and edith dared not laugh, for mamma's forefinger was raised. mamma never allowed them to ridicule the friendship of the two little girls, who had made believe for more than a year that they were "aunt" and "niece." the play might be rather foolish, but the love was very sweet and true. lucy had been thinking all day of barbara and longing for her arrival. a full hour before it was time for the stage she went a little way up the mountain with jimmy, and they took turns gazing down the winding, dusty road through a spy-glass. "i shan't wait here any longer. what's the use?" declared jimmy. "she's coming! she's coming! i saw her first!" was lucy's glad cry. and she ran down the mountain in haste, though the stage, a grayish green one, was just turning a curve at least a mile away. "well, you _have_ been parted a good while," said uncle james, as the two dear friends met and embraced on the coach steps; "a day and a half!" "i'd have 'most died if i'd waited any longer," said aunt lucy, putting her arm around her niece and leading her up the gravel path with the pink "old hen and chickens" on either side. the little girls were entirely unlike, and the contrast was pleasant to see. lucy was very fair, with light curling hair:- "blue were her eyes as the fairy flax, her cheeks like the dawn of day, and her bosom white as the hawthorn buds that ope in the month of may." bab was quite as pretty, but in another way. she had brilliant dark eyes and straight dark hair with a satin gloss. she was half a head shorter than her "auntie," though their ages were about the same. people liked to see them together, for they were always sociable and happy, and loved each other "dearilee." "oh, bab," said wee lucy, "i had such a _loneness_ without you!" "i had a loneness too, auntie lucy. seemed as if the time never would go." and then the dark head and the fair head met again for more kisses, while both the mammas looked on and said, in low tones and with smiles, as they always did:-"how sweet! now we shall hear them singing about the place like two little birds." this was tuesday. the days went on happily until thursday afternoon, when "the dunlee party," which always included the hales and sanfords, set forth up the mountain for a sight of the famous "air-castle." of course nate was with them, but this time not as a guide; the guide was uncle james. the road, though rather steep, was not a hard one. mr. dunlee had his alpenstock, and uncle james walked beside him, holding little eddo by the hand. bab and lucy, or "the little two," as aunt vi called them, were side by side as usual, and lucy had asked bab to repeat the story of "little bo-peep" in french, for nate wanted to hear it. bab could speak french remarkably well. "petit beau bouton a perde ses moutons, il ne sais pas que les a pris. o laissez les tranquille! ils se retournerons, chacun sa queue apres lui." mrs. dunlee and kyzie were just behind the children, and while bab was repeating the verse kyzie said in a low tone:-"oh, mamma, let me walk with you all the way, please. there's something i want to talk about." she looked so earnest that mrs. dunlee wondered not a little what it was her eldest daughter had to say. v the air-castle "a vacation school, katharine? and pray what may that be?" kyzie's cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining. she held her mother's hand and talked fast, though plainly she did not feel quite at her ease. "why, mamma, you've certainly heard of vacation schools--summer schools? they're very common nowadays. in the summer, you know; so that college people can go to them, and business people." "ah! like the one at coronado beach? now i understand. but it didn't occur to me that my little daughter would know enough to teach college people!" "now, mamma, don't laugh at me! of course i mean children, the little ignorant children right around here," making a sweeping gesture toward the cottages and "bunk houses" that dotted the country lower down the mountain, "i know enough to teach little children, i should hope, mamma." "possibly!" mrs. dunlee's tone was so doubtful that her daughter felt crushed. "possibly you may know enough about books; but book-knowledge is not all that is required in a teacher. could you keep the children in order? would they obey you?" the little girl's head drooped a little. "let me see, you are only fourteen?" "fourteen last april, mamma. but everybody says, don't you know, that i'm very large for my age." she tried to speak bravely, but the look of quiet amusement on her listener's face made it rather hard for her to go on. "i suppose," said she, dropping her eyes again, "i suppose they don't know much here, mamma,--the families that live here all the time. some of the boys actually go barefooted." "so i have observed. a great saving of shoes." "and they had a school last summer," went on kyzie, resolutely. "a young girl taught it who boarded where we do. mr. templeton said she did it for fun." "indeed!" "but they didn't like her a bit. i could teach as well as she did anyway, mamma, for she just went around the room boxing their ears." "is it possible, katharine?" mrs. dunlee was serious enough now. "to box a child's ears is simply brutal!" "i knew you'd say so, mamma; but that was just what miss severance did. of course i wouldn't touch their ears any more than i would fly!" mrs. dunlee turned now and regarded her daughter attentively. "but how did you ever happen to take up this sudden fancy for teaching, dear? it's all new to me. what first made you think of it--at your age? can you tell?" "oh, mamma, i've been thinking about it, off and on, for a year. ever since i was at willowbrook last summer and heard grandma parlin talk about _her_ first school. why, don't you remember, she was just fourteen, she said, nearly three months younger than i am." mrs. dunlee understood it all now, and said to herself:-"dear old grandma parlin! little did she imagine she was filling her great grand-daughter's head with mischievous notions!" they walked on a short way in silence. "but you must remember, katharine, that was seventy years ago. grandma parlin wouldn't advise a girl of fourteen to do in these days as she did then. schools are very different now." "yes, indeed, mamma, very, very different. isn't it too bad? i'd like to 'board 'round' the way grandma did, and rap on the window with a ferule, and 'choose sides' and all that! but there's one thing i could do!" exclaimed the little girl, brightening. "i could make the children 'toe the mark'; wouldn't that be fun? i mean stand in a line on a crack in the floor. how grandma would laugh! i'll write her all about it, and send her a photograph, bare feet and all." in her eagerness kyzie spoke as if the matter were all arranged and she could almost see the children "toeing the mark." "not so fast, my daughter. remember there are three points to be settled before we can discuss the matter seriously. first, would your papa consent? second, would your mamma consent? third, do the people of castle cliff want a summer school anyway?" "three points? i see, oh, yes," said kyzie, meekly. "but now, katharine, let us walk a little faster and join the others. and not a word more of this to-day." "what did keep you two so long?" asked edith, coming to meet them with a bright face. if her happy thoughts had not been dwelling on the zebra cat just presented her by the "knitting-woman," she would have observed at once that mamma and kyzie had been "talking secrets"; though she might not have suspected that this had anything to do with the vacation school. "do hurry along," she added. "i want to show you the funniest sight! i don't believe you've seen barbara hale, have you?" edith could hardly speak for laughing; and her mother and kyzie did not wonder when they beheld the figure that little bab had made of herself, by a new style of dressing her hair. the two little girls were, as i have told you, as different as possible, but had an intense desire to look "just alike"; and when they tried their best the result was very funny. i will mention here that lucy "despised" her own hair for not being straight like bab's, and had often tried to braid it down her back; but as the braid always came out and the ribbon came off, the attempt had been forbidden. now, however, as the children had left their city home and come to a place where everybody was "on holiday," the mammas decided that they might have a little more liberty. their dresses were off the same piece,--good, strong brown ones; their hats were alike; and, as for their hair, they were allowed to wear it as they pleased "just for this summer." "we'll look exactly alike up there in the mountains," the little souls had said to each other; and this was perhaps one reason why they had been so overjoyed at the prospect of going. [illustration] but to-day, ah! who would have dreamed that sweet little bab could become such a fright? she had done up her hair the night before on as many as twenty curl-papers. before starting for the air-castle she had taken out some of the papers and found--not ringlets, but wisps of very unruly hair. it would not curl any more than water will run up hill. she went to aunt lucy in her trouble to seek advice. aunt lucy looked her over with great care and then announced:-"it is perfectly awful! don't take out any more papers, bab. let 'em be, so you can have something to stick the curls on to." and so it was done. the "curls," as lucy was pleased to call them, were drawn up and looped and twisted and fastened by hair-pins to the other curls left in the papers. the effect was most surprising. it made bab's head so much higher than usual that she was as tall now as auntie, and that in itself was a great gain. besides, this style, as lucy said, was the "pompy-doo," and very fashionable! if bab could have kept her hat on! but she couldn't, and the moment it came off they all cried out:-"why-ee, barbara!" and turned away to laugh. if mrs. mcquilken had been there she would have said the child looked "as if she was possessed of the fox." "the little goosies! let them enjoy it!" whispered mrs. hale to mrs. dunlee. "but those topknots will have to come down before the child can go to the dinner-table." and then both the ladies laughed privately behind a large tree. the mountain air was doing them good, and they often had as merry times together as the young people. "hear the boyoes," cried edith, meaning jimmy and nate, who had now reached the air-castle and were shouting with all their might. the children ran, and so indeed did the older ones, for there was an excellent path all the way. "so that is the air-castle," exclaimed kyzie, when they were all within sight of it. "it's a real house, built right in the mountain." she was right. there happened to be a great crack right here in the rocky side of the mountain, and a cunning little house had been tucked into the crack. it was built of small stones. it had two real windows with glass panes, and a real door with a brass knocker, which the children declared was "too cute for anything." "the house is as strong as a fort," said uncle james. "do you observe it is walled all around with stones?" "do you know who built it?" asked aunt vi; "and why he built it?" "a rich mexican named bandini. he admired the view from the mountain, and i don't blame him, do you? he wanted a nice, quiet place where he could read and write; that was why he came here. he has been here every summer for years." "well," said mr. dunlee, "if you call this an air-castle i must say it is the most solid one i ever heard of! it doesn't look dreamy at all. why, an earthquake could hardly shake it." "the steps that lead up to it are not dreamy either," said mrs. dunlee. "real granite; and there's a large flag up there floating from the evergreen tree." the "boyoes" had already climbed the steps, and nate called down to mrs. dunlee, "it's the mexican flag!" but she had known that at a glance. the colors were red, white, and green, and the device was an eagle on a prickly pear with a snake in his mouth. "i wonder if there's anybody at home," said nate, and would have lifted the knocker if jimmy had not said, "wait for uncle james." jimmy thought as uncle james was the leader of the expedition he should be the one to do the knocking, or at any rate to tell them when to knock. nate himself had not thought of this. he was not so refined as jimmy, either by nature or by training. everybody had climbed the steps now. the older people were enjoying the magnificent view; but bab and lucy were looking for the two toads who had been seen going up to the castle together, the well toad taking the lame toad's foot in his mouth. "i wish they were both here," said uncle james, "for you would like to see them take that little journey." "and the mexican who built this air-castle," said aunt vi, "is he here this summer?" "no, he died last spring." "died?" echoed little eddo, who had heard that dying means "going up in the sky." "what made him die, mamma? didn't he like it down here?" then without waiting for a reply he added most tenderly and unexpectedly, "isn't it nice that _you're_ not dead, mamma?" "why do you think that, my son?" she asked, wondering what he would say. "oh, _be_-cause i _am_ so glad about it." and at this sweet little speech his mother caught him up in her arms and kissed him. how could she help it? "now," said uncle james, "let us see if we can enter the castle. 'open locks whoever knocks.' try it, boys." nate lifted the knocker and pounded with a will. there was no answer or sign of life. "let's see if this will help us," said uncle james, taking a key from his vest pocket:- "for i'm the keeper of the keys, and i do whatever i please." the key actually fitted the lock, the door opened at once, and they all entered the castle. "mr. templeton lent me the key," explained mr. sanford. "he said the castle was as empty as a last year's bird's nest, but i thought we might like to take a look at it." "we do, oh, we do," said lucy. "isn't it queer? just two rooms and nothing in 'em at all! oh, bab, let's you and i bring some dishes up here and keep house! here's a cupboard right in the wall." "i guess it's mother hubbard's cupboard, it looks bare enough. just a table in the room and one old chair," exclaimed edith. "i'm glad we came in, though," said kyzie. "isn't it beautiful to stand in the door and look down, down, and see castle cliff right at your feet? and off there a city--why, what's that noise?" no one answered. the older people knew the sound: it was that of an angry rattlesnake out of doors shaking his rattle. mr. dunlee said:-"stay in the house, please, you ladies, and keep the children here. james and i will go out and attend to this." he had an alpenstock, uncle james a cane. the ladies and mr, hale and the children watched the two gentlemen from the window,--all but little eddo, whose mother was playing bo-peep with him to prevent him from looking out. a handsome rattlesnake was winding his way up the mountain in pursuit of a tiny baby rabbit. the little "cotton-tail" was running for the castle as fast as he could, intending to hide in a hole under the door-stone. but he never would have reached the door-stone alive, poor little trembling creature, if mr. dunlee and uncle james had not come up just in time to finish the cruel snake with cane and alpenstock. bunny got away safe, without even stopping to say, "thank you." the snake wore seven rattles, of which he was very proud; but eddo had them next day for a plaything, and made as much noise with them as ever the snake had done; though eddo never knew where they came from. it had been a delightful day, and when the friends all met again at table they kept saying, "didn't we have a good time?" it was to be noticed that barbara's "topknots" had disappeared; and i am glad to say that she never wore her lovely hair "pompy-doo" again. kyzie's face was alight. in passing the door of her mother's room she had heard her father say, laughing:-"what, our katharine? why, how that would amuse mr. templeton!" kyzie had hurried away for fear of listening; but now she kept thinking:-"papa laughed. he always laughs when he is going to say 'yes.' he'll talk to mr. templeton, and i just know i shall have the school isn't it splendid?" vi "grandma graymouse" "hoopty-doo!" shouted jimmy, alighting on the piazza on all fours. "a little girl like that keep school!" "well, she is going to," returned edith, looking up from the picture she was drawing of a cherub in the clouds, "she's going to; and mr. templeton says the castle cliff people are as pleased as they can be." "i heard what he said," struck in nate. "he said they jumped at it like a dolphin at a silver spoon." "he's always talking about that dolphin and that silver spoon," laughed edith. "if i knew how a dolphin looks, i'd draw one and give it to him just for fun. but mamma, you don't expect me to go to school to that little girl; now do you?" "certainly not, edith; oh, no." "must _i_ go to grandmother graymouse?" whined jimmy, "she's only my sister. and i came up here to play." "play all you like, my son. no one will ask you to go school." "but _i_ really want to go," said nate. "i wouldn't miss it for anything. a girl's school like that will be larks. only four hours anyway, two in the forenoon and two in the afternoon. time enough left for play." "h'm, if that's all, let's go," cried jimmy. "we can leave off any time we get tired of it." kyzie heard this as she was crossing the hall. "why, boys," she said, "you don't live in castle cliff! it's the castle cliff children i'm going to teach--the little ones, you know." "but papa said if you'd show me about my arithmetic--" began nate. "perhaps i don't know so much as you do, nate. but if you go you'll be good, won't you--you and jimmy both?" she spoke with some concern. "for if you're naughty, the other boys will think they can be naughty too; and i shan't know what in the world to do with them." "oh, we'll sit up as straight as ninepins; we'll show 'em how city boys behave," said nate, making a bow to kyzie. he could be a perfect little gentleman when he chose. he liked to tease jimmy, younger than himself, but had always been polite to kyzie. still kyzie did not altogether like the thought of having a boy of twelve for a pupil. what if he should laugh at her behind his slate? here barbara and lucy appeared upon the veranda, holding edith's new kitty between them. "we're going. we'll sit together and cut out paper dolls and eat figs under the seat," declared lucy, never doubting that this would be pleasing news to the young teacher. before kyzie had time to say, "why, lucy!" little eddo ran up the steps to ask in haste:-"where's lucy going? i fink i'll go too." kyzie could bear no more. she ran and hid in the hammock and cried. they all thought she was to have a sort of play-school; did they? they were going just for fun. she must talk to mamma. mamma thought the school was foolish business; but mamma always knew what ought to be done, and how to help do it. or if mamma ever felt puzzled, there was papa to go to,--papa, who could not possibly make a mistake. between them they would see that their eldest daughter was treated fairly. monday morning came. kyzie's courage had revived. eddo would be kept at home; lucy and bab had been informed that they were not to cut paper dolls, though they might write on their slates. all that they thought of just now, the dear "little two," was of dressing to "look exactly alike." as bab had learned once for all that her hair would not curl, she spent half an hour that morning braiding her auntie's ringlets down her back, and tying the cue with a pink ribbon like her own. but for all the little barber could do the flaxen cue would not lie flat. it was an old story, but very provoking. "oh dear," wailed lucy, "'most school-time and my hair is all _over_ my head!" it did look wild. you could almost fancy it was angry because it had not been allowed to curl after its own graceful fashion. the "little two" started off in good season, hoping not to be seen by eddo; but he espied them from the window, and they heard him calling till his baby voice was lost in the distance:-"you ought to not leave me! you ought to not leave m-e-e!" "he wants to go everywhere big people go." "yes," responded bab. "such babies think they are as old as anybody. oh, see that mexican dog, how straight his tail stands up!" "like your hair," sighed lucy. "if my hair would only be straight like that!" and neither of them smiled at this droll remark. "but there's one thing we must remember, bab. i'm glad i thought of it. we must say, 'miss' to kyzie." "miss what?" "miss dunlee. if we forget it, she'll feel dreadfully." and then they began to hum a tune and keep step to the music. they often did this as they walked. kyzie had gone on before them. her father was with her, but she had the key in her hand and opened the schoolhouse door. they walked in together, and kyzie locked the door behind them, for several children were waiting about who must not enter till the bell rang. the schoolhouse floor was very clean; the new teacher herself had swept it. on the walls were large wreaths of holly, which had been left over from last christmas, when the sunday-school had had a celebration here. at one end of the room was a raised platform with a large desk on it. on the wall over the desk was a motto made of red pepper berries, only the words were so close together that you could not make them out unless you knew beforehand what they were. "that means, 'christ is risen,'" explained kyzie. "it looks dreadfully, but they didn't want it taken down, i'll make another by and by." there were blackboards on three sides of the room; quite clean they looked now. the desks and benches were rude ones of black oak, and had been hacked by jack-knives. kyzie regretted this, but supposed the boys had not been taught any better. there was only one chair in the room, a large armed chair for the little teacher, and it stood solemnly on the platform before the desk. "you see, papa, i've brought a big blank-book to write the names in. the pen and inkstand belong here. ahem, i begin to tremble," said she, and looked at her mother's watch which she wore in her belt. "it's five minutes of nine." "oh, you'll do famously," said mr. dunlee. "and now, daughter, i'll wish you good-by and the very best luck in the world." "good-by, papa," said kyzie, and locked the door after him. "i wish i'd asked him to stay till i called them in and took their names. papa is so dignified that it would have been a great help. my, i feel as if i weren't more than six years old!" she walked the floor, watch in hand. "fifty seconds of nine." she went to the bell-rope and pulled with both hands. it was quite needless to use so much force. the bell was directly over her head; and instead of the "mellow lin-lan-lone" she expected, it made a din so tremendous that it almost seemed as if the roof were about to fall upon her. at the same time there was a scrambling and pounding at the door. the children were trying to get in. "oh, miserable me, i've locked them out!" thought the little teacher in dismay. she hastened to the door and opened it, and they rushed in with a shout. this was an odd beginning; but kyzie said not a word. she remembered that she was now miss dunlee, so she threw back her shoulders and looked her straightest and tallest, and as much as possible like miss prince, her favorite teacher. she had intended all along to imitate miss prince--whenever she could think of it. only fourteen years old! well, what of that? grandma parlin had been only fourteen when she taught _her_ first school. keep a brave heart, katharine dunlee! joe rolfe walked in as stiffly as a wooden soldier. behind him came a few boys and girls, some of them with their fingers in their mouths. there were twelve in all. the last ones to enter were nate and jimmy, followed by aunt lucy and her niece arm in arm. "i wonder if nate is laughing at me for locking the door?" thought kyzie, not daring to look at him, as she waved her hands and said in a loud voice to be heard above the noise:-"all please be seated." being seated was a work of time; and what a din it made! the children wandered about, trying one bench after another to see which they liked best. "you would think they were getting settled for life," whispered nate to jimmy. the "little two" chose a place near the west window and began at once to write on their slates. "i'm scared of miss dunlee," wrote aunt lucy. "stop making me laugh," replied the niece. when at last everybody was "settled for life," kyzie did not know what to do next. "what would miss prince do? why she would read in the bible. i forgot that." the new teacher took her stand on the platform behind the desk, opened her bible, and read aloud the twenty-third psalm. her voice shook, partly from fright, partly from trying so hard not to laugh. but she did not even smile--far from it. nate and jimmy who were watching her could have told you that. if she had been at a funeral she could hardly have looked more solemn. jimmy touched nate's foot under the bench; nate gave jimmy a shove; bab gazed hard at lucy's flaxen cue; lucy gazed straight at her thumb. after the reading "miss dunlee" walked about with her blank-book in one hand and her pen in the other to take down the children's names. "i'm joseph rolfe; don't you remember me?" said the boy with red hair. "and this boy next seat is chicken little." "no, i ain't either, i'm henry small," corrected the little fellow, ready to cry. kyzie shook her finger at both the boys and resolved that "joe should stop calling names, and henry should stop being such a cry-baby." annie farrell was a dear little girl in a blue and white gingham gown, and the new teacher loved her at once. dorothy pratt was little more than a baby, and when spoken to she put her apron to her eyes and wanted to go home. "she can't go home," said her older sister janey, "mamma's cookin' for company!" kyzie patted the baby's tangled hair and sent janey to get her some water. "i'll go," spoke up jack whiting, aged seven. "janey isn't big enough. besides the pail leaks." "i'm so glad edith isn't here," thought kyzie, "or we should both get to giggling. there, it's time now to call them out to read. let me see, where is the best crack in the floor for them to stand on? why didn't i bring a quarter of a dollar with a hole in it for a medal? oh, the medal will be for the spelling-class; that was what grandma parlin said." it seemed a "ling-long" forenoon, and the little teacher rejoiced when eleven o'clock came. the family at home looked at her curiously, and uncle james asked outright, "tell us, grandmother graymouse, how do the scholars behave?" "well, i suppose they behaved as well as they knew how; but oh, it makes me so hungry!" she could not say whether she liked teaching or not. "wait till friday night, uncle james, and then i'll tell you." "well said, grandmother graymouse! you couldn't have made a wiser remark. we'll ask no further questions till friday night." but when friday night came they were all thinking of something else, something quite out of the common; and "grandmother graymouse" and her school were forgotten. vii the zebra kitten it began with zee. by this time her young mistress had become very much attached to her; and so indeed had all the "dunlee party." even mrs. dunlee petted the kitten and said she was the most graceful creature she had ever seen, except, perhaps, the dancing horse, thistleblow. eddo loved her because "she hadn't any pins in her feet" and did not resent his rough handling. the "little two" loved her because she allowed them to play all sorts of games with her. they could make believe she was very ill and tuck her up in bed, and she would swallow meekly such medicine as alum with salt and water without even a mew. "she is so amiable," said edith. "and then that wonderful tail of hers, mamma! 'twould bring, i don't know how much money, at a cat fair. it's a regular _prize_ tail, you see!" an animal like this merited extra care. she was not to be put off like an everyday cat with saucers of milk and scraps of meat; she must have the choicest bits from the table. "mrs. mcquilken says the best-fed cats make the best mousers," said edith. "is that so, miss edith? then the mice here at castle cliff haven't long to live!" laughed good-natured mr. templeton, as he handed zee's little mistress a pitcher of excellent cream. edith was very grateful to mrs. mcquilken for this remarkable kitten. she had taken much pains with her pencil drawing of a cherub in the clouds, intending it as a present for the eccentric old lady. "do you suppose she'll like it, mamma? you know she's so odd that one never can tell." mrs. dunlee was sure the picture would be appreciated. the cherub's sweet face looked like eddo's, and the clouds lay about him very softly, leaving bare his pretty dimpled feet, and hands, and arms, and neck. on friday afternoon edith took the picture in her hand and knocked with a beating heart at the door of number five. "mrs. me--mcquilken," said she, in a timid voice, on entering the room, "you're so fond of pictures that i thought i'd bring you one i drew myself. i'm afraid it's not so very, very good; but i hope you'll like it just a little." [illustration] mrs. mcquilken was much surprised as well as gratified; and actually there were tears in her eyes as she took the offering from edith's hand. she was a lonely old body, and never expected much attention from any one, especially from children. "why, how kind of you, my dear! it's a beauty!" she exclaimed, gazing at the cherub through her spectacles. she was a good judge of pictures. "that face is well drawn, and the clouds are fleecy. did you really do it your own self--and for me? thank you, dear child!" edith blushed with pleasure. she had by no means counted on such praise. "i'll always be kind to old people after this," she thought. "i believe they care more about it than you think they do." but here they were interrupted by the very loud mewing of a cat out of doors. they both ran downstairs to see what it meant. "i do hope and trust it isn't my zee," cried edith in alarm. but it was. they did not see her at first; she was in the back yard behind the hotel. it seems a pan of clams had been left standing on the back door-step; and zee must have been frolicking about the pan, never dreaming any live creature was in it, when one of the clams, attracted by her black waving tail, had caught the tip of the tail in his mouth and was holding it fast! this was pretty severe. being only an ignorant bivalve, the clam did not know that what he had in his mouth was a very precious article, the "prize tail" of a beautiful cat. but having once taken hold of it, the clam was too obstinate to let go. poor zee jumped up and down, and ran around in circles, mewing with all her might. what had happened she did not know; she only knew some heavy thing was dragging at her tail and pinching it fearfully. every one in the back of the house was busy; no one but eddo heard zee's cries. he ran to the maid to ask "what made the kitty sing so sorry?" whenever she mewed he called it singing. the maid looked out then and threw down her mixing-spoon for laughing. it was an odd sight to see a cat prancing about, waving her plume-like tail with a clam at the end of it! nancy was sorry for the kitten, but did not know how in the world to get off the clam. "take an axe! take a hatchet!" cried mrs. mcquilken. and without waiting for nancy she seized a hatchet herself, split the shell of the clam, and let poor kitty free. when kyzie got home from school, mrs. mcquilken had just mended zee's bleeding member with a piece of court-plaster. all the boarders were grouped about on the lawn and veranda talking it over. mrs. dunlee held in her lap a very forlorn and crumpled little bundle of kitty; and edith and eddo were crying as if their hearts would break. "that beautiful, beautiful tail!" sobbed edith. "don't be unhappy about it, darling," said aunt vi, "it will heal in time." "i know 't will heal, auntie; but what i'm thinking of is, won't it be stiff? aren't you afraid 'twill lose the--the--_expression of the wiggle?_" no one even smiled at the question; everybody tried to comfort edith. and right in the midst of this trying scene another event occurred of a different sort, but far more serious. it was little wonder that nobody once thought of saying to kyzie:-"well, grandma graymouse, you promised to tell us to-night how you like your school." the school was quite forgotten, and so was the injured kitten. it happened in this way: as soon as the kitten had been placed in a basket of cotton and seemed tolerably comfortable, jimmy and "the little two" went along the road as they often did to watch for the stage. "the colonel" might be coming now at almost any time, to find the lost vein of the gold mine, and they wanted to see him first of any one. lucy had her papa's watch fastened to the waist of her dress, and took great pleasure in seeing the hands move. this was not the first time she had been allowed to carry the watch, and she was very proud because papa had just said, "see how i trust my little girl." jimmy had uncle james's spy-glass. "nate thinks the colonel won't come till to-morrow; but i expect him to-night. let's go farther up," said jimmy-boy. they all climbed a little way and stood on a rock gazing down toward the dusty road. they could see the roofs of several houses, and lucy asked why there was so much wire on them. "oh, that's to hold the chimneys on," was jimmy's reply. "how queer!" "not queer at all. i've seen lots of chimneys tied on that way." bab doubted this, but lucy was proud to think how much jimmy knew. "six minutes past five," said she, looking at the watch again. "it takes these little hands just as long to go round this little face as it takes a clock's hands to go round a clock's face. how funny!" "not funny at all," said jimmy. "they're made that way. but be careful, lucy dunlee, or you'll drop that watch. i shouldn't have thought papa would have let you bring it up here. did you tell him where we were going?" "no, i never," replied lucy with a sudden prick of conscience. "i didn't know we'd go so far. 'twas you that spoke and said we'd go higher up." "well, you'd better let me take it, lucy. i'm older than you are, and i've got a little pocket, too, just the right size to hold it." lucy hesitated, not wishing to part with the watch, and not at all sure that it would be safer with jimmy than with herself. he was not a famous care-taker. "i don't see why you want to get it away when papa lent it to me and it's fastened on so tight. how do i know papa would be willing?" as she spoke, however, jimmy was fingering the little chain to see if he could undo the clasp which held it to her dress. "there, i don't believe you could have got it off, lucy, you didn't know how." "why, i never tried--papa fastened it on himself--oh, jimmy-boy, you will be so careful of it, now won't you?" for the watch lay in his hand, and she did not know how to get it back again. when he had set his heart on anything lucy usually gave up. barbara looked on in disapproval as the big brother put the watch in his pocket. it had long been jimmy's unspoken wish to have a watch of his very own like nate pollard and various other boys. how rich and handsome the short gold chain looked! what a bright spot it made as it dangled down his new jacket. he gazed at it admiringly, while bab and lucy took turns in looking through the spy-glass. "the stage is coming," they cried. then they all started and ran down the mountain; but as the stage drove up to the hotel no colonel alighted, or at least, no one who looked like a colonel. jimmy was playing with the short gold chain which made a bright spot on his jacket. he meant to restore the watch to its owner at dinner-time; but it was early, he was not going in yet. and there was nate pollard throwing up his cap and looking ready for a frolic. "i stump you to catch me!" said nate. "poh, i can catch you and not half try." jimmy-boy was agile, nate rather heavily built and clumsy. but if jimmy had suspected what a foolhardy project was in nate's mind he would have held back from the race. as it was, they both planted themselves against a tree, shouted, "one, two, three!" and off they started. no one was watching, no one remembered afterward which way they were going. viii stealing a chimney the "knitting-woman" sat knitting in her chamber that looked up the mountain side, and thinking how the zebra kitten had suffered from her enemy, the clam. mrs. mcquilken's own cats were most of them asleep; the blind canary was eating her supper of hemp-seed; and the noisy magpie had run off to chat with the dog and hens. the room seemed remarkably quiet. mrs. mcquilken narrowed two stitches and glanced out of the window. "mercy upon us!" she exclaimed, though there was not a soul to hear her. "mercy upon us, what are those boyoes doing atop of that house?" in her astonishment she actually dropped her knitting-work on the floor and rushed out of the room crying, "fire!" though there was not a spark of fire to be seen. the "boyoes" were nate and jimmy. nate had said to jimmy just as they started on the race:-"you won't dare follow where i lead;" and jimmy, stung by the defiant tone, had answered:-"poh, yes, i will! who's afraid?" never once suspecting that nate was going to climb the ridge-pole of a house! the house was a small cabin painted green, but there were people living in it, and nothing could be ruder than to storm it in this way, as both boys knew. "why, nate why, _nate_, what are you doing?" "ho, needn't come if you're scared," retorted nate. "who said i was scared? but i'm not your 'caddy,' i won't go another step," gasped jimmy. still he did not stop climbing. hadn't nate "stumped" him; and hadn't he "taken the stump," agreeing to follow his lead? besides, nate was already on the roof, and it was necessary to catch him at once. jimmy reached the roof easily enough and darted toward nate with both arms out-stretched. but by that time nate had turned around and begun to slide down another ridge-pole, shouting:-"here, my caddy, here i am; catch me, caddy!" it was most exasperating. jimmy saw that he had been outwitted. on the solid earth, running a fair race, the chances were that he could have beaten nate. but was this a fair race? "no, i'll leave it out to anybody if it's fair! nate pollard is the meanest boy in california," thought angry jimmy, as he started to follow his leader down the ridge-pole. at this moment something hit him just below the knee and held him fast. in his haste he had not stopped to notice that the chimney was of the very sort he had just described to lucy--built of tiles and held on to the roof by wires. he was caught in these wires; and whenever he tried to move he found he was actually pulling the chimney after him! nate, safely landed on the ground, called back to him in triumph:-"hello, jimmy-cum-jim! hello, my caddy! where are you? why don't you come along?" jimmy was coming as fast as he could. he lay face downward, sliding along toward the edge of the roof, and carrying with him that most undesirable chimney! what would become of him if he should fall head-first with the chimney on his back? it was a rough scramble; but he managed to turn over before he reached the ground--so that he landed on his feet. the chimney landed near him, a wreck. jimmy was unhurt except for a few scratches. but oh, it was dreadful to hear himself laughed at, not only by that mischievous nate, but by half a dozen other boys and a few grown people, who had collected on the spot; among them the landlord and mrs. mcquilken. not that any one could be blamed for laughing. jimmy was a comical object. in carrying away a chimney which did not belong to him, he had of course torn his clothes frightfully and left big pieces sticking on the broken wires of the roof. a more "raggety" boy never was seen. "wouldn't he make a good scarecrow?" said the landlord, shaking his sides. "jimmum, chimney, and all!" it was necessary to tear his clothes still more in order to get them free from the tangle of wires. as the poor young culprit crept unwillingly back to the hotel all the cats, dogs, donkeys, and chickens in castle cliff seemed to combine in a chorus of mewing, barking, braying, and cackling to inform the whole world that here was a boy who had stolen a chimney! what wretched little beggar was this coming to the house? no one thought of its being jimmy dunlee. "we caught this young rogue stealing a chimney," said mr. templeton. it seemed funny at first, and the dunlees and sanfords and hales all laughed heartily, till it occurred to them that the dear child had been in actual danger; and then they drew long breaths and shuddered, thinking how he might have pitched headlong to the ground and been crushed by the weight of the chimney. "but my little son," asked mrs. dunlee presently, when the child was once more respectably clad, and was walking down to dinner between herself and aunt vi, "but my little son, what could have possessed you to climb a roof? was that a nice thing to do?" "no, mamma, of course not. but 'twas all nate pollard's fault. nate stumped me to it and i took the stump." "what _do_ you mean?" "why, he said, 'you won't dare follow me,' and i said, 'yes, i would.' and i never mistrusted where he was going. who'd have thought of his climbing top of a house?" "why, jamie dunlee, you did not follow nate without knowing where he was going?" "yes, mamma; if i _had_ known i wouldn't have followed. but you see he had stumped me and i'd taken the stump, so i was _obliged_ to go!" "obliged to go!" repeated aunt vi, laughing, "isn't that characteristic of jimmy?" the little fellow felt guiltier than ever. when aunt vi used that word of five syllables it always meant that people had done very wrong, so he thought. "jamie," said his mother very seriously, "i am surprised that you should have promised to follow nate without knowing where he was going! and you never even asked him where he was going! is that the way you play, you boys?" "no, mamma, it isn't. nate makes you play his way because he's the oldest. he's just as mean! but i couldn't back out after i was stumped." "oh, fie! backing out is exactly the thing to do when a boy is trying to lead you into mischief! but we'll talk more of this by and by." as they entered the dining-room, jimmy squared his shoulders and would not look toward nate's table; and nate, who had been severely reproved by his parents, never once raised his eyes from his plate. no one felt very happy. jimmy's new suit was ruined; and mr. dunlee had already learned that it would cost ten dollars to restore the tile chimney. nor was this all. while jimmy was trying to console himself with ice-cream he suddenly thought of his father's watch! it must have dropped out of his pocket when he slid down the roof; but where, oh, where was it now? was it still on the ground, or had some one picked it up? joe rolfe had been there, so had chicken little and a dozen others. he must go and look for that watch, he must go this minute. "mamma," he murmured, pushing aside his saucer of ice-cream, "may i--may i be excused?" there was no answer; his mother had not heard him. "mamma," in a louder tone, "oh, mamma!" "what is it, my son?" seeing by his unhappy face that something was wrong, she nodded permission for him to leave the table; and at the same time arose and followed him into the hall. "dear child, what is the matter?" "papa's watch," he moaned. "i'm afraid somebody will steal it." as mrs. dunlee knew nothing whatever about the watch this sounded very strange. she wondered if jimmy had really been hurt by his fall and was out of his head. "why, my precious little boy," said she, taking his hot hand in hers. "papa's watch is safe in his vest pocket. nobody is going to steal it." jimmy looked immensely relieved. "oh, has he got it back again? i'm so glad! where did he find it?" "darling," said mrs. dunlee, now really alarmed. "come upstairs with mamma. does your head ache? i think it will be best for you to go right to bed." but jimmy persisted in talking about the watch. "where did papa find it? he let lucy have it; don't you know?" "no, i did not know." "and i took it away from lucy. i was afraid she'd lose it. and then,--oh, dear, oh, dear,--then i went and lost it myself!" mrs. dunlee understood it all now. jimmy's head was clear enough; he knew perfectly well what he was talking about. the watch was gone, a very valuable one. search must be made for it at once. without waiting to speak to her husband, mrs. dunlee put on her hat and went with jimmy up the hill. he limped a little from the bruise of his fall and she steadied him with her arm as they walked. ix "chicken little" and joe the man and woman who lived in the green cottage had gone to a neighbor's to stay till their chimney should be fastened on again. there was no one in sight. "here's the place where i went up," said jimmy, laying his hand on one of the ridge-poles. "and here's the place where i came down," pointing to another ridge-pole. mrs. dunlee was stooping and looking around carefully. there was not a tuft of grass or a clump of weeds behind which even a small article could be hidden, much less a large bright object like a gold watch. she took a wooden pencil from her pocket and scraped the earth with it; but only disturbed a few ants and beetles. if the watch had ever been dropped here, it certainly was not here now. she and jimmy turned and walked home in the twilight,--or as mrs. mcquilken called it, "the dimmets," and poor jimmy drew a cloud of gloom about him like a cloak. they looked on the ground at every step of the way. "there's a piece of chaparral over there. did you go through that?" asked mrs. dunlee. "no, i never, i'm sure i never. i walked in the road right straight along. oh, mamma, if i've lost that watch 'twill break my heart. but i'll pay papa for it, you see if i don't! i'll save every penny i get and put it together and pay papa!" mrs. dunlee did not reply for a moment; she took time to reflect. jimmy was a dear boy, but very heedless. he had done wrong in the first place to take the watch from lucy without his father's permission. he must be taught to respect other people's property and other people's rights. he must learn to think, and learn to be careful. here was a chance for a lesson. "jamie," said she at last, "i am glad you wish to atone for the wrong you have done; it shows a proper spirit. i agree with you that if the watch isn't found you ought to give papa what you can toward paying for it. that is no more than fair." "i want to, mamma, i just want to!" burst forth jimmy. "i wish i was little like eddo, before 'twas wrong for me to be naughty." his mother took him in her arms and kissed him, for he was so tired and miserable that he could not keep the tears back another moment. friday night passed and most of saturday; and though diligent search was made, the watch was not found. "poor papa!" said kyzie. "he doesn't say much; but how sober he looks! grandma dunlee gave him that watch, jimmy, when he was a young man; and he did love it so!" "i know it. oh, dear, how can he stand it?" responded jimmy, who had been deeply touched from the first by his father's forbearance. "mr, pollard punished nate dreadfully, you know; but here's papa dunlee, why, he hasn't even scolded!" papa dunlee was a wise man. he saw that his little son was suffering enough already; he was learning a hard lesson, and perhaps would learn it all the better for being left alone with his own conscience. on sunday afternoon the boy was very disconsolate, and mr. dunlee patted him on the head, saying:-"maybe we'll find the watch yet, my son. and anyway, i know jimmum didn't mean to lose it." then he sat down to read, and jimmy gazed at him reverently. the sunshine about his head seemed almost like a halo, and the boy thought of the angels, and wondered if they could possibly be any better than papa! "papa is the best man! never was cross in his life. i should be cross as fury! i should shake _my_ boy all to pieces if he should carry off my gold watch and drop it in the sand!" monday morning came and the missing article did not appear. everybody looked troubled. edith walked about, carrying her lame kitten in a basket, and saying:-"zee is getting better all the while, but how can i be happy when papa's watch is lost!" "who knows but i shall be the one to find it?" returned katharine with a mysterious smile, as she was leaving the house. "you forgot to tell us, and we forgot to ask you, how do you like your school?" said aunt vi. "oh, ever so much, auntie. i'm making it just as old-fashioned as i can. i'm going to write grandma parlin this week and ask her if what i do is old-fashioned enough. good-by." jimmy was waiting for her down the path. "what makes you think you'll find the watch, kyzie?" "oh, i don't know, myself, what i meant. i just said it for fun." "well, do you think joe rolfe has got it, or chicken little? that's what i want to know." "hush, jimmy! papa wouldn't allow you to speak names in that way. somebody stole it, i suppose, but we don't know who it was." still kyzie's face wore a stern look that morning. it was a thing not to be spoken of, but she had resolved to "keep an eye" on two or three of the boys, and see if there was anything peculiar in their appearance. should one of them blush or turn pale when spoken to, it would be a sure sign of guilt, and she should go home and announce with triumph to her father:-"papa, i've found out the thief!" the scholars all appeared pretty much as usual; raising their hands very often to ask, "may i speak?" or, "may i have a drink of water?" the little teacher had always wished they would not do so, but how could she help it? it was "an old-fashioned school," perhaps that was why it was so noisy. whatever went wrong, kyzie always said to herself, "oh, it's just an old-fashioned school." nate pollard and jimmy sat to-day as far apart as possible, almost turning their backs upon each other. at the bottom of his heart nate was truly ashamed of himself, though he would not have owned it. there were five new scholars, and katharine wrote down their names with much pride. best of all, some of the children really seemed to be trying to get their lessons. she had never known joe rolfe to study like this. "is it because he is guilty?" thought the little teacher watching him from under her eyebrows. she walked along toward him so softly that he did not hear her footsteps. "joseph!" she exclaimed, suddenly. her voice startled him; he looked up in surprise. "i'm glad to see you studying, joseph." did he blush? his face was of a brownish red hue at any time, being much tanned; she could not be quite sure of the blush. but why did he look so sober? children generally smile when they are praised. she had been to bab and lucy and said, "how still you are, darlings!" and they had seemed delighted. next she tried chicken little. he certainly jumped when she spoke his name close to his ear, "henry." now why should he jump and seem so confused unless he knew he had done something wrong? she forgot that he was a very timid boy. "henry, what is the matter with you?" she asked, frowning severely. she had never frowned on him before, for she liked the little fellow, and was trying her best to "make a man of him." "what is the matter, henry?" by this time he was scared nearly out of his wits, and stole a side glance at her to see if she had a switch in her hand. "don't whip me," he pleaded in a trembling voice. "don't whip me, teacher; and i'll give you f-i-v-e thousand dollars!" as he offered this modest sum to save himself from her wrath, the little teacher nearly laughed aloud, henry did not know it, however; her face was hidden behind a book. "what made you think, you silly boy, that i was going to punish you?" she asked as soon as she could find her voice. "have you done something wicked?" she spoke in a low tone for his ear alone, but he writhed under it as if it had been a blow. "i--don'--know." "he is the thief," thought kyzie. "oh, henry, if you've done something wrong you must know it. tell me what it was." "i--can't!" she put her lips nearer his ear. "was it you and joseph rolfe together? perhaps you _both_ did something wicked?" "i--don'--know." "was it last friday?" "i--don'--know!" "will you tell me after school?" henry was unable to answer. worn out with contending emotions he put his head down on the seat and cried. this did not seem like innocence. joseph rolfe was looking on from across the aisle, as if he wished very much to know what she and henry were talking about. "i'll make them tell me the whole story, the wicked boys," thought kyzie, indignantly. "but i can't hurry about it; i must be very careful. i think i'll wait till to-morrow." so she calmed herself and called out her classes. katharine was a "golden girl," and had a strong sense of justice. she would say nothing yet to her father, for the boys might possibly be innocent; still she went home that afternoon feeling that she had almost made a discovery. "good evening, grandmother graymouse," said uncle james, as they were all seated on the veranda after dinner, "do i understand that you are hunting for a watch?" "i'm hunting for it, oh, yes," replied kyzie, trying not to look too triumphant; "but i haven't found it yet. just wait till to-morrow, uncle james." "i don't believe we'll wait another minute!" declared mr. sanford, looking around with a roguish smile. "i see the dunlee people are all here, jimmum, lucy, and all. attention, my friends! the thief has been found!" "what thief?" asked mrs. hale and mrs. dunlee. "why, _the_ thief! the one we're looking for! the one that stole the watch!" "do you really mean it?" asked the ladies again. "did he bring it back?" "come and see," said uncle james, leading the way upstairs. "of course it's joe rolfe," thought kyzie. "i suppose he was frightened by what i said to henry small." "is the thief in your room, uncle james?" said jimmy. "why didn't you put him in jail?" "ah, jimmum, do you think all thieves ought to go to jail? i once knew a little boy who stole a chimney right off a house; yet i never heard a word said about putting _him_ in jail! "but here we are at the chamber door. stand behind me, all of you, in single file." x the thief found "i don't know so much as i thought i did," said kyzie to herself. "joe rolfe wouldn't be in this room." for uncle james was knocking at the door of number five. "walk right in," said mrs. mcquilken, coming to meet her guests. she had her knitting in one hand. "come in, all of you. why, mr. templeton, are you here too? you wouldn't have taken me into your house if you'd known i was a thief; now would you, mr. templeton?" and laughing, she put her right hand in her apron pocket and drew out a gold watch and chain. "if this belongs to anybody present, let him step up and claim his property." mr. dunlee came forward in amazement, while jimmy gave a little squeal of delight. "this is mine, thank you, madam," said mr. dunlee, looking at the watch closely. it seemed very much battered. "dreadfully smashed up, isn't it, sir? i can't tell you how sorry i am." mr. dunlee shook it, and held it to his ear. "oh, it won't go," said mrs. mcquilken. "the inside seems worse off, if anything, than the outside. 'twill have to have new works." "very likely. but it is so precious to me, madam, that even in this condition i'm glad to get it back again. pray, where has it been?" "right here in this room. didn't you understand me to confess to stealing it? why, you're shaking your head as if you doubted my word." they were all laughing now, and the old lady's eyes twinkled with fun. "well, if i didn't steal it myself, one of my family did, so it amounts to the same thing. come out here, you unprincipled girl, and beg the gentleman's pardon," she added, kneeling and dragging forth from under the bed a beautiful bird. it was her own magpie, chattering and scolding. "now tell the gentleman who stole his watch? speak up loud and clear!" the bird flapped her wings, and cawed out very crossly:-"mag! mag! mag!" "hear her! hear that!" cried her mistress. "so you did steal it, mag--i'm glad to hear you tell the truth for once in your life." "did she take the watch? did she really and truly?" cried the children in chorus. "to be sure she did, the bad girl. she has done such things before, and i have always found her out; but this time she was too sly for me. she went and put it in my mending-basket; and who would have thought of looking for it there?" mag tipped her head to one side saucily, and kept muttering to herself. "well, i happened to go to the basket this afternoon and take up a pair of stockings to mend. they felt amazingly heavy. there was a hard wad in them, and i wondered what it could be. i put in my hand and pulled out the watch. yes, 'twas tucked right into the stockings." "i wonder we didn't any of us mistrust her at the time of it," said mr. templeton; "those magpies are dreadful thieves." "well, i suppose you thought 'twas my business to take care of her, and it was. i'm ashamed of myself," said mrs. mcquilken. "i was looking out of the window when the boys shied over that roof, but my mind wasn't on jewelry then. all i thought of was to run and call for help." yes, and it was her screams which had aroused the whole neighborhood. "and at that very time my mag was roaming at large. no doubt she saw the watch the moment it fell; and to use your expression, mr. templeton, she jumped at it like a dolphin at a silver spoon." the landlord laughed. "but the mystery is," said he, "how she got back to the house without being seen. she must have been pretty spry." "o mag, mag, to think i never once thought to look after you!" exclaimed mrs. mcquilken, penitently. the bird was scolding all the while, and running about with short, jerky movements, trying her best to get out of the room; but the door was closed. "pretty thing," said edith. "what a shame she should be a thief!" "she is pretty, now isn't she?" returned her mistress, fondly. "my husband brought her from china. you don't often see a chinese magpie, with blue plumage,--cobalt blue." "she's a perfect oddity," said mrs. hale. "see those two centre tail-feathers, so very long, barred with black and tipped with white." "yes," said mr. dunlee, "and the red bill and red legs. she's a brilliant creature, mrs. mcquilken." "well, you'll try to forgive her, won't you, sir? i mean to bring her up as well as i know how; but what are you going to do with a girl that can't sense the ten commandments?" "what indeed!" laughed mr. dunlee. "you see she's naturally light-fingered. yes, you are, mag, you needn't deny it. those red claws of yours are just pickers and stealers." here edith called attention to mag's nest on the wall, and they all admired it; and mrs. mcquilken said the canary liked to have mag near him at night, he was apt to be lonesome. "i wish you'd come in the daytime," said she. "come any and all of you, and hear him sing. he does sing so sweetly, poor blind thing; it's as good as a sermon to hear him." on leaving mrs. mcquilken the children went to aunt vi's room and jimmy kept repeating joyously:-"we've found the watch, we've found the watch!" "yes," said aunt vi; "but what a wreck it is! your papa will have to spend a deal of money in repairing it." "too bad!" said lucy, "i 'spect 'twould cost him cheaper to buy a new one." "'twouldn't cost him so much; that's what you mean," corrected jimmy. "but i'm going to pay for mending it anyway." "how can you?" asked kyzie. "all you have is just your tin box with silver in it." "well, but don't i keep having presents? and can't i ask folks to stop giving me toys and books and give me money? and they'll do it every time." "but that would be begging." jimmy's face fell. yes, on the whole it did seem like begging. he had not thought of that. "why can't it ever snow in this country?" he exclaimed suddenly. "then i could shovel it. that's the way boys make money 'back east'" then after a pause he burst forth again, "or, i might pick berries--if there were any berries!" "it's not so very easy for little boys to earn money; is it, dear?" said aunt vi, putting her arm around her young nephew and drawing him toward her. "but when they've done wrong--you still think you did wrong, don't you, jimmy?" "he knows he did," broke in lucy. "my papa lent me the watch." "she wasn't talking to you," remonstrated jimmy. "yes, auntie, i did wrong; but lucy needn't twit me of it! i won't be _characteristic_ any more as long as i live." aunt vi smiled and patted his head lovingly. "no, dear, i think you'll be more thoughtful in future. but now let us try to think what can be done to pay for the watch." "i'll let him have some of the money i get for teaching. i always meant to," said kyzie. "very kind of you," returned aunt vi; "but we'll not take it if we can help it, will we, jimmy? i've been thinking it over for some days, children; and a little plan has occurred to me. would you like to know what it is?" they all looked interested. if aunt vi had a plan, it was sure to be worth hearing. "it is this: mightn't we get up some entertainments,--good ones that would be worth paying for?" "and sell the tickets? oh, auntie, that's just the thing! that's capital!" cried edith and kyzie. "you'd do it beautifully." "i'm not so sure of that, girls. but we might join together and act a little play that i've been writing; that is, we might try. what have you to say, jimmy? could you help?" "i don't know. i can't speak pieces worth a cent," replied the boy, writhing and shuffling his feet. "look here!" he said, brightening. "don't you want some nails driven? i can do that first rate." aunt vi laughed and said nails might be needed in putting up a staging, and she was sure that he could use a hammer better than she could. jimmy-boy, much gratified, struck an attitude, and pounding his left palm with his thumb, repeated the rhyme:- "drive the nail straight, boys, hit it on the head; work with your might, boys, ere the day has fled." "there, he can speak, i knew he could speak!" cried lucy, in admiration. it was settled that they were all to meet wednesday morning, and their mother with them, to talk over the matter. "that's great," said jimmy. the watch was found and the world looked bright once more. true, he was deeply in debt; but with such a grand helper as aunt vi he was sure the debt would very soon be paid. xi begging pardon next morning jimmy walked to school with "the little two," whistling as he went. lucy had tortured her hair into a "cue," and "the happy wind upon her played, blowing the ringlet from the braid." "i've got the snarling-est, flying-est hair," scolded she. "i never'll braid it again as long as i live; so there!" "good!" cried jimmy. "it has looked like fury ever since we came up here." here nate overtook the children. he had not been very social since the accident, but seemed now to want to talk. "how do you do, jimmy?" he said: and jimmy responded, "how d'ye do yourself?" the little girls ran on in advance, and jimmy would have joined them, but nate said:--"hold on! what's your hurry?" jimmy turned then and saw that nate was scowling and twisting his watch-chain. "i've got something to say to you--i mean papa wants me to say something." "oh ho!" "i don't see any need of it, but papa says i must." jimmy waited, curious to hear what was coming. "papa says i jollied you the other day." "what's that?" "why, fooled you." "so you did, nate pollard, and 'twas awful mean." [illustration] "it wasn't either. what made you climb that ridge-pole? you needn't have done it just because i did. but papa says i've got to--to--ask your pardon." "h'm! i should think you'd better! tore my clothes to pieces. smashed a gold watch." "you hadn't any business taking that watch." there was a pause. "look here, jimmy dunlee, why don't you speak?" "haven't anything to say." "can't you say, 'i forgive you'?" "of course i can't. you never asked me." "well, i ask you now. james s. dunlee, will--you--forgive me?" "h'm! i suppose i'll have to," replied jimmy, firing a pebble at nothing in particular. "i forgive you all right because we've found the watch. if we hadn't found it, i wouldn't! but don't you 'jolly' me again, nate pollard, or you'll catch it!" this did not sound very forgiving; but neither had nate's remark sounded very penitent. nate smiled good-naturedly and seemed satisfied. the fact was, he and jimmy were both of them trying, after the manner of boys, to hide their real feelings. nate knew that his conduct had been very shabby and contemptible, and he was ashamed of it, but did not like to say so. jimmy, for his part, was glad to make up, but did not wish to seem too glad. then they each tried to think of something else to say. they were fully agreed that they had talked long enough about their foolish quarrel and would never allude to it again. "glad that watch has come," said nate. "so am i. it has come, but it won't _go_," said jimmy. and they laughed as if this were a great joke. next jimmy inquired about "the colonel," and nate asked: "what colonel? oh, you mean the mining engineer. he'll be here next week with his men." by this time the boys were feeling so friendly that jimmy asked nate to go with him before school next morning to see the knitting-woman's pets and hear the blind canary sing. "do you suppose the magpie will be there?" returned nate. "i want to catch her some time and wring her old neck." "wish you would," said jimmy. "hello, there's chicken little crying again. he's more of a baby than our eddo." henry was crying now because dave blake had called him a coward. so very, very unjust! he stood near the schoolhouse door, wiping his eyes on his checked apron and saying:-"i'll go tell the teacher, dave blake!" "well, go along and tell her then. fie, for shame!" henry, a feeble, petted child, was always falling into trouble and always threatening to tell the teacher. kyzie considered him very tiresome; but to-day when he came to her with his tale of woe, she listened patiently, because she had done him a wrong and wished to atone for it. she had "really and truly" suspected this simple child of a crime! he would not take so much as a pin without leave; neither would joseph rolfe. yet in her heart she had been accusing these innocent children of stealing her father's watch! "miserable me!" thought kyzie. "i must be very good to both of them now, to make up for my dreadful injustice!" she went to joe and sweetly offered to lend him her knife to whittle his lead pencil. he looked surprised. he did not know she had ever wronged him in her heart. she wiped henry's eyes on her own pocket handkerchief. "poor little cry-baby!" thought she. "i told my mother i would try to make a man of him, and now i mean to begin." she walked part of the way home with him that afternoon. he considered it a great honor. she looked like a little girl, but her wish to help the child made her feel quite grown-up and very wise. "henry," said she, "how nice you look when you are not crying. why, now you're smiling, and you look like a darling!" he laughed. "there! laugh again. i want to tell you something, henry. you'd be a great deal happier if you didn't cry so much; do you know it?" "well, miss dunlee,"--kyzie liked extremely to be called miss dunlee,--"well, miss dunlee, you see, the boys keep a-plaguing me. and when they plague me i have to cry." "oh, fie, don't you do it! if i were a little black-eyed boy about your age i'd laugh, and i'd say to those boys: 'you needn't try to plague me; you just can't do it. the more you try, the more i'll laugh.'" henry's eyes opened wide in surprise, and he laughed before he knew it. "there! that's the way, henry. if you do that they'll stop right off. there's no fun in plaguing a little boy that laughs." henry laughed again and threw back his shoulders. why, this was something new. this wasn't the way his mamma talked to him. she always said, "mamma's boy is sick and mustn't be plagued." "another thing," went on the little girl, pleased to see that her words had had some effect; "whatever else you may do, henry, _don't_ 'run and tell,' do you suppose george washington ever crept along to his teacher, rubbing his eyes this way on his jacket sleeve, and said 'miss dunlee--ah, the boys have been a-making fun of me--ah! they called me names, they did!'" henry dropped his chin into his neck. "never mind! you're a good little boy, after all. _you_ wouldn't steal anything, would you, henry?" this sudden question was naturally rather startling. he had no answer ready. "oh, i know you wouldn't! but sometimes little _birds_ steal. did you hear that a magpie stole a watch the other day?" "yes, i heard." "well, here's some candy for you, henry." the boy held out his hand eagerly, though looking rather bewildered. was the candy given because george washington didn't "run and tell"? or because magpies steal watches? "now, good night, henry, and don't forget what: i've been saying to you." henry walked on, feeling somewhat ashamed, but enjoying the candy nevertheless. if his pretty teacher didn't want him to tell tales, he wouldn't do it any more. he would act just like george washington; and then how would the big boys feel? he did not forget his resolve. next morning when dave blake ran out his tongue at him and joe rolfe said, "got any chickens to sell?" he laughed with all his might, just to see how it would seem. both the boys stared; they didn't understand it. "hello, chicken little, what's the matter with you?" henry could see the eyes of his young teacher twinkling from between the slats of the window-blinds, and he spoke up with a courage quite unheard-of:-"nothing's the matter with _me!_" "hear that chicken," cried joe rolfe. "he's beginning to crow!" henry felt the tears starting; but as miss katharine at that moment opened the blind far enough to shake her finger at him privately he thought better of it, and faltered out:-"see here, boys, i like to be called chicken little first rate! say it again. say it fi-ive thousand times if you want to!" "oh, you're too willing," said joe. "we'll try it some other time when you get over being so willing!" the bell rang; it sounded to henry like a peal of joy. he walked in in triumph, and as he passed by the little teacher she patted him on the head. she did not need to wipe his eyes with her handkerchief, there were no tears to be seen. he was not a brave boy yet by any means, but he had made a beginning; yes, that very morning he had made a beginning. "don't you tease henry small any more, i don't like it at all," said katharine to joseph rolfe. and then she slipped a paper of choice candy into joe's hand, charging him "not to eat it in school, now remember." it was a queer thing to do; but then this was a queer school; and besides kyzie had her own reasons for thinking she ought to be very kind to joe. "how silly i was to suspect those little boys! i'm afraid i never shall have much judgment. still, on the whole, i believe i'm doing pretty well," thought she, looking proudly at henry small's bright face, and remembering too how mr. pollard had told her that very morning that his son nate was learning more arithmetic at her little school than he had ever learned in the city schools. "oh, i'm so glad," mused the little teacher. mrs. dunlee thought kyzie did not get time enough for play. and just now the little girl was unusually busy. they were talking at home of the new entertainment to be given for jimmy-boy's benefit, and she was to act a part in it as well as edith. it was "jimmy's play," but jimmy was not to appear in it at all. kyzie and edith together were to print the tickets with a pen. the white pasteboard had been cut into strips for this purpose; but as it was not decided yet whether the play would be enacted on the tailings or in the schoolhouse, the young printers had got no farther than to print these words very neatly at the bottom of the tickets: "admit the bearer." xii "the little schoolma'am's earthquake" there were only ten days in which to prepare for the play called "granny's quilting." the children met wednesday morning in aunt vi's room, all but bab, who was off riding. so unfortunate, lucy thought; for how could any plans be made without bab? the play was very old-fashioned, requiring four people, all clad in the style of one hundred and fifty years ago. uncle james would wear a gray wig and "small clothes" and personate "grandsir whalen"; kyzie dunlee, grandsir's old wife, in white cap, "short gown," and petticoat, was to be "granny whalen" of course. a grandson and granddaughter were needed for this aged couple. edith would make a lovely granddaughter and pretend to spin flax. who would play the grandson and shell the corn? jimmy thought nate pollard was just the one, he was "so good at speaking pieces." they decided to ask nate at once, and have that matter settled. aunt vi showed a collection of articles which "the knitting-woman" had kindly offered for their use; a three-legged light stand, two fiddle-backed chairs, and a very old hour-glass. "i should call it a pair of glasses," said edith, as they watched the sand drip slowly from one glass into the other. aunt vi said it took exactly an hour for it to drain out, and our forefathers used to tell the time of day by hour-glasses before clocks were invented. "what _are_ forefathers?" lucy asked edith. "oh, adam and eve and all those old people," was the careless reply. "and didn't they have any clocks?" "of course not. what do you suppose?" there was a knock at the door. nate had come to find jimmy and go with him to see the blind canary. "we were just talking about you," said aunt vi. "are you willing to be katharine's grandson in the play?" nate replied laughing that he would do whatever was wanted of him, and he could send home and get some knee-buckles and a cocked hat. aunt vi said "capital!" and gave jimmy a look which said, "everything seems to be going on famously for our new play." jimmy led the way to mrs. mcquilken's room, his face wreathed with smiles. "ah, good morning; how do you all do?" said the lady, meeting the children with courteous smiles. "i see you've brought your kitten, edith." "yes, ma'am; will you please look at her wounds again?" "they are pretty well healed, dear. i've never felt much concerned about zee's wounds. she makes believe half of her sufferings for the sake of being petted." "does she, though? i'm so glad." "yes; that 'prize tail' will soon be waving as proudly as ever. but i suppose you all came to see the canary. mag, you naughty girl," she added, turning to the magpie, "hide under the bed. they didn't come to see you. here, job, you are the one that's wanted." little job, the canary, was standing on the rug. he came forward now to greet his visitors, putting out a foot to feel his way, like a blind man with a cane. then he began to sing joyously. "don't you call that good music?" asked his mistress, knitting as she spoke. "he came from germany; there's where you get the best singers. some canaries won't sing before company and some won't sing alone; they are fussy,--i call it _pernickitty_. why, i had one with a voice like a flute; but i happened to buy some new wall-paper, and she didn't like the looks of it, and after that she never would sing a note." "are you in earnest?" asked kyzie. "yes, it's a fact. but job never was pernickitty, bless his little heart!" she brought a tiny bell and let him take it in his claws. "now, i'll go out of the room, and you all keep still and see if he'll ring to call me back." she went, closing the door after her. no one spoke. job moved his head from side to side, and, apparently making up his little mind that he was all alone, he shook the bell peal after peal. presently his mistress appeared. "did you think mamma had gone and left you, job darling? mamma can't stay away from her baby." the cooing tone pleased the little creature, and he sang again even more sweetly than before. "let me show you another of his tricks. you see this little gun? well, when he fires it off that will be the end of poor job!" the gun was about two inches long and as large around as a lead pencil. inside was a tiny spring; and when job's claw touched the spring the gun went off with a loud report. job fell over at once as if shot and lay perfectly still and stiff on the rug. lucy screamed out:--"oh, i'm so sorry he is dead!" but next moment he roused himself and sat up and shook his feathers as if he relished the joke. the children had a delightful half hour with the captain's widow and her pets; only lucy could not be satisfied because bab was away. "too bad you went off riding yesterday," said she as they sat next morning playing with their dolls. "you never saw that blind canary that shoots himself, and comes to life and rings a bell." "but can't i see him sometime, auntie lucy?" "you can, oh, yes, and i'll go with you. but, bab, you ought to have heard our talk about the play! kyzie is going to be as much as a hundred years old, and i guess uncle james will be a hundred and fifty. and they've got a pair of old glasses with sand inside--the same kind that adam and eve used to have." "why-ee! did adam and eve wear glasses? 'tisn't in their pictures; _i_ never saw 'em with glasses on!" "no, no, i don't mean glasses _wear_! i said glasses with sand inside; _that's_ what uncle james has got. runs out every hour. sits on the table." "oh, i know what you mean, auntie! you mean an _hour-glass!_ grandpa hale has one and i've seen lots of 'em in france." lucy felt humbled. though pretending to be bab's aunt, she often found that her little niece knew more than she knew herself! "seems queer about adam and eve," said she, hastening to change the subject; "who do you s'pose took care of 'em when they were little babies?" "why, auntie lucy, there wasn't ever any _babiness_ about adam and eve! don't you remember, they stayed just exactly as they were made!" "yes, so they did. i forgot." lucy had made another mistake. this was not like a "truly auntie"; still it did not matter so very much, for bab never laughed at her and they loved each other "dearilee." "you know a great many things, don't you, bab? and _i_ keep forgetting 'em." "oh, i know all about the world and the garden of eden; _that's_ easy enough," replied the wise niece. and then they went back to their dolls. half an hour later kyzie dunlee was standing in the schoolhouse door with a group of children about her when nate pollard appeared. as he looked at her he remembered "jimmy's play," and the parts they were both to take in it; and the thought of little kyzie as his poor old grandmother seemed so funny to nate that he began to laugh and called out, "good morning, grandmother!" he meant no harm; but kyzie thought him very disrespectful to accost her in that way before the children, and she tossed her head without answering him. nate was angry. how polite he had always been to her, never telling her what a queer school she kept! and now that he had consented to be her grandson in jimmy's play, just to please her and the rest of the family, it did seem as if she needn't put on airs in this way! "ahem!" said he; "did you hear about that dreadful earthquake in san diego?" there had been a very slight one, but he was trying to tease her. "no, oh, no!" she replied, throwing up both hands. "when was it?" "last night. i'm afraid of 'em myself, and if we get one here to-day you needn't be surprised to see me cut and run right out of the schoolhouse." the children looked at him in alarm. kyzie could not allow this. "oh, you wouldn't do that!" said she, with another toss of the head. "before i'd run away from an earthquake! besides, what good would it do?" by afternoon the news had spread about among the children that there was to be a terrible earthquake that day. they huddled together like frightened lambs. the little teacher, wishing to reassure them, planted herself against the wall, and made what edith would have called a "little preach." she pointed out of the window to the clear sky and said she "could not see the least sign of an earthquake." but even if one should come they need not be afraid, for their heavenly father would take care of them. "and you mustn't think for a moment of running away! no, children, be quiet! look at me, _i_ am quiet. i wouldn't run away if there were fifty earthquakes!" strange to say, she had hardly spoken these words when the house began to shake! they all knew too well what it meant, that frightful rocking and rumbling; the ground was opening under their feet! kyzie, though she may have feared it vaguely all along, was taken entirely by surprise, and did--what do you think? as quick as a flash, without waiting for a second thought, she turned and jumped out of the window! next moment, remembering the children, she screamed for them to follow her, and they poured out of the house, some by the window, some by the door, all shrieking like mad. it was a wild scene,--the frantic teacher, the terrified children,--and kyzie will never cease to blush every time she recalls it. for there was no earthquake after all! it was only the new "colonel" and his men blasting a rock in the mine! of course this escapade of the young teacher amused the people of castle cliff immensely. they called it "the little schoolma'am's earthquake"; and the little schoolma'am heard of it and almost wished it had been a real earthquake and had swallowed her up. "oh, papa dunlee! oh, mamma dunlee!" she cried, her cheeks crimson, her eyelids swollen from weeping. "i keep finding out that i'm not half so much of a girl as i thought i was! what does make me do such ridiculous things?" "you are only very young, you dear child," replied her parents. they pitied her sincerely and did their best to console her. but they were wise people, and perhaps they knew that their eldest daughter needed to be humbled just a little. it was hard, very hard, yet sometimes it is the hard things which do us most good. "o mamma, don't ask me to go down to dinner. i can't, i can't!" "no indeed, darling, your dinner shall be sent up to you. what would you like?" "no matter what, mamma--i don't care for eating. i can't ever hold up my head any more. and as for going into that school again, i never, never, never will do it." "i think you will, my daughter," said mr. dunlee, quietly. "i think you'll go back and live this down and 'twill soon be all forgotten." "o papa, do you really, really think 'twill ever be forgotten? do you think so, mamma? a silly, disgraceful, foolish, outrageous, abominable,--there, i can't find words bad enough!" as her parents were leaving the room she revived a little and added:-"remember, mamma, just soup and chicken and celery. but a full saucer of ice-cream. i hope 'twill be vanilla." xiii nate's cave the little teacher went back to her school the very next day. it was a hard thing, but she knew her parents desired it. her proud head was lowered; she could not meet the eyes of the children, who seemed to be trying their best not to laugh. at last she spoke:-"i got frightened yesterday. i was not very brave; now was i? hark! the people in the mine are blasting rocks again, but we won't run away, will we?" they laughed, and she tried to laugh, too. then she called the classes into the floor; and no more did she ever say to the scholars about the earthquake. she helped nate in his arithmetic, and he treated her like a queen. he was coming to aunt vi's room that evening to show his knee-buckles and cocked hat and find out just what he was to do on the stage. kyzie wanted to see the cocked hat and felt interested in her own white cap which mrs. mcquilken was making. it was a good thing for katharine that she had "jimmy's play" to think of just now. it helped her through that long forenoon. after this the forenoons did not drag; school went on as usual, and kyzie was glad she had had the courage to go back and "live down" her foolish behavior. when they met in aunt vi's room that evening it was decided not to have "jimmy's play" on the tailings, for that was a place free to all. people would not buy tickets for an entertainment out of doors. "my tent is the thing," said uncle james, and so they all thought it was a large white one, and the children agreed to decorate it with evergreens. it would hold all the people who were likely to come and many more. during the week uncle james set up the tent not far from the hotel and in one corner of it built a staging. he did not mind taking trouble for his beloved namesake, james sanford dunlee. the stage was made to look like a room in an old-fashioned house. it had a make-believe door and window and a make-believe fireplace with andirons and wood and shovel and tongs. there was a rag rug on the floor, and on the three-legged stand stood the hour-glass with candles in iron candlesticks. the fiddle-backed chairs were there and two _hard_ "easy-chairs" and an old wooden "settle." lucy and bab said it looked "like somebody's house," and they wanted to go and live in it. on the saturday afternoon appointed the play had been well learned by the four actors. everything being ready, this cosy little sitting-room was now shut off from view by a calico curtain which was stretched across the stage by long strings run through brass rings. the play would begin at half-past two. jimmy was dressed neatly in his very best clothes. he had a roll of paper and a pencil in one of his pockets and during the play he meant to add up the number of people present and find out how much money had been taken. "but jimmy-boy, it won't be very much," said edith. "this is an empty town, and so queer too. something may happen at the last minute that will spoil the whole thing." she was right. something did happen which no one could have foreseen. for an "empty" town castle cliff was famous for events. as jimmy left the hotel just after luncheon he overtook nate pollard and joe rolfe standing near a big sand bank, talking together earnestly. "come on, jimmum," said nate; "we've got a spade for you. we're going to dig a cave in the side of this bank." "what's the use of a cave?" "why, for one thing, we can run into it in time of an earthquake." "that's so," said jimmy. "or we could stay in and be cave-dwellers." but as he took up the spade he chanced to look down at his new clothes. he had spoiled one nice suit already and had promised his mother he would be more careful of this one. "wait till i put on my old clothes, will you?" nate laughed and snapped his fingers. "we're in a hurry. i've got to be in the tent in half an hour. go along, you little dude! we'll dig the cave without you." the laugh cut jimmy to the heart. and he had been learning to like nate so well. a dude? not he! besides, what harm would dry sand do? it's "clean dirt." then all in a minute he thought of that wild journey on the roof. it had made a deeper impression upon him than any other event of his life. "poh! am i going to dig dirt in my best clothes just because nate pollard laughs at me? i don't 'take stumps' any more; there's no sense in it, so there!" and off he started, afraid to linger lest he should fall into temptation. jimmy might be heedless, no doubt he often was; but when he really stopped to think, he always respected his mother's wishes and always kept his word to her. this was the trait in jimmy which marked him off as a highly bred little fellow. for let me tell you, boys, respect for your elders is the first point of high breeding all the world over. jimmy sauntered on slowly toward the door of the tent. there were a great many benches inside, but it was not time yet for the audience to arrive. uncle james and katharine and edith were on the stage, and aunt vi was adding a few touches to edith's dress. "o dear," said grandmamma graymouse, "i hope i shan't forget my part. tell me, uncle james, do i look old enough?" "you look too old to be alive," he answered; "fifty years older than i do, certainly! mrs. mehitable whalen, are you my wife or my very great grandmamma?" "but where's nate pollard?" aunt vi asked. "i told him to come early to rehearse." "he said he'd be here in half an hour," said jimmy. "he's off playing." "i hope i shall not have to punish my young grandson," said uncle james, solemnly, as he began to peel a sycamore switch. uncle james's name was now "ichabod whalen," and he and "mehitable whalen," his wife, were such droll objects in their old-fashioned clothes that they could not look at each other without laughing. their absent grandson, "ezekiel whalen" (or nate pollard), was a fine specimen of a boy of ancient times, and aunt vi had been much pleased with the way in which he acted his part. but where was he? aunt vi and the grandparents grew impatient. it was now half-past two; people were flocking into the tent; but the curtain could not rise, for nothing was yet to be seen of young master "ezekiel whalen" and his small clothes and his cocked hat. the house was pretty well filled; really there were far more people than had been expected, jimmy, with pencil and paper in hand, was figuring up the grown people and children, and multiplying these numbers by twenty-five and by fifteen. when he found that the sum amounted to nearly nine dollars he almost whistled for joy. but all this while the audience was waiting. people looked around in surprise; the dunlee family grew more and more anxious. aunt lucy pinched bab and bab pinched aunt lucy. suddenly there were loud voices at the entrance of the tent. the tent curtain was pushed aside violently, and mr. templeton and mr. rolfe rushed in exclaiming:-"two boys lost! all hands to the rescue!" the people were on their feet in a moment and there was a grand rush for the outside. the panic, so it was said afterward, was about equal to "the little schoolma'am's earthquake." xiv jimmy's good luck "it's the pollard and rolfe boys," explained mr. templeton. "ho! i know where _they_ are!" cried jimmy, "they're all right. they're only digging a cave in the side of a sand-bank." "show us where! run as fast as you can!" exclaimed mr. rolfe and mr. pollard. mr. pollard had been hunting for the last half-hour. he knew nate was deeply interested in "jimmy's play" and would not have kept away from the tent unless something unusual had happened. jimmy ran, followed by several men who could not possibly keep up with him. but when they all reached the sand-bank, where were the "cave-dwellers"? they had burrowed in the sand till completely out of sight! "hello! where are you"? screamed jimmy. there was no answer. in enlarging the cave they had loosened the very dry earth, and thus caused the roof over their heads to fall in upon them, actually burying them as far as their arm-pits! they tried to scream, but their muffled voices could not be heard. the "cave" looked like a great pile of sand and nothing more. nobody would have dreamed that there was any one inside it if it had not been for jimmy's story. "courage, boys, we're after you, we'll soon have you out!" said the men cheerily; though how could they tell whether the boys heard or not? indeed, how did they know the boys were still alive? two men went for shovels. the other men, not waiting for them to come back thrust their arms into the bank and scooped out the sand with their hands. the sand was loose and they worked very fast. before the shovels arrived a moan was heard. at any rate one of the boys was alive. and before long they had unearthed both the young prisoners and dragged them out of the cave. not a minute too soon, joe gasped for breath and looked wildly about; but nate lay perfectly still; it could hardly be seen at first that he breathed. his father and mother, the doctor and plenty of other people were ready and eager to help; but it was some time before he showed signs of life. when at last he opened his eyes the joy of his parents was something touching to witness. jimmy, who had been standing about with the other children, watching and waiting, caught his mother by the sleeve and whispered:-"i should have been in there too, mamma, if it hadn't been for you!" "what do you mean, my son? in that cave? i never knew the boys were trying to make a cave. i did not forbid your digging in the sand, did i?" "no, mamma; but i knew you wouldn't want me to do it in these clothes--after all my actions! and i had promised to be more careful." mrs. dunlee smiled, but there were tears in her eyes. "how glad i am that my little boy respected his mother's wishes," said she, stooping to kiss his earnest face. she dared not think what might have happened if he had disregarded her wishes! it was a time of rejoicing. mr. templeton ordered out the brass band and the hindoo tam tam. the horse thistleblow seemed to think he must be wanted too, and came and danced in circles before the groups of happy people. "i could believe i was in some foreign country," said mrs. mcquilken, smiling under her east indian puggaree, as she had not been seen to smile before, and dropping a kiss on the cheek of her favorite edith. after dinner the dunlees met in aunt vi's room, and aunt vi observed that mrs. dunlee kept jimmy close by her side, looking at him in the way mothers look at good little sons, her eyes shining with happy love and pride. they were talking over "jimmy's play," which had not been played. the money must all be given back to the people who had sat and looked so long at that calico curtain. "we'll try 'granny's quilting' again next saturday," said aunt vi. they did try it again. there were no caves to dig this time, and young master "ezekiel whalen" was on the stage promptly at half-past one, eager to show his grandparents that he was a boy to be relied upon after all. the play was a remarkable success. all the "summer boarders and campers" came to it, and everybody said:-"oh, do give us some more entertainments, mrs. sanford! let us have one every saturday." aunt vi, being the kindest soul in the world, promised to do what she could. she gave the play of the "pied piper of hamelin," with children for rats; and eddo was dressed as a mouse, and squealed so perfectly that edith's cat could hardly be restrained from rushing headlong upon the stage. later there were tableaux. edith wore red, white, and blue and was the goddess of liberty. jimmy was a cowboy with cartridge-belt and pistols. lucy and barbara were night and morning, with stars on their heads. mr. sanford was uncle jonathan. mr. hale was an indian chief. jimmy's debts were more than paid, and a happier boy was not to be found in the state of california. after this there were plenty of free entertainments on the tailings. at one of these, when the audience was watching a flight of rockets, katharine heard two women not far away talking together. one of them asked:-"where's that little dunlee girl, the one that keeps the play-school?" "over there in the corner," replied the other, "she hasn't any hat on. she's sitting beside the girl with a cat in her lap." "oh, is that the one? so young as that? well, she's a good girl, yes, she is. i guess she _is_ a good girl," said the first speaker heartily. "my little henry thinks there's nothing like her. he never learned much of anything till he went to that play-school. he never behaved so well as he does now, never gave me so little trouble at home. she's a _good_ girl." a world of comfort fell on kyzie. young as she was and full of faults, she had really done a wee bit of good. "and they didn't say a word about my jumping out of the window," thought she, with deep satisfaction. "wait till i grow up, just wait till i grow up, and as true as i live i'll be something and do something in this world!" she did not say this aloud, you may be sure; but there was a look on her face of high resolve. uncle james had often said to aunt vi:-"our katharine is very much in earnest. i know you agree with me that "little prudy's" eldest daughter is a golden girl!" the "play-school" closed a few days later, and it was henry small who received the medal for good spelling. he wasn't so much of a cry-baby nowadays and the boys had stopped calling him "chicken little." the dunlee party went home the last week in august, declaring they had had delightful times at castle cliff. "only i never went down that mine in a bucket," said lucy. "how could i when the men were blowing up rocks just like an earthquake?" "and i wanted to wait till they found that vein," said jimmy. a few days before they left, uncle james went hunting and shot a deer. i wish there were space to tell of the barbecue to which all the neighbors were invited a little later. as it is, my young readers are not likely to hear any more of the adventures of the "bonnie dunlees," either at home or abroad. but during their stay in the mountains that summer lucy begged aunt vi to write some stories, with the little friends, bab and lucy, for the heroines. "some 'once-upon-a-time stories,' auntie vi. make believe we two girls go all about among the fairies, just as alice did in wonderland; only there are two of us together, and we shall have a better time!" "oh, fie! how could i take real live little girls into the kingdom of the elves and gnomes and pixies? i shouldn't know how!" but she was so obliging as to try. the week before they left for home she had completed a book of "once-upon-a-time stories," which she read aloud to all the children as they clustered around her in the "air-castle." she called it "lucy in fairyland," though she meant bab just as much as lucy. if the little public would like to see this book it may be offered them by and by; together with the comments which were made upon each story by the whole dunlee family,--jimmy, wee lucy, and all. [illustration: little prudy series specimen illustration from "sister susie"] [illustration: little prudy series specimen illustration from "dotty dimple"] [illustration: little prudy series specimen illustration from "cousin grace"] [illustration: little prudy's children series specimen illustration from "wee lucy's secret"] proofreaders note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see 20984-h.htm or 20984-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/0/9/8/20984/20984-h/20984-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/0/9/8/20984/20984-h.zip) little prudy's flyaway series. prudy keeping house. by sophie may. author of "little prudy stories," "dotty dimple stories," etc. illustrated. [illustration: "o, what a fascinating creature!"] [illustration: little prudy's flyaway series "what is home without a mother?" boston 1891 lee and shepard publishers 10 milk street next "the old south meeting house" new york chas. t. dillingham 718 and 720 broadway entered according to act of congress, in the year 1870, by lee and shepard, in the office of the librarian of congress, at washington. to my young friend, _bessie baker._ contents. i. a queer idea ii. pride and oranges iii. borrowed jewels iv. going to housekeeping v. mother hubbard's dinner vi. prudy in a new light vii. a fly in trinity church viii. dotty's windpipe ix. two live children x. "riding on jack frost" xi. the jewel cabinet xii. "folded eyes" prudy keeping house. chapter i. a queer idea. one of mrs. allen's bay windows stood open. between the ivies, tuberoses, and lilies, you caught a glimpse of gilded walls and rare paintings. better than all, you saw four young faces looking out at a snow-storm; dotty with eyes like living diamonds, prudy fair and sweet, horace lordly and wise; and the little one "with dove's eyes" following every motion of his head, as if she were a sunflower, and he the sun. "please shut the window, quick, horace; the plants will freeze," said prudy, drawing in her powdered head. "things don't freeze in cloudy weather, prue; but you children will catch cold; so here goes." "o, hollis, don't those snow-specks look like little bits o' birdies, athout any wings or any feathers, too?" "droll birds they would be," said aunt madge. "that reminds me of an old riddle, children,- "'white bird featherless flew out of paradise, lit on the castle wall; came a knight breathless, ate it up toothless, rode away horseless.'" "why, auntie, the 'bird featherless' must have been the snow; but who was the knight!" "who rides over the sky without any horse, dotty, and melts snow by shining on it?" "o, the sun--the sun!" "hollis, i want to ask you sumpin. does those snow-specks fly down out o' heaven? does the little angels see 'em?" "no, topknot; they only come from the clouds; they are nowhere near up to the little angels." "not half so near as you are, goldilocks," said aunt madge, brushing back the child's soft hair. "i hope you don't mean fly's going to die," cried dotty, in sudden alarm, remembering how crossly she had spoken to the child two or three times since they had been in new york. "no, dotty; i only mean that we are told, in the bible, there are 'ministering spirits,' and we believe they watch over good little children." "o, my shole!" said fly, folding her tiny hands, and raising her eyes to the top of the window. "nice, pretty little spirricks out there, only but i can't see 'em." "no, miss eyebright; not even you. wait till you go where they live." "wisht i could go up there now, a-visiting; stay all night, and three weeks and then--" "hush, fly clifford; you're the wickedest girl to talk," said dotty. "i shouldn't ever expect to go to heaven at all, if i said such things as you do.--o, auntie, i am so sorry it storms! maria and her mother won't come--will they?" maria brooks was a little blind girl with whom the family were just making acquaintance. a few days before, when she was walking broadway, led by her "freckled doggie," fly, lost on the street, had spied her, and been attracted by the dog, and maria had persuaded the child to go home with her. afterwards mrs. brooks had taken fly back to colonel allen's; and in this way aunt madge had learned about maria's blindness, and had offered to take her to a physician who could help her, if any one could. "yes, dotty; i presume they will come to-day, for maria can hardly wait to have the doctor look at her eyes." "of course they'll come," said horace; "who ever heard of _brooks_ minding the weather? rain water agrees with 'em." "if you please, mrs. allen," said nathaniel, appearing at the door, "i--" "o, they've come--have they, nat?" asked horace. horace was already well acquainted with the waiting man, and called him nat, though he was a very sober youth, with velvety hair, and a green neck-tie, as stiff as a cactus. nat only replied by handing mrs. allen a letter, with a hesitating air, as if he would much rather not do it. "a despatch!" cried mrs. allen, turning rather pale. dotty dimple and flyaway crowded close to her, and overwhelmed her with questions. "o, what is it?" said one. "who wroted it? and why didn't hollis bring the camphor bottle athout my asking?" said the other. but the older children knew better than to speak just then. as soon as mrs. allen could get her breath, she said,-"don't be frightened, dears. it is only a message from your uncle augustus. he can't come home to-night, as we expected. he says, 'one of my old attacks. nothing serious. can you come?'" "o, is that all?" said dotty, and ceased fanning her auntie with a book-cover. "o, is that all?" echoed fly, and left off patting her cheek with a pencil. "but, children," said horace, "don't you understand uncle augustus is sick--wants auntie to go and take care of him?" "why, he can't have her." "indeed, miss dot, and why not?" "she's got company, you know." "there, little sister! i wouldn't think that of you? poor uncle augustus!" "but he says he isn't serious," said dotty, looking ashamed. "auntie, you don't think he's serious--do you?" "no, dear; he's suffering very much, but i am not in the least alarmed. he has had just such attacks as this ever since he came out of the army. he is at a hotel in trenton, new jersey, and needs some one to wait upon him, who knows just what to do. i am very sorry to go and leave my company, dotty, but--" "o, auntie, you ought to go," cried dotty. "i dislike particularly not to be polite." "o, auntie, you will be _'tic'ly_ polite," cried little echo. "please let me go, too; i won't make no noise." "how long do you think you'll have to stay, auntie?" said prudy. "i cannot tell, dear. these attacks are usually short, and i think quite likely your uncle can come home to-morrow night; but he may not be able till next day." "how he'll feel if he can't be here to christmas!" said dotty; "and so much greens and things in the windows!" "yes; and how we shall both feel to know our little friends are keeping house by themselves!" "keeping house? o, may we keep house!" exclaimed prudy, her eyes suddenly brightening. "why, yes, my child; you may be the lady of the mansion, if that is what you mean, and horace the lord." "but may i cook the dinners, and not ask mrs. fixfax? because i really do know a great deal, aunt madge. you'd be surprised! i can cook cake, and pie, and biscuit, and three kinds of pudding. please, this once, let me manage things just as i want to." "just as _we_ want, you mean," said dotty. "i can make gingerbread as well as you can." "and i shaked a table-cloth once," put in the youngest. "only i shan't be here if my auntie tookens me off." "yes, auntie," said horace; "let the girls manage. they'll get up queer messes, but 'twill be good fun." "do you believe it?" said auntie, thoughtfully. and there entered her brain, at that moment, a singular scheme, which, to almost any other woman, would have seemed absurd. "poor little souls? their visit has been a failure. i've a great mind to make an arrangement with mrs. fixfax to have them keep house in her room." (mrs. fixfax was mrs. allen's housekeeper.) "the novelty will amuse them. of course they will waste flour and sugar, but not very much, probably, and mrs. fixfax will be on the watch to see that they don't get too hungry. it will tax her severely, but i can pay her for her trouble. really, the more i think of it, the more i'm inclined to try it. they say i'm foolishly indulgent to children. perhaps so; but i do want them happy when they come to my house visiting." "have you thinked it all up?" asked fly, peeping into her auntie's face; "i won't 'sturb uncle 'gustus." "yes, chickie; i've thinked of talking to mrs. fixfax about letting you all keep house; that is, if she won't consider it too much trouble." "trouble?" said prudy; "why, i should think it would be a real help, auntie. she has so much care, you know. and if i got the meals for us four, the cook could rest, too." aunt madge only smiled at this. there were five servants in all: john, the coachman; nat, the waiting-man; mrs. fixfax, the housekeeper; rachel fixfax, the chambermaid; and patty diggles, the cook. they were all remarkably faithful, except pretty rachel, the housekeeper's daughter, who was rather gay and flighty, and had been something of a trial to her mistress. aunt maude went into the kitchen dressed for her journey. mrs. fixfax had just returned from market, and was talking with the cook about the dinner. "that is a fine plump turkey," said mrs. allen; "i wish i were to help eat it; but i came to tell you, mrs. fixfax, that colonel allen is sick, and i must go to him at once, and leave you with the care of these children." the housekeeper, who was a fat, comfortable-looking woman, twice as large as her mistress, said, "indeed, mum!" hoped colonel allen "wasn't sick to speak of," and shook her broad sides with laughter at the idea of taking care of fly. "i'll give up going to church to-morrow, mum; for, light as the child is, i can but feel as if you was sitting a ton's weight on my shoulders. and i promise to keep her alive if the lord's willing." "you will hardly be obliged to give up your whole time mrs. fixfax. i shall absolutely forbid her going out of the house, unless you, or some other grown-up person, has charge of her. and really, with john, nathaniel, and patty to keep guard, i don't see what mischief can befall the little creature." "we'll all do our best, mum," replied mrs. fixfax, heroically. "i have perfect faith that you will. there is one more favor to ask. these children have had a strange visit thus far, and if i go away and leave them, i fear they will feel rather forlorn. can you consent to let the little girls 'keep house,' as they call it? that is, cook their own meals, and set their own table?" the cook, who was stuffing the turkey was so surprised that she spilled a handful of sage over her apron. she would not have dared say the words, but her thoughts ran like this: "pretty doings, indeed! what does mrs. allen mean by letting children come into the kitchen to bother _me_?" but aunt madge had not finished speaking. "mrs. fixfax, there is a little old cooking-stove in the attic. don't you remember you had it in your room when you were nursing rachel through that fever?" "o, yes'm, so i had; and it shall be set right up there again, mum, if you say so," said the obliging housekeeper; "and i'll carry up flour and sugar, and what not, and move out my own things, so the children can have the room pretty much to themselves." "no need of that, mrs. fixfax," spoke up the cook, very pleasantly. "let 'em come right into the kitchen. i should admire to see 'em enjoy themselves." patty diggles was a singular woman. she was always full of polite speeches, just a minute too late. "thank you, patty; but i think the children may feel more at home in mrs. fixfax's room, with no one to watch them. and now, good bye. i hope to come back to-morrow." mrs. fixfax left the kitchen to find nathaniel, and get him to help her move the stove. as soon as the business was over, nathaniel came into the kitchen, and held up his sooty hands for patty to see. she was stabbing the turkey with a darning-needle. "some folks know how to feather their own nests," said she. "why, what have i done now, patty?" "not you, but mrs. fixfax; she's going to wait and tend on those children, and of course she'll get a splendid present for it. i should admire to have the little dears round me in the kitchen; but she spoke up, and took the words right out of my mouth." the young man laughed in his sleeves, as he turned them back to wash his hands. he took care not to express his mind, however. he had a few fixed ideas. one was, that mrs. allen could do no wrong; and another was, that he must never bandy words with patty diggles, because mrs. allen had strictly forbidden it. chapter ii. pride and oranges. while mrs. fixfax was making her room ready for the little housekeepers, aunt madge went to her own chamber, and locked up her best dresses, and most valuable possessions. the children watched her with some curiosity. "are you afraid of _burgalers_, auntie?" asked dotty. "because, if you are, we shan't dare stay here." "no, dotty. i only thought, if you should play keep house, it might be rather amusing to come in here, and dress up in some of my old finery. you are welcome to whatever you can find, for i have locked up all that is worth much." "o, you darling auntie, won't that be splendid? now we shan't feel half so sorry about your going away." "sorry!" said mrs. allen, with a mischievous smile. "you are so delighted you don't know what to do." "there, auntie, that isn't fair," laughed prudy, "when we've been trying our best to cry. but somehow, how can we, when uncle augustus isn't very sick, and you're coming right back? but what made me laugh just now, was looking at that ruffled pillow-case, and thinking what a splendid cap it would make for an old lady, tied down with black ribbon!" "a pretty uproar we shall find when we get back, miss prudy; but i am prepared for that. only promise one thing--keep that baby in the house. flyaway, darling, will you remember not to go out of doors?" "yes, um, i'll 'member," replied fly, winking her eyes solemnly. she had expected, till the last minute, to go with her auntie. "there is one thing i regret. if mrs. brooks and maria come, they will be very much disappointed. tell them i'll try to attend to them the day but one after christmas. and now, good by, children. you know you're as dear to me as the apple of my eye. do take good care of yourselves, and be good." "the apple of your eye appears to be split in four quarters, auntie," remarked horace; and on the strength of that joke, mrs. allen started on her journey to trenton. "now i suppose i'm to be the head of the family," said prudy, with a majestic air. "we are the two heads, if you please, _mum_," said horace, striking an attitude. "what am i, then?" asked dotty. "you? the foot. you must run and tend." "h'm!" "what am i?" asked fly. "why, the little finger, pet. all you have to do is to curl up in one corner." "h'm!" responded fly, looking at dotty's solemn face, and trying to draw her own down to exactly the same length. "pretty well, i should think," said dotty, as soon as her injured feelings would allow her to speak. "what have i done to be put down to the bottom of the foot?" "but you know, little sister, one woman has to manage a house; and i am older than you." "but you can't make a bit better gingerbread, prudy parlin! if i've got to be _your_ hired girl, i won't play." "so i wouldn't," said horace. "i'd show 'em what i thought of such actions." upon this there was a little whirlwind, which spun dotty out of the room before you could count two. "they stand very high in their own self-esteem. he's a hero, she a _hero-ess_! they think i like to be laughed at. she said it only took one woman to manage a house; but she never made any fuss when _horace_ spoke up, and wanted to help. it's _me_ that can't manage--just because it's me. who wants horace for the head of the family? he don't know more'n the head of a pin! when'd ever _he_ make ginger-bread?" by this time dotty had reached her own room in a tumult of rage. "prudy wouldn't 'low three heads to it, i s'pose? o, no; for then i could be one! if i was a great boy, with a silver watch, that wasn't her own sister, she'd let me! yes, if i had five heads, she wouldn't have said a word." dotty paced the floor restlessly, with her hands behind her. "i shan't go back. let 'em keep their old house. i can keep house my own self up in this room--wish i'd brought fly--she's too good for 'em. wish i hadn't come to new york to be imposed upon." as dotty was crossing and recrossing the room, her eye fell on one of the illuminated cards on the wall, printed in red and gold, and wreathed with delicate lilies of the valley--"god resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble." the angry child stopped short. "who put that there? what did auntie mean? she meant _me_. everybody means me. i wouldn't have thought that of auntie." dotty turned away; but the words followed her across the room like the eyes of a portrait. "'god resisteth the proud.' well, who said i was proud? people are so queer! always think it's me wants the best things. 'giveth grace to the humble.' there, i s'pose that means prudy. she's just as humble! never wants to take the best parts when we play. o, no; prudy's humble? prudy's a _hero-ess_!'" but scold as she might, those burning red words were looking right down into dotty's soul. though she shut her eyes, there they were still. "'god resisteth the proud.' am i proud?--yes. does god _resisteth_ me?--yes, for the bible can't lie. what _is_ resisteth? something that makes you feel bad, prob'ly. that's why i can't be happy. i won't be proud another minute." dotty winked fast, set her teeth together, pinched her neck, and swallowed. "there, it's going down my throat like a pill,--its gone! am i proud any more? no--_for_ i really don't s'pose i can make gingerbread quite so well as prudy! i never made any but once, and then norah took it out of the oven and put in the ginger and molasses. no, i'm not proud. i don't want to keep house. i shouldn't know how. it would be very much better to go back and behave, for i can't stay here without being lonesome." dotty looked again at the red and gold text. "how different it seems to me now i'm humble! people needn't be proud if they'd swallow it down like a pill." dotty's reasoning was rather mixed; still it is worthy of notice, that she was doing a remarkable thing for her, as she slowly walked back to her auntie's room. but all this while prudy, too, had been suffering. she could never bear to have her young sister angry, and, if it had not been for horace, would have gone to her with all sorts of promises--anything for peace. "she's an outrageous little tyrant, prue. she ought to have a sound whipping." "o, horace," said prudy, quite shocked; "she can't help her temper; she has to be humored." "poh! that's just what ails her! been humored to death." "but, horace, can't we change our play, somehow? it never will do for me to try to order her about." "nonsense, prue! but if you're going to be so fussy, you might keep boarding-house, and have her for lady boarder." prudy's brow cleared. "just what'll suit her, horace! a lady boarder is so fashionable,--like the one they had at mrs. penny's,--always washing out laces. now i'll go tell dotty." just then miss dimple appeared at the door with an uncertain smile. "i--i--thought--" "o, how kind of you to come back to us, my lady magnifico!" cried horace, bowing himself double. "your landlady was afraid you objected to your boarding-place." "you see," said prudy, eagerly, "we are making believe i keep boarders. i've 'seen better days,' or something of that kind, as they say in story-books--o, seems to me my husband died." "yes; i saw his death in the papers," said dotty, briskly; "so you don't want me for your hired girl--do you?" then she thought, "how glad i am i came back! it's always better to be humble!" and added aloud, with a fine-lady drawl,-"no, mim; it's not the style i've been subject to. i was _necessiated_ to leave you, mim, because i can't eat out of anything but gold teaspoons." "that sounds so like mrs. pitkin smith!" said prudy, laughing. "she used to board at mrs. penny's, horace. come, let's go and dress in our costumes. i'll be mother hubbard; and horace, you go into uncle's dressing-room and see what you can find." [illustration: little miss fly.] chapter iii. borrowed jewels. "of course i must take the best things," said dotty; "for i'm to have the best part." so she chose a blue poplin dress, a pink sash, a scarlet bow, and a green pin. the dress was half a yard too long, and she caught it up in front with some artificial flowers she found in a box. her head she surmounted with an old chignon, which bobbed back and forth, as she walked, like a pedler's pack. "o, see, prudy," said she; "here is auntie's jewel cabinet. what cunning little sliding drawers!" "don't open it; don't touch it, dotty. i saw auntie look it up in her safe once; but i suppose she took it out again to get her watch." "no, she didn't; here's her watch," said dotty, swinging open one of the little drawers. "that's her other watch, dotty. she says it needs mending." "then i'm going to wear it; it is just as good for a lady boarder, as a whole one." "don't, dotty; that's the watch uncle augustus gave her when they were married, and she thinks the world of it." "well, he gave her the other one too--didn't he?" "yes; last christmas: don't you know how she found it in an orange?" "o, i remember. and she ought to think the most of that one, prudy, because she loves him better now than she did when he gave her this one; ever so much better." "it's of no consequence to you if she does, or if she doesn't, dotty dimple. what right have you with that cabinet, i _should_ like to know? shut it right up this minute. o please do, dotty." dotty's contrary spirit began to rise. she opened every one of the drawers, and poured out the glittering jewels. of course fly was on the spot in a twinkling; but prudy caught her, and playfully pinned her little arms down to her sides; so her prying fingers had no chance to do mischief. "didn't auntie tell us to dress up in her old finery?" said dotty, thrusting the watch into her girdle. "old finery, dotty dimple!" "and isn't this old? 'you're welcome to whatever you can find;' that was just the words she said, prudy parlin." "o, how many ways there are for people to do wrong if they want to!" cried prudy, in despair. "when you _do_ get started, dotty--will you, or will you not, put up those things? if you don't, it's my duty to call horace, and--" "_'fore_ i'd be a tell-tale!" said dotty, slipping off half a dozen rings in haste. "there, i won't wear but just two--one on each thumb. who wants the old watch? tick's all out of it. you don't know, prudy, how tight those rings fit. i could wear 'em on my forefinger, but i shan't, you make such a fuss." prudy answered by a look of unutterable contempt. "i suppose," said she, speaking with a vehemence quite unusual to her--"i suppose you know auntie's jewels are worth more money than father has in the world! if you lose one of them, i don't know who's going to pay for it; that's all." dotty looked amazed, but answered coolly,-"of course i always knew that! auntie has about as nice things as the governor's wife." she was sure she was very humble, since swallowing her pride like a pill; but somehow she was determined not to take off those rings. "prudy needn't speak so sharp to me! i didn't care about wearing 'em in the first place; but now i'll do it to show her what's the use to preach!" prudy, having done her duty, said no more, but proceeded to look over her auntie's wardrobe in search of a dress. "i s'pose she thinks i'm the awfulest girl," mused dotty, fluttering in and out of the closet. "i s'pose she's thinking about that rag-bag last summer--how jennie vance no business to take those three dollars out of the saddle-bag pockets! grandma said, 'you're welcome to all you can find.' well, but that didn't mean for jennie to steal! prudy needn't go to thinking this is the same kind of a thing, for it isn't. i guess stealing is pretty different from borrowing." dotty viewed herself in the glass with secret satisfaction. she really looked like a fourth of july fantastic; but we do not see ourselves as others see us. "she won't be the least help to me about the house," thought prudy, with a feeling of envy. "i shall have every single thing to do; and i declare i don't know what to get for dinner." she chose the worst looking wrapper her aunt's wardrobe afforded, and a gingham apron with pockets. quite good enough for a woman keeping house without a servant. and as she had decided to call herself mother hubbard, she made an ample cap, by folding a "pillow-sham," and putting two of its ruffled edges around her face for a double border. then, with green spectacles at her nose, a bunch of keys at her waist, and a pair of high-heeled slippers on her feet, she went to the door, and called for fly. "fly! why, isn't she in there?" responded horace, appearing on the landing, "you didn't think i had her with me--did you?" as prudy wisely remarked, "how many ways there are for people to do wrong if they want to!" seeing her betters disagree, little fly had taken her turn at pouting. "they don't say nuffin' 'bout fixin' _me_ up. goin' to let me go to the party in my old clo'es? wisht auntie'd tookened me with her. might just's well not! might a' worn soft slippers, and not 'sturbed uncle 'gustus!" fly wafted herself to the top of the bureau, and gazed down on the girls in stern displeasure. but she might as well have scowled at empty air, for no notice was taken of her. dotty was giving an extra touch to her chignon, and prudy trying on her cap. "hark! what's that?" it was the street-cry away off in the backyard--"fine fresh oranges." "guess i'll go see what's the matter with that man," thought miss fly. "guess he's got hurted." she slid down from the bureau, and stole softly out of the room backward; but her feet made no more sound on the carpet than the fall of a rose-leaf, and neither of the girls looked up. "for course i shan't go ou'doors, 'cause i _solomon_ promised i wouldn't," said she, pattering down the basement stairs. the fact was, she had no idea any one would let her go. but it so happened that thoughtless rachel was the one who unlocked the basement door, and it was an easy thing to slip out behind her. "'cause i spect she'll send me ri' back." but when rachel looked around, and saw the pretty child with her fair hair blowing wild, she only laughed and went on gossiping with the orange boy. she saw no harm in letting fly hop about the pavement on one foot sucking oranges, till she herself felt chilled by the keen wind; then she drew the little girl into the house, and shut the door against the snow-storm, saying,-"why, how happened you out here, little miss fly?" "she sawed me the whole time; she ought to sended me in," thought fly, dancing up and down to shake off the snow. "twasn't me was naughty; 'twas the rest the folks. they didn't pay no 'tention where i went to." but though she pretended to herself that she had done no wrong, she did not wish to be found out, and crept very softly up stairs, even as far as the cupola, and looked out of the windows with all her might. "cold room up here, athout no fire," thought she, by and by, with a shiver; and just then she heard the girls calling. "here i is," a voice replied, far up the height; and down ran fly in a trice. "you haven't been 'up attic' all this time, topknot?" "well, you ought to paid 'tention where i's going to," returned fly, sharply. "nobody knows what i'll do next--auntie said there didn't!" horace laughed. "come, fix her up, girls; she's my baby." "i thought you were the 'man in the moon,'" said mother hubbard, "and he isn't married." "i've been a widower some time," sighed horace, laying his hand on the left pocket of his blue swallow-tail coat. his costume was as droll as the girls'; for uncle augustus, who had figured the week before in some private tableaux, had a full brother jonathan suit. "the man in the moon, if you please, mother hubbard, come down to inquire the way to norridge." "ah! i'm afraid you've 'come down too soon.' didn't you forget your whiskers?" horace rubbed his upper lip thoughtfully. "will you inform me, ma'am, where i can get a boarding-place? i'm sort of turned round. growing place. last time i was down, there were only a few houses here; now it's pretty thick settled back of the meeting-house." "i'll take you," said mother hubbard, putting her handkerchief to her face. "how would my dog feel if he knew i had come to this!" "come to what, ma'am?" "why, to new york, to take boarders." "are you in _indigenous_ circumstances, madam? and have you seen the first society? if so, i may possibly conclude to come too," said dotty, sweeping forward, and losing a hair-pin out of her chignon. "o, what a fascinating creature!" said the man in the moon, making an eye-glass of his thumb and forefinger, and gazing at the lady boarder. "_are_ you a widow, ma'am?" "well, they don't say nuffin' 'bout fixin' _me_ up! guess i shan't go to the party!" exclaimed fly, opening and closing her eyes in token of outraged dignity. prudy took her into auntie's room, and proceeded at once to robe her in her own night-dress, with a lace night-cap, and a cologne-mat for a bib. "hollis didn't say for me to be such a _long_ baby," sniffled fly, trying in vain to clear her feet from the trailing skirt. "this is your slip, dear. you're only a baby--musn't try to walk." "then my papa must carry me down stairs," said fly, entering into the spirit of the play. "you tell him so--i can't tell him, for i can't talk. _argoo-goo._ my teeth haven't camed." "if you please, master clifford," said nathaniel, appearing at the head of the stairs. then he stopped short with surprise, hardly knowing the children in their strange attire; but being too dignified to laugh aloud, added, with a grim smile,-"the woman that brought miss fly home the other day is down in the dining-room, and says,'can she see one of the family?'" "a little girl with her, nat?" "yes, sir; the blind girl is with her." "and the freckled doggie!" asked "the long baby," suddenly raising her head from her father's shoulder. "i meant to told 'em to bringed that doggie." "let's all go down and see," said mother hubbard. when they entered the dining-room, mrs. brooks started up in dismay. she had left her sick husband, and come a long distance through the storm, only to find mrs. allen gone, and a parcel of children decked out like circus-riders. it seemed like a cruel mockery. "beg pardon," said she. "maria, we'll go home now." maria was sitting near her mother, trying to force back the tears which would find their way through her closed eyes. "you poor dear girl," said mother hubbard, going up to her, and taking her hand. "my auntie was so sorry to go off to-day, just when you were coming! but she had to, for uncle augustus is sick. and it looks funny to you--i mean to your mother--to see us dressed up this way; but auntie said we might, just to keep us from being so lonesome. and mrs. brooks, she wants you to call again the day after _the day after_ to-morrow. she thinks she'll be home then." "yes'm," struck in my lady magnifico! "she thinks she'll come then with uncle 'gustus. he isn't much sick. if he was going to die, we wouldn't dress up so, certainly." "no," replied mrs. brooks, smiling. "it's just as well; my maria must have patience; that's all." "patience!" thought maria; "haven't i had it, and had it?--but i do suppose god will attend to me when he thinks best. is this what they call waiting on the lord?" "when you come nex' time, i hope you'll bring that doggie," said fly. then they went away, and the last thing maria listened to was fly's melodious voice; and the last thing fly looked at was mrs. brooks's nose moving up and down. chapter iv. going to housekeeping. it was nearly noon before mrs. fixfax had made her room ready for housekeeping. she turned up her bed into a press that stood beside the wall, brought in a high chair, a small rocking chair, two ottomans, some pictures and picture-books, and nearly all the curiosities she could find in the house. a cunning little cooking-stove, highly polished, was set against the chimney, and the drollest shovel and tongs seemed to be making "dumb love" to each other across the fireplace, like a black punch and judy. then there was a pair of brazen-faced bellows, hanging, nose downward, on a brass nail; a large table in one corner, with a cake-board on it, and near it a cupboard made out of an old clothes-press, with dishes in it, and flour, sugar, raisins, spices, rolling-pin, "aerating egg-beater," yellow bowls, wooden spoons, and everything that could be needed in cooking for a very large family. there were five rugs spread on the carpet, and a large oilcloth under the stove. last, but not least, mrs. fixfax brought mrs. allen's tortoise-shell cat, and set her in a stuffed chair by the west window. then she called the children; and mother hubbard and lady magnifico rushed in, followed by the man in the moon and his baby. "good morning, all; i hope i see you well," said mrs. fixfax, as sober as nathaniel himself. "this room is yours as long as you like. make yourselves perfectly at home." "thank you ever so much," replied mother hubbard, bobbing her head, while the "pillow-sham" ruffles waved this way and that, like a field of ripe grain. "whenever you want anything, just ring this bell, and i will come; or, if you ring the other one, it will bring rachel. and, miss prudy, here is the 'young housekeeper's friend;' perhaps you would like to look it over." mother hubbard blushed to her cap-border, and took the book with another "thank you ever so much," but did not know what else to say to such a dignified woman. the truth was, mrs. fixfax was trying so hard to keep from laughing, that her manner was rather stiff and cold. "i have left the ventilator open," thought she. "the children are full of talk, and i don't want to lose a word. besides, mrs. allen would consider it safer for me to know all that's going on." "there, glad she's gone," said lady magnifico, as mrs. fixfax's stately form disappeared. "she isn't as pretty as the _new_ miss _fixfix_. 'spect she's got the toothache," suggested the talking infant, who was trying to lie and coo on a rug, but was unable to do it. "well said, little toddle; false toothache, hey?" "are they false, mr. moony? then that was why she puckered up her lips so funny," said mother hubbard; "it was to keep 'em in!" "yes; and take her, teeth and all, her face has about as much expression as a platter of cold hash. i'll leave it to you if it hasn't, prue." "why, there, miss fixfix never asked me to kiss her one time," said fly, with sudden astonishment. "reckon you'd have wanted a lump of sugar after it, topknot." the good-natured housekeeper shook with laughter as she listened to these remarks from the next room. "what a terrible creature this _miss fixfix_ is!" thought she. "well, if they've got such an idea of me, i won't try to change it. not for the rest of the day, at any rate. i'll keep my distance, and let 'em work." mother hubbard began to look about her with the mien of a housekeeper. "let us see: what are we burning here?" said she, taking off a stove-cover. "wood, i declare. mrs. fixfax is afraid i couldn't manage coal!" "and here's a 'normous big box full of sticks," said lady magnifico. "i didn't s'pose wood grew in new york. what now, mr. moon? don't i know wood is sawed out of trees? well, what you laughing at, then?" "laughing, my lady? why, who can help it, to see such a jolly room, big enough to hold a mass-meeting? that's a loud-spoken clock up there. wonder if mother hubbard notices it's just going to strike twelve?" prudy looked up, but did not take the hint. "i'm so glad i remembered to bring that clock. i always used to tell my dog i prized it as much as he did his dear little tail.--why, what's burning? that child has scorched her slip. do take care of her, mr.--what may i call you?--while i look over this cupboard." "call me dr. moonshine, if you want to." "i'm glad i was so thoughtful as to order sugar," continued the landlady. "it's excellent to drop medicine on. what's this in a bowl? ice-cream?" "why, don't you know what that is?" said lady magnifico, sweeping along to the cupboard, and dipping in her dainty finger; "that's _condemned milk_.' "_condensed_ milk, her ladyship means," said the doctor, "boiled down, you know, and thickened. when you make a custard for dinner, you'll have to put in a tea-kettle full of water." this was the second hint the young man had thrown out concerning dinner; but prudy was not to be hurried. "what's this in a little caddy? o, it's rice. no; it's what dotty used to call _coker whacker_." "what does she call it now, may i ask?" said the doctor, with an irritating smile. "_patti-coker_--what you s'pose?" was the rash reply. poor lady magnifico! little tingles of shame ran down her fingers as soon as she had spoken, for she saw, by the glances between her landlady and the doctor, that she had made another mistake. "o, i like to keep house," cried fly, holding up her trailing robes, and dancing over a carpet seam. "what's this goldy thing?" "bellows, toddlekins, to blow up the fire. see me fill out their leather cheeks." "what pretty little _blozers_! let me blow 'em!" there was a second dash upon the stove, and another scorch in the slip. "there ought to be a fence built round that stove," said the anxious father. "come, mother hubbard, have you seen all there is in the cupboard? can't you give this poor old dog a bone?" "well, here i am with the care of the family on my shoulders," thought mother hubbard, winking fast behind the green spectacles, and recalling uneasily the couplet her father often repeated:- "think well before you pursue it; but when you begin, go through it." "now what'll we have for dinner?" lady magnifico was walking languidly about, admiring herself in the mirror, dr. moonshine rummaging an old closet, and baby pulling out the bureau drawers. "they have the easy part. but never mind; i'll show them what i can do. mother says i have a great deal more taste for cooking than susy has. didn't i make pickles all one vacation?" then prudy sat down with the "housekeeper's friend," and began at the first page to read. half an hour passed, and no signs of her moving. "i'm hunger-y," whispered baby, taking a sugar-coated pill out of a box, and touching it with her tongue. it was sweet till her teeth went into it, when out rolled the little ball upon the floor. "o, my shole! how bitter!" groaned she, wiping her mouth on a lace cuff. "'spect that's a pill, and they cooked it in sugar; but i shan't eat it." "little daughter, what are you doing there? mustn't meddle with other folks' things." dr. moonshine sneezed as he spoke, having breathed some of the "dust of ages" into his nose off a top shelf, where mrs. fixfax kept a few herbs. ten minutes more. the doctor stepped down from the chair-back on which he had been standing, and gazed hard at his landlady. she was turning the sixteenth page. "my lady magnifico!" "sir?" "my lady, do you happen to have such a thing as a peanut in your pocket?" my lady shook the cat out of the armchair, and seated herself. "it isn't polite to carry round peanuts." "i was only thinking," continued the doctor, with a side glance at mother hubbard, "how nice a peanut would be to keep anybody from fainting away." mother hubbard started from her chair. "what unfashionable boarders! you don't expect dinner in the middle of the day, i hope! in the city of new york we don't have it till five or six o'clock. i'm afraid you came down too soon, dr. moonshine." "afraid i did. wish i was 'the man in the south.' i'd like to 'burn my mouth' on a little 'cold plum porridge.'" "haven't any for you; but i'll give you a lunch. what say to omelettes and coffee?" "excellent," said dr. moonshine, reviving. "exquisite," drawled my lady. "_exquit_," quoth fly. "only there isn't any coffee," said mother hubbard, going to the cupboard. "call it tea," said the doctor, "and hurry up." "no, chocolate is better. how do you make chocolate?" said the landlady, turning to her cook-book. "i don't know, and don't care," fumed the doctor. "baked in a _slow_ oven, most likely, with a top crust. let the chocolate slide." "well, i will. and now i'll make the omelette. eggs? yes; there are eggs enough; but dear me, where's the milk? this _condemned_ kind my lady tells about won't do to make omelettes. i shouldn't dare try it." "well, well, give us a little bread and butter. i've got past being particular." "o, dr. moonshine, such biscuits as i'm going to bake for you at five o'clock! but now i really can't find a speck of bread!" "i'll warrant it! i always heard that when old mother hubbard went to her cupboard she found the shelves were all bare." "then you needn't have come here to board. won't crackers and raisins do?" they had to do; and the boarders tried to be satisfied in view of the coming dinner. all the afternoon mother hubbard spent between the cake-board and the mouth of the oven. "queen of the rolling-pin, can't you hush up this fire?" said dr. moonshine, looking at the thermometer; "we're nearly up to 'butter melts,' and i suppose you know that's ninety degrees." "dr. moonshine," replied mother hubbard, nervously, "i can't help it if the butter does melt. we've got to have something to eat." "papa, pin up my dress," said the baby. "i want to do sumpin. i want some pastry to paste a book with." "you're a real failure, toddlekins. your teeth have come, and you talk and keep talking. i'm afraid mother hubbard will charge me full price for your board. you hear what she calls for, ma'am? can you make her a little paste? here's an old patent office report; and i'll run the risk of her spoiling it. i'll cut some pictures for her out of these papers." "lucky i don't keep a file of my newspapers," thought mrs. fixfax, listening from the next room. "if i did, those children would hear from me." "yes, i'll make her some paste," said mother hubbard, dropping the aerating egg-beater, and setting the spice-box on the stove. dr. moonshine laughed. mother hubbard had never dreamed a boarder could be so disagreeable. she snatched off the spice-box, and setting a kettle on the stove, boiled paste enough to paper the walls of a room. meanwhile fly was making free with the nutmegs and soda, and the little cook could not remember how far along she had got with the cake. "children don't annoy you, i hope," said the doctor, seating the baby at the side of the table, opposite mother hubbard, and giving her a stick with a rag wound around the end of it, in order to paste pictures into a scrap-book. "thank you, doctor. i never did like children half as well as dogs," replied mother hubbard, forcing a smile. then she tasted her cake slyly, to make sure whether she had put the butter in or not. "madam hubbard, mim," said lady magnifico, "may i trouble you for a glass of water?" "mamma hubbard, may i have a hangfiss to wipe off the pastry?" old mother hubbard went to the cupboard, and got a goblet for the lady; to the closet, and found a rag for the baby. by that time she smelt something burning; it was eggs. she had left the patent egg-beater on the stove by accident, and its contents were as black as a shoe. "o, what a frightful, alarming odor!" cried lady magnifico. "if somebody doesn't throw up a window! madam, do tell us what's afire now!" "mother hubbard's got a dumb chill," said the doctor; "she won't speak." but prudy was saying under breath, "please, god, let me keep pleasant. they don't mean any harm, and i _should_ be ashamed to get angry just about a play." "what ails you, mother hubbard? 'you look as blue as the skimmiest kind of skim-milk.'" "do i? well, no wonder, with such troublesome boarders. suppose you and my lady go down to the parlor. i don't believe i'm a bit interesting, you know. i'll call you when dinner is ready." "agreed! sharp five, remember." "there," said mother hubbard, taking off her spectacles; "now i can cook." could she? "little folks we is to keep house--isn't we?" buzzed the little torment that was left behind. "hush! don't you talk, prudy. when you shake the table, then i make blots with my pastry." prudy said nothing, but thoughtfully tasted the cake again. how could she tell whether she had left out the soda? "are you _blind of your ears_, prudy, can't you hear nuffin what i say? rag's come off the stick. please to tie it on. and _i_ want to eat some o' that dough." mother hubbard did her blundering best; but ill luck seemed to pursue the cooking. "needn't call that book the 'young housekeeper's friend.' it's an enemy, a real bitter enemy," cried she, in great excitement. "wood is hotter than coal, too. mrs. fixfax must have given it to me to plague me. how it does burn things up! i hope beefsteak is cheap. i won't ask anybody to eat this, all covered with ashes. i'll never try to broil any again on top of a stick of wood! i won't try that 'steamboat pudding.' sounds as if 'twould burn, and i know it would. let 'em go without pudding." after the most tiresome afternoon she had ever spent in her life, mother hubbard went down with fly, whom she dared not leave by herself, to call her boarders to dinner. chapter v. mother hubbard's dinner. this was mrs. allen's "reception-day," the day on which she always staid at home, that her friends might be sure of finding her in. "not at home," nathaniel had kept saying to visitors that afternoon. but one of them, a queenly-looking lady, would not be satisfied with the answer. "are the children here?" demanded she. "those nieces and nephews?" nathaniel did not know exactly what reply to make; so he invited the lady into the parlor, and went to inquire. dr. moonshine and lady magnifico were in the drawing-room, looking over engravings. "gnat, gnat, you troublesome insect," said the doctor. "i heard auntie tell you we were not to be disturbed." "but what could i say?" asked the insect, humbly. "i couldn't tell her 'not at home.'" "you must say, 'beg to be excused;' those are the proper words," said my lady. "yes," added the doctor; "go, there's a good gnat, and sting 'em like sixty, if they don't start quick." nathaniel obeyed, looking as dignified as ever, though nothing but a strong sense of propriety kept him from smiling. he had not crossed the hall before mother hubbard entered the parlor, dragging fly, who was pinned to her skirts. mother hubbard was flushed and excited, her nose dusted with flour, her cap pulled entirely over her forehead; and she was saying, in a loud tone, "i can't take any peace of my life, fly clifford, you know i can't, unless i get you fastened somehow." "i don't 'low folks to _fassin_ me," responded fly, shaking her lace cap in a blaze of wrath; "the next that _fassins_ me, i'll _scwatch who did it_!" it was not at all like either of the children to talk in this way, any more than it was like them to be dressed in such ridiculous costume. the effect upon the lady visitor was quite startling. she started, smiled, rose from her chair, and held out her hand. "now tell me if this isn't miss prudy parlin. i have seen your picture, my love." what eyes, to spy out a likeness under all the flour and furbelows, not to mention the green spectacles! prudy quivered like a frightened mouse, but could not get away, for a trap was sprung upon her; a steel-gloved hand was holding her fast. "i am madam pragoffyetski, a polish runaway. you may not have heard of me, but i know all about prudy and little thistledown flyaway." "nicely, thank you, m'm," responded miss fly, in a voice as faint as the peep of a chicken; at the same time darting forward and tearing a piece out of her slip. "if she runned away i'd be 'shamed to tell of it." "how awful for her to come here!" thought mother hubbard, stealing a timid glance at the lady's ermine muff. "she looks nice, but i don't want anything to do with such people." "don't be afraid of me, dears," said the lady, laughing; "i call myself a runaway just in sport. i am a warm admirer of yours, and my dear friend, your auntie, has promised me a visit from you. i came on purpose to ask you, and your sister, and your cousins to my house to dinner to-morrow. will you come?" mother hubbard gazed doubtfully at the steel-colored glove. what could she say? "thank you ever so much, mrs.--mrs. pradigoff, but fly is not allowed to go out." flyaway was greatly chagrined. "well, i--i _solomon_ promised," said she, casting down her guilty eyes, as she remembered the orange man; "i solomon promised i would't go ou' doors, _athout_ somebody _lets_ me." "there's a tender conscience for you," laughed the polish lady. "why was she not to go out, miss prudy?" "because she is so quick-motioned, ma'am. before you know it she's lost. that's the reason i pinned her to my dress. you see, ma'am, we are playing 'keep house.'" "o, if her quickness is all the trouble, i'll take the responsibility that she shan't get lost. i'll bind her fast with a silken chain. really, children, my heart is set on your coming. my house is full of things that make a noise--a canary, a paroquet, a mocking-bird, a harp, a piano, and a guitar. and--" mrs. pragoff did not add that she had invited a little party to meet them. she was afraid of frightening the timid souls. "would you like to come, miss prudy? tell me honestly, now." there was no need to ask fly. she was dancing for joy--the absurd little image. "o, yes'm; i'd be delighted," replied mother hubbard, a smile lighting up her face even to the floury tip of her nose. "and i think horace and dotty would, too. shall i go and ask?" yes, horace and dotty were both pleased with the idea. "she's a foreigner," said prudy, doubtfully; "but she talks our language beautifully. she's a dear friend of auntie's, too." "what i object to," said horace, "is taking toddlekins; but i may possibly hire her to stay at home." it was finally decided that mrs. pragoff should call next day and take the children to church with her, and thence home to a christmas dinner. she laughed, as she rolled away in her carriage, thinking what droll figures they were, and how prudy blinked through her glasses. "so i shan't have to cook but one meal more, and that will be breakfast," thought mother hubbard, her tired heart leaping up with something like joy. they sat down to dinner at last. "tea urn been standing on the table all this while?" asked dr. moonshine, resuming his critical manners; "'twould take the tea some time to freeze on here, mrs. hubbard, if that is what you're trying to do with it!" mrs. hubbard pretended not to hear. "she's blind of her ears, papa; you have to speak loud." "what makes your child's face so red, doctor?" asked the landlady, pouring hot water till it overran the cup; "don't the darling feel well?" "yes'm, pitty well; only but the white tea gets in my cheeks and makes 'em too hot." "white tea, i should think," remarked dr. moonshine; "why, mother hubbard, the tea-leaf in your urn must feel rather lonesome." mother hubbard took off the cover and peeped in. "none there, as true as you live! i'll jump right up, doctor, and stew two or three handfuls." "don't rise for me, ma'am; don't rise for me. we'll swallow the will for the deed, ma'am; the will for the deed." "it's always so, doctor," said lady magnifico, in an undertone; "we've had to swallow these mistakes from time _immortal_." her ladyship meant "immemorial." she was surprised at the ease with which she used large words. "all the mistakes are owing to the eccentricity of genius," said the doctor, bowing to mother hubbard. "our landlady is what is called 'absent.' here's a health to our _absent_ friend." "you'll have to excuse the biscuit," said mother hubbard, nervously. "i mixed 'em too tight, and i think the flour's half corn, they look so yellow; it _can't_ be all soda." "i presume not _all_ soda; some mixture of flour and water. but where are they, ma'am?" "o, i put them in the cupboard. i thought you'd like crackers better." "but these are the _mizzerble_ kind, that don't split," said lady magnifico, in tragic tones; "i told you so to-day noon." "stop a minute, miss hubbard; my coffee's too sour," cried the youngest, determined to scowl as hard as dotty did, if it was a possible thing. the worried landlady passed the sugar, and the small boarder corrected the _sourness_ of her white tea with three teaspoonfuls, heaping measure. "my little toddlekins is eating nothing." said the doctor. "i hope her red cheeks don't indicate fever." "there's great quantities of sickness just now among children," said lady magnifico, crooking her little finger genteelly. "_nervous exhaustation_ is going about." "nervous what, my lady?" "_exhaustation_. i am well acquainted with a lady in the first society that had it dreadfully. she called in twenty-five doctors, if my memory _preserves_ me right; and _then_ she like to died." "you know it for a fact, my lady? i hope it won't come here (or the doctors either). is it catching, dr. moonshine?" "well, yes, mother hubbard; it's apt to catch fine ladies. goes hard with 'em, too." "ah me, then i'll never dare go out," drawled lady magnifico, looking at her rings. here mother hubbard timidly passed the cake. "white mountain; but i suspect it's a poor rule." "a poor rule that don't work both ways, hey? if this was ever white, ma'am, 'twasn't a fast color; faded to a rusty black. and as to it's being a mountain, ma'am, it looks to me like a pretty hollow valley." "i'm so sorry, doctor! but your little girl dusted my soda over the cat, and that was why the cake didn't rise." "just so, ma'am; but did the cat rise?" "o, dr. moonshine, i see you're making fun of my cooking. and now i'll tell you something more. i got the butter ready, and forgot to put it in, and that's why the cake's so tough." "never mind," said the doctor, very amiable as long as he could make his joke. "it is pretty tough cake, ma'am; but it's always tougher where there's none." "there's one thing about it," said mother hubbard, a little relieved; "it's sweet in the middle, and you needn't eat the bitter part, where it's burnt." "it's my practice to mix the bitter with the sweet," said the doctor, waving the butter-knife. "in this way, mother h., your black-valley cake is almost as good as pills." "i ate a pill," observed fly, "and 'twas worser'n this!" "you ate a pill, child? when? where? i'll warrant that's what ails you." "no, it don't ail me now. i spitted it out." after nibbling a few crackers, and the inside of the cake, the happy family moved away from the table, hungrier than when they had sat down. "what is home without a mother?" sang horace, in a plaintive voice; and dotty joined in, with emphasis. prudy looked as low-spirited as the "black-valley cake." "i hope uncle augustus will be able to come home to-morrow. i declare, we are real cruel not to feel worse about his being sick away off there in a hotel." "you'd better believe he gets things to eat," responded lady magnifico, aside to the doctor. "i'd rather be some sick than have a landlady that's purblind and _purdeaf_, and such _owdrageous_ poor cooking! glad i'm going out to christmas dinner." chapter vi. prudy in a new light. mother hubbard was heated, and tired, and hungry, and cross. it was all very well for a lady boarder to loll on an ottoman, play with her rings, and find fault. it was all very well for a gentleman boarder to fire poor jokes; but they couldn't either of them know how every word cut like a lash. when the doctor said, carelessly, "some people think themselves great cooks, my lady; but the proof of the pudding's in the eating," why, that speech was "the pin in the end of the lash." prudy saw now that she had pretended to know a great deal more than she really did. pretension is very apt to get laughed at. she had always scorned dotty's self-conceit; but hadn't she shown quite as much herself? making her auntie suppose she understood cooking, and putting mrs. fixfax to all this trouble for nothing? how horrified auntie would be, and the housekeeper too, if they should dream that this little family was starving, with a cook-book lying open on the floor! "but i declare, it's real mean in you two to make fun of me," cried the young landlady, tipping the sugar-basin plump into the dish-tub; "you couldn't get any better supper yourselves, nor half so good; so there!" surprised at the sharp sound of her own voice, dismayed at sight of the wet sugar, and completely discouraged by the aspect of things in general, prudy burst out into a sort of frenzy. she was ashamed of herself, but she couldn't stop. "you think i can bear everything--you and dotty both! people are careful what they say to dotty, for her temper's just like live coals; but they talk to me, and say anything; anything they've a mind to." "why, prue," exclaimed horace, as astonished as if mother hubbard's dog had spoken; "why, prue!" "yes, you think it's awful if i speak; but sometimes it seems as if i should bite my tongue out." "don't, prudy," exclaimed dotty, looking on with awe and alarm, as if there had been a sudden eclipse of the sun; "i didn't mean to." "don't prudy," said fly, clutching at the brown dress; "and i'll give you sumpin what i buy." there is an old saying, "beware the fury of a patient man." prudy had tried all day to "smile and smile, while secret wounds were eating at her heart;" but now she could scarcely bear the touch of little fly's hand. she did not care what she said, if she could only find words bitter enough. "i always have to bear, and bear, and bear. nobody else does. i've noticed how different it is with susy. she frets, and then people let her alone. and dotty, how she tosses up her head like aunt martha's horse lightning-dodger! haven't i always pacified dotty, and humored her? had to alter the play to suit her. and what does that child know or care, any more than if i was a common sister, that hadn't been giving up, and giving up, and _giving up_, ever since she was born?" prudy's cap-strings shook violently, her teeth chattered, and the sharp words seemed to rattle out like hail-stones. horace had never seen her in such a mood, and was half inclined to run away; but when she took her hands down from her face, and he saw how pale she was, his heart was moved. "come, prue, you're sick abed; that's what's the matter. lie down, and let that lazy dot take off her diamonds, and go to work." prudy dropped upon the sofa and covered her face with her handkerchief, while dotty, strange to relate, actually slid the rings off her fingers and thumbs, and began to put away the crackers. "o, dear," thought prudy, blushing under the cap-border, spectacles, and handkerchief; "what did possess me to talk so? i had been holding in all day; why did i let go? if i ever do let go, i can't stop; and o, how shameful it is!" it seemed as easy for prudy to be good as for a bird to sing; but it was not so. she had a great deal of human nature, after all. she liked her own way, but she never had it unless dotty was willing. was that a pleasant way to live? if you think so, dears, just try it. the secret of prudy's sweetness was really this: in all trials she was continually saying, under breath, "please, god, keep me from doing wrong." she had found that was really the only way--the only _safe_ way. "everybody calls me amiable. they wouldn't if they knew how i have to grit my teeth together to keep from scolding. i like to be called amiable, but nobody'll do it again; and horace sees now i'm not the girl he thought i was." all prudy's hail-stones of wrath had melted into tear-drops, and she was sobbing them into her handkerchief. she did not clearly know whether she was crying because she had done wrong, or because horace would see she "was not the girl he had thought she was." "bless your dear little soul," said dr. moonshine, kneeling before her, while his blue swallow-tails swept the floor, "you've told the truth. everybody knows dot's a spitfire, and you're an angel; and she does impose upon you most abominably." dotty stood staring, with a plate in her hand, too much astonished to defend herself. "and i'm ashamed of firing so many jokes at you, prue; i am so. i'm a great joker (he meant a great _wit_!), but this is the first time i ever mistrusted you cared--you always take things so like a lamb,--or you'd better believe i wouldn't have done it. for there isn't a girl in the world i like so well as i do you, nor begin to." "o, hollis," moaned the little one, stirred by sudden jealousy. "hullelo! i forgot you, topknot.--you're my heart's jewel; that's generally understood. when i say i like prue, i mean next after you." the jealous fly was satisfied, and folded her little wings against horace's breast. prudy felt greatly soothed, but her cap-strings were still shaking, and she could not trust her voice to speak. nothing more was said for some time. dotty clattered away at the dishes, kitty purred by the stove, and horace rocked his little sister, who clung about his neck like an everlasting pea. presently he stopped rocking, and exclaimed,-"why, what's the matter with my toddlekins? what makes her breathe so short?" "my froat's short; that's what is it," replied the little philosopher, closing her eyes, as if she did not choose to talk. "but how does your throat feel, topknot?" "feels bad; why?" "girls, this child has a sore throat, and a high fever. her hands are as hot as pepper." dotty wrung the dish-cloth tragically. "she's going to have the measles; you see'f she don't." "hush!" said prudy, springing up, and tucking back her sleeves. "let's give her a warm bath. that's what mother does when we are sick, before ever she sends for the doctor." "i'd _ravver_ have a _turkey-wash_," said fly, rousing a little, and then dropping her head again. "there, she's lost her senses; i knew she would," said dotty, walking the floor. "do stop that, dot. she has her senses as clear as you have. when she says _turkey-wash_, she means a turkish bath; it takes me to interpret. she had a very gentle turkish bath once. liked it--didn't you, fly? can't you rub her real hard with a crash towel, girls? that will be almost as good." "of course we can," said prudy, forgetting her gust of indignation entirely; "and what could be nicer than this little bathroom, with the silver faucets and ivory tub. come, fly, and have your turkey-wash. 'twill make you feel a great deal better." after a nice bath, at which prudy and dotty presided, the little one was dressed in her nightie, and set on her brother's knee again. "prudy said i'd feel better to be baved," said she, looking thoughtfully at the gas-light; "but now i was baved, and i don't feel any diffunt; i feel just's i did by-fore." "when can she have taken such a cold?" said horace; "don't you see, prue, she can't breathe out of her nose?" then fly remembered the orange-man, and something made her face grow red in a minute; but it was not the white tea. "pitiful about my signess," sighed she, and thought she would never, never tell of her own disobedience. but horace saw the blush and heard the sigh. "i am glad fly always minds," said he, looking straight into the little guilty face. "for god sees everything she does," whispered he, solemnly. horace never spoke of such subjects to other people; you would not suppose they were much in his mind; but to this precious little sister he gave his best thoughts, so far as he could make her understand them. "for god sees everything she does." fly did not speak for as much as a minute, and then she said, timidly,-"hollis, i want to ask you sumpin; does god wear spetticles?" "no, dear; no, indeed." "o, i thought he did." "but he sees us in the light and in the dark, topknot." the child winced. "can he see hisself athout looking in the glass?" "yes, i suppose so." "then, when i go up to god, i'll find he has four eyes,--two to see hisself, and two to see other things. o, dear, i'm so sick, i guess i will go up to god." the housekeeper was listening from the next room. "that child's voice is growing hoarse. i must go and look into this business," thought she. she knocked at the children's door. "i came to ask if i can do anything for you, young ladies." mrs. fixfax had heard a great deal of the play, and had been in a state of amusement all day, without seeing the actors; and when she caught sight of them now, she had to twist her mouth very hard, "to keep her teeth in." the magnificent lady magnifico, the ridiculous dr. moonshine, and the becapped mother hubbard, all replied in chorus, "o, yes'm, we were going to ring for you. do you see what ails the baby." mrs. fixfax approached the child in such a tender, motherly way, that horace was ashamed of having compared her face to "a platter of cold hash." she had a strong, sensible look, as if she were capable of carrying a whole hospital full of children through all sorts of diseases; and prudy and horace, who had begun to have an unpleasant feeling of responsibility, were greatly relieved. "you don't think it's anything but a cold--do you, mrs. fixfax? i don't know much about sickness." mrs. fixfax allowed herself to smile this time, as her eye rested on the mother hubbard cap. "no, i don't see anything alarming yet. if this was my child, i should just gargle her throat with salt and water, wrap a pork rind round her neck, and put her to bed." fly objected to nothing, if she could only sleep with her own brother hollis. when told she might do so, she tried to clap her hands; but her heart was heavy, and her throat was sore; so all she could do was to kiss him and cry. "and now, my dears, how do you enjoy housekeeping?" asked mrs. fixfax, carelessly, as she attended to fly's throat. "no--ot very much," returned dr. moonshine, faintly; for no one else seemed ready to speak. "rather hard on the head of the family. don't you say so, prue?" but prudy could not answer, on account of a throbbing at the roots of her tongue. "i see you have been taking an early dinner," contined mrs. fixfax, very coolly, as if she had no idea the children before her were half starved. "ye--es'm." "so, perhaps you wouldn't object to going down and finishing off on roast turkey? i ordered the table set for you." "you did? o, thank you, ma'am!" cried lady magnifico, ready to throw herself on the housekeeper's neck. "i never object to roast turkey myself," said the doctor, his eyes gleaming with delight. mother hubbard said nothing; but she thought she should relish a good dinner as well as her boarders. they all went down but fly, who was by this time fast asleep in mrs. fixfax's arms. "i reckon the servants thought we'd been wrecked on a desert island, by the dash we made at that turkey," whispered horace, as they returned to the housekeeper's room. "how good you were, horace clifford, not to tell mrs. fixfax about my awful cooking." "and i didn't tell, either," said dotty. "but wasn't it _mizzerble_?" as if mrs. fixfax didn't know, and wasn't that very minute laughing over the "tight biscuit" and low-spirited cake! chapter vii. a fly in trinity church. the children went to bed that night cheered by a remark which mrs. fixfax dropped as if by accident. "the cook is to fry buckwheat cakes in the morning. i dare say you would like omelettes, too. do you drink chocolate?" "she takes it for granted we are going to eat down stairs," thought prudy. and now her troubles were over. life bloomed before her once more like a garden of roses. horace did not rest remarkably well. in the first place, the bed was too warm. mrs. fixfax had rolled fly into a big bundle, with nothing out but the end of her nose, and was toasting her with soapstones. "buried alive," horace said, "with gravestones at her head and feet." "i'm all of a _personation_," gasped the child. "my mamma never did me so, hollis. she gave me little tinty tonty pills,--sugar clear through,--not the big ones miss fixfix eats." "well, lie still, topknot, and don't roll towards me." for an hour or two fly lay gasping; then she said, softly,-"hollis, hollis, is he looking now?" "yes, dear; but don't be afraid of the good god." "i didn't, hollis, if i wasn't naughty. when i'm good i'm willin' he should look." "naughty, topknot?" "yes, hollis; i _solomon_ promised i wouldn't go ou' doors; but that new miss fixfix, she let me gwout, athout nuffin on my head, 'n' i got a awful cold." "o, little fly!" "i know it, hollis. i was defful sorry all the time. i ate ollinges, too; so for course i got the sore froat." "i'm glad you told me, fly; now i know what ails you. but you mustn't ever disobey again." "yes, um," said fly, rolling towards her brother, and crying till the tears ran down on the flannel which was bound around her neck. a few moments after she whispered,-"now i don't feel any 'fraid, hollis; i've telled god. i feel better, 'n' i'm willin' he should look." "well, then, dear, that's right--go to sleep." "and now, hollis, do you s'pose he'll send my spirrick back to me?" "what are you talking about, topknot? your spirit's in your body, child. go to sleep." "no, it isn't in my body, too! i want my nice good little spirrick to come back," murmured the child. "auntie said 'twould stay to me if i's good." fly was thinking of her unseen guardian angel. it was a troubled night for horace. fly waked him no less than three times, to ask him if she had the measles. "no, child, no; don't wake me for that again." "well, you ought to not go to sleep 'fore i do. you're a fast boy, hollis!" morning came, and fly was rather languid, as might have been expected after such a night. "i don't see," mused mrs. fixfax, "where she caught this dreadful cold, unless it was your keeping the room so hot yesterday, children." fly hid her face in her brother's back hair, for she was riding pickaback down stairs. "and can we go to see that poland lady?" said dotty. "if you asked _me_, i answer, no," said horace, bluntly. "at any rate, fly mustn't stir a step out of the house to-day." "i didn't ask you, horace. i asked mrs. fixfax. she is the one that has the care of us." "i really don't know what to say about it," replied the housekeeper, hesitating. "we will wait and see how she seems after breakfast." "rather a cool way of setting my opinion one side," thought horace, indignantly. fly ate only two small buckwheat cakes, but seemed lively enough, as she always did when there was a prospect of going anywhere. "i don't suppose it is exactly the thing, after steaming her so," said mrs. fixfax, as if talking to herself,--she did not even look at horace;--"but really i don't know what else to do. i couldn't keep her at home unless the rest of the children staid; and if i did i presume she'd get killed some other way. she's one of the kind that's never safe, except in bed, with the door locked, and the key in your pocket." "let her manage it to suit herself," thought brother horace, deeply wounded; "she knows _my_ opinion." when madam pragoffyetski came, the housekeeper went down to the parlor to introduce the children--a step which horace thought highly unnecessary. he was charmed at once with the foreign lady's affable manners, and would have liked to go with her, if only fly could have been left behind. mrs. fixfax explained that the child had been sick, and must be treated like a hot-house plant. "we thought last night she was in danger of her _life_," said dotty. "you expected she was going to die, horace; you know you did." "well, i wasn't going to," returned fly, coughing. "i knew i should live--i always do live." "what was the matter?" said mrs. pragoffyetski, in alarm; for she knew as much about children's ailments as she did about the volcanoes in the sun. "only a little sore throat," answered the housekeeper, still looking anxious, and not at all sure she was doing right. "yes'm, sore froat. and dotty wanted me to have the measles, too; but i wouldn't." "that is right," said mrs. pragoffyetski, with a musical laugh. "indeed, your little cousin was cruel to ask such a thing of you. i'm glad you didn't do it." they took a street-car, and dotty pressed her face against a window, expecting to see gay sights all the way. but no; the shops had their eyes shut. yesterday how quickly everybody had moved! now, men and women were walking quietly along, and there was no confusion anywhere. "how strange!" said prudy. "i should think it was sunday, only the boys are blowing tin trumpets." "yes; and the babies are going to visit their grandmammas," said mrs. pragoff; "look at the one in the corner in its nurse's arms, with a point-lace bib under its chin. that pretty blanket, embroidered so heavily, must weigh more than the baby." dotty kept her gaze steadily fixed on the streets. "it seems so funny for a steeple to be _preceding_ from the middle of those stores. 'tisn't a very pious place for a church!" "now i hope dotty isn't going to be pert," thought prudy. "i know what street that is, down there," added miss dimple, jumping out of the car with both feet; "that is wall street. did they use to have walls both sides of it? horace, you scared me so yesterday, i like to screamed. you said there were bulls and bears growling all the way along; but there wasn't a single bear, only a stuffed one sitting on top of a store, and he wasn't alive, and not on this street either." here prudy gave her sister's little finger a squeeze, which was meant for "hush;" but dotty never could understand why it was not proper at all times to say what she had on her mind, especially when people listened so politely as this polish lady. "mrs.--mrs. pragoff-yetski, i hope you'll excuse me, but i can't remember your name." "that is it; you have it exactly; but never mind about the last part, my love. pragoff is enough." "yes'm.--well, i was going to ask you, mrs. yetski, will you please sit between me and fly when we go into church? o, you don't know how funny she acts, or you never'd dare take her. i wouldn't laugh in church for anything in this world; but fly always makes me." "does she, indeed! ah me, that is very unfortunate!" said the queenly lady, looking down on little miss toddlekins as if she were actually afraid of her. she took care to put dotty out of harm's way, by placing the untamable fly between horace and prudy. the interior of trinity church was so magnificent, the christmas decorations so fresh and beautiful, and the service so imposing, that no one thought of such a thing as smiling. "how could i have been so impatient, yesterday?" thought prudy, as she listened to the plaintive chant, "he was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." "why, if you only think of that, how our saviour had trouble every minute, it doesn't seem as if it makes so much difference whether we people and children have a good time or not." here, as they were about to seat themselves at the close of the chant, fly, who, in spite of her brother's warnings, had been tilting back and forth on a stool, suddenly tipped forward, and hit her nose furiously. blood flowed from the wound; and the sight of it, together with the pain, made the child frantic. she forgot where she was and screamed. poor mrs. pragoffyetski! though a good woman in the main, she was rather proud of appearances, and had just been thinking the four children did her credit. but now! the shrill cry of distress called everybody's attention to her pew. the whole audience were looking up from their prayer-books in astonishment. "tut, tut! my dear! my love! hush, my babe, lie still,--o, can't you stop crying?" horace, too, was trying to quiet the child; but fly sincerely believed she was bleeding to death; so what did she care for proprieties? "o, my shole!" piped she aloud, plunging both hands into the stream of blood, and afterwards into her hair. thus, by the time mrs. pragoff and horace got her into the aisle, she looked as if she had been murdered. "i wish i was twenty-one," thought horace, bitterly. "mrs. fixfax had no business steaming this child. i believe it has gone to her brain." the party of five marched out of church, for mrs. pragoff did not wish to make a second sensation by coming back after prudy and dotty. "i never go with fly but i get mortified," thought miss dimple; "and now, o dear, i shan't hear those christmas chimes!" but prudy was thinking how sorry she was for mrs. pragoff and horace. they all went into a druggist's, and, after a few minutes spent in the use of a sponge and water, poor fly ceased to look like a murdered victim, but very much like a marble image. when they reached mrs. pragoff's, she was placed on a sofa, and for once in her life lay still. horace bent over her with the wildest anxiety, thinking some terrible crisis was coming. as soon as she felt a little better, she began to cry. "o, darling, what is it?" said he, glad to see her in motion once more. "cause my uncle 'gustus is sick." "poh," said dotty; "crying about that? see! _i_ don't cry." "well, you don't love uncle 'gustus so hard as i do," said fly, with another burst. mrs. pragoff looked on with interest, and tried to remember whether she had ever heard that children shed tears when they were "coming down" with scarlet fever. this elegant mansion was a very interesting place to visit. to say nothing of things which "made a noise," there was no end of curiosities from the four quarters of the globe; and mrs. pragoff was so truly well-bred that the children soon felt at home. dotty was deeply engaged in examining a sea-horse, when prudy suddenly whispered,-"dotty, what did you do last night with those two rings?" "rings? what rings?" then a look of absolute terror spread over dotty's face. she remembered slipping off her auntie's rings when she washed the dishes; but where had she put them? "why, prudy, i _persume_ i left 'em in--in--where i ought to leave 'em." "o, i'm glad you did," returned prudy, quite satisfied, for she was listening with one ear to the liquid notes of "the wandering sprite." "why didn't prudy parlin ask me before?" thought dotty, in much agitation; "and then i could have gone all round and looked to see if i'd put them in the right place." [illustration: "dotty dimple, you here?"] chapter viii. dotty's windpipe. it mattered little to dotty, after this, what happened. she cared nothing about the elegant masters and misses who dropped in to dinner, though prudy was too frightened to speak; nothing about the paroquets, and dried butterflies, and japanese canoes she pretended to look at; nothing about the chatting and laughing, and very little about the christmas plum-pudding, the oyster-pies, and ice cream. dotty had no heart for any of these things. she was thinking continually, "where are those rings?" fly did not dine, and dotty had begged to stay with her. "no," said mrs. pragoff, patting miss dimple's cheek with her dainty hand, which did not look as if it had ever been soiled with anything coarser than rose leaves; "i am glad to see you so kind to your dear little cousin; but she is asleep on my bed, and does not need you." prudy sat at her hostess's right hand, and in spite of her bashfulness, was as happy a child as ever broke a wish-bone. no one who has not had the care of a family can imagine the relief she felt now the cooking was off her mind. but dotty was wringing her hands under the table-cloth, and thinking, "i don't want to see anybody. my heart is certainly broken." "why, dot, what's the matter? what are you scowling at so?" said horace, in a low tone. upon that dotty began to smile. no one must know her heart was broken, for fear the question might arise, "what broke it?" of course her smile was a make-believe, nothing more nor less than a simper. the large boy across the table looked at her in surprise. "handsome as a picture," thought he, "but no brains." "o, my sorrows! what'll i do? i can't remember whether i put those rings in my blue pocket, or carried 'em up stairs. seems to me i dropped 'em in a salt-cellar. no; i thought i'd lay 'em in a book, but we flew round so when fly was sick, that i shouldn't wonder if they got into the wood-box." all the while dotty went on simpering and saying, "if you please, sir," every time a dish was passed her. her singular behavior surprised horace, and when she took three olives, which she very much disliked, and immediately afterwards tucked them under her plate, he said,-"dot, i believe you are crazy." it was an unfortunate remark. a little more, and there would have been a scene at the table; but dotty, with all her self-control, forced back the tears. "wonder if he wanted to make me cry," thought she; "but i won't cry. and he needn't think he can make me 'mad' either. s'pose i'd show temper right before these people?" on the whole, dotty contrived to keep up appearances, and no one but horace and the youth opposite noticed her much, or suspected her of being an idiot. but the moment dinner was over, she stole away from the party, and found her way up-stairs to mrs. pragoff's room. there, on the outside of the bed, lay fly, half undressed, and still very pale. "gas-light makes folks look _gas_-ly," thought dotty, "but she isn't much sick, or horace wouldn't have eaten any dinner. there, when i first got a peek at this bed-quilt, i thought it was so queer; and now i'm going to see what it's made of." instead of a common coverlet, the bed was adorned with two enormous crimson satin cushions stuffed with swan's down. the cushion on the lower half of the bed was two feet deep, to cover the lower part of the body, and the one at the upper part not quite so thick, for it was to cover the shoulders. then a sheet of the finest linen was turned over at the top and sides, and buttoned on to the cushions. the pillows were of crimson silk, the bedstead enormously high, and carved all over with figures of gods and goddesses. dotty stood gazing with surprise, and almost forgetting her trouble. "she must have brought it over from poland when she ran away, only it's so heavy. but then i don't s'pose she ran on foot. came in the night, in the cars, prob'ly. poland's up by the north pole. i'm going to ask auntie about it." but the moment auntie came into her thoughts dotty was wretched again. she went to a window, drew back the damask curtain, and gazed out. "the night came on alone, the little stars sat, one by one, each on his golden throne." "those stars twinkle like auntie's rings. let's see: one was full of little pieces of glass, about as big as raspberry seeds. i shouldn't think glass would cost much. and the other was red, like a drop of blood, with ice frozen over it. that can't be so expensive, should you think, as a string of beads?" dotty tried hard to comfort herself, but could not stay comforted. "you don't s'pose auntie's jewels cost more than my papa is worth? how he must feel to be so poor! if he has to pay for those rings, we shan't get enough to eat. have to live on crackers and olives. and when we come to the table, father will look at me, and say, 'this is on the account of your naughty conduct, child!' o, dear! i can't speak one word, for it will be true, what he says. grandma read will have enough to eat; norah will set it on her end of the table. grandma is rich; i've seen her counting over bills in her desk; but how could i ask her for any, when she'd look right in my eyes, and say, 'what was thee doing with other folks' rings on thy thumbs?' "well, i know 'twasn't right; but 'twas prudy's fault some. if she hadn't told me not to so hard, i _persume_ i shouldn't. what made her speak up, and get me started? "o, did you ever see such a beautiful string of beads? one, two, three,--i guess there are a thousand." dotty threw the necklace over her head, and the air became as fragrant as a garden of spices. "i don't mean to meddle with other peoples' things any more; mother has taught me better. but there's one thought keeps coming into my mind: isn't it wicked to have so much jewelry? the 'postles didn't wear any, nor job didn't wear any, nor moses. "well, nor auntie don't, either. nothing but a watch and wedding-ring. horace says that's so queer. "now, what's the use of it, just to lock up away from the _morths_? i don't believe auntie knows how many rings there were in that casket!" this was a new idea. dotty's eyes began to sparkle. they would have made a jeweller's fortune if he could have put them in a gold setting, and sold them for sapphires. "the rings are somewhere round. i'm sure i can find them; but if i can't, will it be very wrong not to tell, when 'twouldn't make the least difference, and auntie never wears 'em? ought never to have 'em at all; ought to have the ornaments of meek and quiet spirits, instead of rings. "prudy would think 'twas awful not to tell; but prudy can't say anything to me. didn't she get mad yesterday, real, shaky mad? 'twas a great deal wickeder for her than it is for me--her disposition is real good, and mine was born awful. so prudy can't say a word to me about anything i do. "and i declare, who wants to eat olives and fried pork? prudy wouldn't like it any better'n i do. she would _think_ she'd tell, but p'haps she wouldn't any quicker'n me. "all just for two old rings, that never did me any good, and didn't have much of a time keeping house, either." "dotty dimple, you here?" said prudy, appearing at her sister's elbow, like an accusing angel. "why, i've been hunting you all over the house. you mustn't wear that on your neck; it is a rosary; it doesn't belong to you." "prudy little knows how my heart's broken," thought dotty, "or she wouldn't talk about beads. and me wanting to go home so i could 'most fly, just to find those rings." "i have been hunting for you," repeated prudy. "mrs. pragoff sent a man over to uncle augustus's to find out whether they came to-night in the cars; but they didn't. there was a letter that uncle wasn't able; but they'll come to-morrow afternoon." "that's splendid," thought dotty; "now i'll have to-night and all to-morrow forenoon to hunt." "and then mrs. pragoff said we might just as well stay here all night as to go home," continued prudy. "o, dear, dear! we're not going to stay here. prudy parlin? why didn't you come and ask if i was willing?" "i did hunt for you, dotty, but i couldn't find you. i thought you'd like to stay. they are playing so beautifully down stairs. i'm just proud of horace; he acts like a little gentleman." "i don't care how horace acts, and i don't want to play with people that have their hair frizzed. i want to go back to auntie's.' "but you can't, dotty. mrs. pragoff has sent to mrs. fixfax for our night-dresses." dotty rolled herself up in the curtain, and screamed into the folds of it. "why, dotty, what am i going to do with you? please come down, and behave." "o, prudy, i don't want ever to go down again. i don't want ever to see folks, or behave, as long as i live." "but, dotty, all these little boys and girls came here just to see us. it is our christmas party. you'll mortify mrs. pragoff. you know how fly mortified her this morning. please _don't_ be contrary." dotty unrolled herself from the curtain with a triumphant smile. "you needn't say anything, prudy parlin! you got mad your own self, i s'pose you know!" prudy's eyes dropped suddenly. "but, dotty, why do you want to go back to auntie's to-night?" "i want to go for something particular. i--" prudy's mouth was opening for another question. "because i---i've swallowed something the wrong way." "o dotty, not a pin!" "no; what you s'pose? guess i've done something to my windpipe. wish you wouldn't talk." prudy, in spite of her vexation, could not help smiling at dotty's fierce grimaces, of which she got a vanishing view as the child went into the curtain again. "if we don't go home, prudy, i'll have to go right to bed. i don't feel like sitting up." "then i must ask mrs. pragoff where we are to sleep." and next minute prudy was half way down stairs, thinking,-"what's gone wrong? i never can find out by asking _her_. she don't think or care how impolite she is, and how hard she makes it for me." it was a very brilliant party, composed of some of the most refined and accomplished little people in the city of new york. such fine dresses and such die-away manners overawed prudy. she did wish her mamma had sent a thin summer dress in the trunk. it was dreadful to have to wear woollen, high-necked and long-sleeved. it cost her a great effort to cross the room. she felt as awkward as a limping grasshopper in a crowd of butterflies. but reaching her hostess at last, she timidly whispered,-"my sister _says_ she isn't very well, mrs. pragoff, and that's why she stays up stairs. if you please, perhaps she'd better go to bed." prudy was very much ashamed to say this; but politeness required her to make some excuse for wayward dotty's behavior. of course mrs. pragoff went up stairs at once. at the sound of her steps, and the words, "you poor, forlorn little dear," dotty came out of the curtain, looking as miserable as could be desired. "i am so sorry, darling! i wished you to become acquainted with these nice little gentlemen and ladies." "but i--i--it hurts me to talk, ma'am." "_your_ throat, too? o, my love!" cried mrs. pragoff, seeing a dreadful vision, with her mind's eye, of two cases of scarlet fever. she was a childless widow, and children puzzled as well as interested her. she did not know what to make of dotty's confused statement that she "wasn't sick and wasn't well," but undressed and put her to bed as if she had been six months old, resolving to send for the doctor in the morning. "what have you on your neck, precious? o, that rosary. it is one of my curiosities. do you fancy it?" "here is the box in which it belongs. i give you the box and the beads, my charming dear, for a christmas present and a consolation. see the card at the bottom of the box:- "'life is a rosary, strung with the beads of little deeds done humbly, lord, as unto thee.' "i hope your life will be the most beautiful of rosaries, darling, and all your little deeds as lovely as these beads. "and now, good night, and may the christ-child give you your dreams." as soon as dotty was alone, she covered her head with the bed-clothes, and made up faces. she wished she could push herself through the footboard, and come out at portland. she never wished to set eyes on the city of new york again, or anybody that lived in it. chapter ix. two live children. as dotty lay tossing on her bed, she heard the laughing, and the lively music of the piano, and began to find she had missed a great deal by not going down stairs. horace and prudy were getting a taste of fashionable society. true, prudy did tire of the fixed questions, "how do you like new york? have you been in the park?" asked by girls in pink, and girls in blue, and boys in wondrous neck-ties, with hair parted very near the middle. she was astonished when mrs. pragoff proposed games. how could such exquisite children play without tearing their flounces and deranging their criãªped hair? but games were a relief to prudy. when she was playing she forgot her thick winter dress, and appeared like herself. "i don't believe dotty can get to sleep in all this noise. here's a nice chance to slip out, and i'll run up and see." she was not quite sure of the room, but the words, "is that you, prudy?" in an aggrieved voice, showed her the way. "how do you feel, darling?" "feel? how'd _you_ feel going to bed right after dinner?" "but you said you were sick." "well, yes; my--windpipe; but that's done aching. i can talk now. you get my clothes, and i'll dress and go down stairs." "why, dotty, i've excused you to mrs. pragoff, and it wouldn't be polite to go now." "why not? mother went down once with her head tied up in vinegar. besides, it shakes me all over to hear such a noise. and it's not polite to stay away when the party's some of it for me." prudy resigned herself to this new mortification, and helped the child dress. dotty went down stairs with such an appearance of restored health, that mrs. pragoff was quite relieved, and gave up her fear of scarlet fever. but miss dimple's friends were all sorry, half an hour afterwards, that she had not staid in bed. among other games, they played "key to unlock characters;" and here she proved herself anything but polished in her manners. the key coming to her as "the girl with the brightest eyes," she was told, in a whisper, to give it to the person of whom she had such or such an opinion. the little boys were interested to know which one of them would get it, for it was usually considered a compliment. but dotty did not notice any of the boys; she quickly stepped up to a young girl with frizzes of hair falling into her eyes, and gay streamers of ribbons flying abroad. little miss took the key with an affected smile and a shake of her shaggy locks, never doubting she was receiving a great honor. but when, at the close of the game, the players explained themselves, mallie lewis was startled by these words from the little portland girl:-"i was told to give the key to the most horrid-looking person in the room, and _i did so_!" dotty had not stopped to reflect that "the truth should not be spoken at all times," and is often out of place in games of amusement. but to do her justice, she was ashamed of her rudeness the moment the words were spoken. prudy was blushing from the roots of her hair to the lace in her throat. "why hadn't dotty given the key to horace or herself? then nobody would have minded." ah, prudy, your little sister, though more brilliant than you are, has not your exquisite tact. mrs. pragoff tried to laugh off this awkward blunder, but did not succeed. the moment dotty could catch her ear, she said, in a low tone,-"i'm so sorry, mrs. pragoff-yetski. will it do any good to go and tell her she made me think of a shetland pony?" mrs. pragoff laughed, and thought not. but afterwards she took mallie into a corner to show her some "seven-years" african flowers, and said,-"mallie, dear, i wish you wouldn't veil those bright eyes under such fuzzy little curls. that was why you got the key. dotty dimple isn't used to seeing young ladies look like shetland ponies." mallie's face brightened, or that part of it which was in sight. o, it was only her hair the country child called horrid! after this she actually allowed dotty to sit beside her on the sofa, and look at the fan which mrs. pragoff said marie antoinette had once owned. miss dimple was remarkably polite and reserved. "safe as long as she stays in a corner," thought horace; and he took care to keep her supplied with books and pictures. he enjoyed the party, not being overawed, as poor prudy was. wasn't he as good as any of them? better than most, for he didn't have to use an eye-glass. "these fellows are got up cheap. what do hair-oil and perfumery amount to?" the boys, in their turn, looked at horace, and decided he was "backwoodsy." nobody who sported a silver watch could belong to the "first circles." however, when he allowed himself to be "knight of the whistle," and hunted for the enchanted thing which everybody was blowing, and found at last it was dangling down his own back from a string, and they were all laughing at him, he was manly enough not to get vexed. that carried him up several degrees in every one's esteem. in his own, too, i confess. as for prudy, the girls could not help seeing she had no style; but the boys liked her, for all that. if they had only known what their hostess thought, there would have been some surprise. "these little misses look to me like bonnet flowers made out of book-muslin. prudy, now, is a genuine, fresh moss rose bud. there is no comparison, you dear little prudy, between artificial and natural flowers!" mrs. pragoff was called a "finished lady." she was acquainted with some of the best people in europe and america. what could she see in prudy? the child was not to be compared with these exquisite little creatures, who had maids to dress them, and foreign masters come to their houses and teach them french, music, and dancing. why, prudy did not know french from hebrew; she had only learned a few tunes on the piano, and could not sing "operatic" to save her life; her dancing was generally done on one foot. what was the charm in prudy? just one thing--_naturalness_. she was not made after a pattern. "it was a great risk inviting them here, and that youngest one seems very delicate; but let what will happen, i make a note of this: i have seen four live children." live children indeed! and here comes one of them now--the unaccountable fly, darting into the room very unexpectedly, rubbing her eyes as she runs. "why, topknot!" cried horace, making a dash upon her; for her frock was unfastened, and slipping off at the shoulders, and her head looked like a last year's bird's nest. "scusa me," whispered the "live child," very much astonished to see such a crowd. "but you ought not to come down here half undressed, you little midget!" "what if i wanted to ask you sumpin?" stammered the child, more alarmed by her brother's sternness than by the fire of strange eyes. "'spec' i mus' have my froat _goggled_; have some more _poke-rime_ round it, hollis!" added she, in a tone loud enough to be heard by half the party. think of mentioning "poke-rime" in fashionable society! "tell her she must dance 'little zephyrs,' or you'll send her right back," suggested prudy, who was famous for thinking of the right thing at the right time, and so making awkward affairs pass off well. "yes, fly, come out in the floor, and dance 'little zephyrs' this minute, or you must go back to bed." anything for the sake of staying down stairs. hardly conscious of the strange faces about her, the child flew into the middle of the room, rubbed some more sleep out of her eyes, and began to sing,- "little zephyrs, light and gay, first to tell us of the spring." she seemed to float on air. there was not a bit of her body that was not in motion, from the tuft of hair a-top of her head to the soles of her twinkling boots. now here, now there, head nodding, hands waving, feet flying. "encore," cried the delighted hostess. "please, darling, let us hear that last verse again." mrs. pragoff was curious to know what sort of jargon she made of the lines,- "where the modest violets grow, and the fair anemone." fly repeated it with an exquisite sweetness which charmed the whole house:- "where the modest _vilets_ grow, and the _fairy men no more know me_." "the fairies do all know you, darling." exclaimed mrs. pragoff, kissing her rapturously. "your feet are more light than a faery's feet, who dances on bubbles where brooklets meet." "there! dancing on bubbles!" said prudy aside to horace. "that's just what i always wanted to call it, but never knew how." on the whole it was a pleasant evening, and mrs. pragoff had no reason to regret having given the little party. everybody went to bed happy but dotty, who could not shut her eyes without seeing the blaze of two rings, which burned into her brain. chapter x. riding on jack frost. fly slept in a little cot beside her hostess's bed. mrs. pragoff, poor lady, reclined half the night on her elbow, watching the child's breathing; but, to her inexpressible relief, nothing happened that was at all alarming. fly only waked once in the night, and asked in a drowsy tone, "have i got a measle?" but just as mrs. pragoff was enjoying a morning nap, a pair of little feet went pricking over the floor, towards the girls' room, but soon returned, and a sweet young voice cried,-"o, miss perdigoff, i can't wake up dotty!" "can't wake her, child!" "no'm, i can't; nor prudy can't: we can't wake up dotty." mrs. pragoff roused at once, with a new cause for alarm. "why, what does this mean? did you try hard to wake her?" "yes'm; i shaked her." mrs. pragoff now remembered, with terror, that there had been a little trouble with dotty's windpipe. could she have choked to death? rising instantly, she threw on her wrapper, and was hurrying across the passage, when fly added,-"'haps she'll let _you_ wake her; she wouldn't let me 'n' prudy." "you little mischief, is that what you mean? she won't _let_ you wake her?" "no'm, she won't," replied artless fly; "she said she wouldn't be _bovvered_." mrs. pragoff went to bed again, laughing at her own folly. dotty, it seems, was feeling very much like a bitter-sour apple. it had always been a peculiarity of hers to visit her own sins upon other people. prudy did not suspect in the least what the matter was, but knew, from experience, it was safest to ask no questions. "i'm going back to auntie's, this morning." "why, dotty, uncle augustus and auntie won't be home till night. mrs. pragoff said she would take us to the park and the museum, you know." "i don't care how much you go to parks and museums, prudy; i want to be at home long enough to get my hair brushed and put away my things." prudy looked up in surprise; but the rousing-bell sounded, and both the little girls had as much as they could do to get ready for breakfast. when mrs. pragoff met them in the parlor, she saw two lovely dimples playing in dotty's cheeks; for the child was old enough, and had pride enough, to conceal her disagreeable feelings from strangers. all very well, only she might have carried the concealment a little farther, and spared poor prudy much discomfort. not that prudy thought of complaining,--for really her younger sister's temper was greatly improved. for a year or two she had scarcely been known to get seriously angry, and prudy did not mind a sharp retort now and then, or even an hour's sulks. while dotty sipped her chocolate from a cup so delicate that it looked like a gilded bubble, she was wondering how she could get home. she did not know the way, and could not ask any one to go with her without making up an excuse. "i could say i am sick, but that wouldn't be true, and me eating muffins and honey. i'm afraid 'twasn't quite true last night. i did feel rather funny, though, in my windpipe, now honest." there seemed to be no other way but to wait and go home with the rest of the children. dotty tried to think there might be time enough, after all, to find the rings. they started for the park. "may i depend upon you, master horace, to take the entire charge of your little sister!" said mrs. pragoff, fastening her ermine cloak with fingers which actually trembled; "i confess i haven't the courage; and i see you understand managing her perfectly." of course horace always expected to take care of topknot. he would gladly have done a much harder thing for a lady who was so polite, and appreciated him so well. mrs. pragoff gave a hand to prudy and dotty, saying gayly, as they all five took a car for the park,- "'sound the trumpet, beat the drum; tremble, france; we come! we come!'" there was just enough snow to whiten the ground, but none to spare. everybody was determined to make the most of it while it lasted, and the park was full of people sleigh-riding. it was really a wonderful sight. there were miles and miles of sleighs of all sorts, shaped like sea-shells, cradles, boats, water-lilies, or any other fanciful things. the people in them were so gay with various colors, that they looked like long lines of rainbows. many of the horses had silver-mounted harnesses, and on their necks stood up little silver trees, branching out into sleigh-bells, and sprinkling the air with merry music. "see, children, let us ride in this beautiful sleigh; it is shaped like a spanish gondola, and we ought to have music as we float." "fly can sing the 'shepherd's pipe coming over the mountains,'" said dotty; and forthwith the child began to warble the softest, sweetest music from her wonderful little throat. dotty queried privately why it should be called the shepherd's _pipe_: how could a shepherd smoke while he sang? "o, how beautiful!" said everybody, when the music ceased. they meant that everything was beautiful. the air was so balmy, and the sky so soft, that you might fancy the sun was walking in his sleep, writing his dreams on the white clouds. "splendid!" exclaimed fly, forgetting, perhaps, that she was not a flying-fish, and trying to dive head first out of the gondola. "tell me, children, if you don't think our park is very fine?" "yes'm," was the faint reply in chorus. "why don't you say, 'we never saw the like before?'" "o, we have, you know, ma'am," said prudy; "it's just like riding round willow-brook." "fie! don't tell me there's anything so beautiful in maine! i expect you to be enchanted every step of the way. look at this pond, with, the swans sailing on it." "o, yes; those are beauties," cried dotty; "i never saw any but cotton flannel ones before. but do you think the pond is as pretty as bottomless pond, prudy, where uncle henry goes for pitcher-plants?" "you prosy little creature," said mrs. pragoff, laughing; "i am afraid you don't admire these picturesque rocks and tree-stumps as you should." dotty thought this was certainly a jest. "pity there's so many. why don't they hire men to dig 'em up by the roots?" horace smiled on dotty patronizingly. "they'll do it some time, dot. the park is new. things can't be finished in a minute, even in new york." mrs. pragoff smiled quietly, but was too polite to tell horace the rocks had been brought there as an ornament, at great expense. "i like the park, if it isn't finished," said prudy, summoning all her enthusiasm; "i know you'll laugh, horace, but i like it better for the rocks; they make it look like home." the ride would have seemed perfect to everybody; only a wee sleigh passed them, drawn by a pair of goats, and fly thought at once how much better a "goat-hossy" must be than a "growned-up hossy, that didn't have no horns." she thought about it so much, that at last she could contain herself no longer. "there was little girls in that pony-sleigh, miss perdigoff, with a boy a-drivin.' 'haps they'd let me go, too, if _you_ asked 'em, miss perdigoff. my mamma don't 'low me to trouble nobody, and i shan't; only i thought i'd let you know i wanted to go, miss perdigoff." mrs. pragoff laughed heartily, and thought fly should certainly have a ride, "ahind the goat-horses;" but it was not possible, as the cunning little sleigh was engaged for hours in advance. a visit to the zoological gardens comforted the little one, however, after she got over her first fear of the animals. there they saw a vulture, like a lady in a cell, looking sadly out of a window, the train of her grey and brown dress trailing on the ground. horace thought of lady jane grey in prison. there was a white stork holding his red nose against his bosom, as if to warm it. a red macaw peeling an apple with his bill. brown ostriches, like camels, walking slowly about, as if they had great care on their minds. green monkeys biting sticks and climbing bars. a spotted leopard, licking his feet like a cat. a fierce panther, looking out of a window in the same discontented mood as the vulture. "see him stoop down," said dotty; "he makes as much bones of himself as he can." a horned owl, with eyes like auntie's when she looks "'stonished." an eagle, with a face, horace said, like a very cute lawyer. a "speckled bear," without any spectacles. a "nelephant" like a great hill of stone, and a baby "nelephant," with ears like ruffled aprons. an anaconda that "kept making a dandelion of himself." a great grizzly bear hugging a young grizzly daughter. "who made that _grizzle_?" asked fly, disgusted. "god." "why did he? i wouldn't!--miss perdegoff, which does god love best, great ugly _grizzles_ or hunkydory little parrots?" "o, fie!" said mrs. pragoff, really shocked; "where did a well-bred child like you ever hear such a coarse word as that?" "hollis says hunkydory," replied fly, with her finger in her mouth, while horace pretended to be absorbed in a monkey. mrs. pragoff turned the subject. "tell me, children, which do you consider the most wonderful animal you have ever seen?" "the lion," replied prudy. "the whale," said dotty. "which do you, mrs. pragoff?" "this sort of animal, that _thinks_," replied the lady, touching dotty's shoulder: "this shows the most amazing power of all." "you don't mean to call me an animal," said dotty, with a slight shade of resentment in her voice. "why, little sister, i just hope you're not a vegetable! don't you know we are all animals that breathe?" "o, are we? then i don't care," said dotty, and serenely followed the others up stairs, "where the dried things were." next they went to wood's museum, and saw greater wonders still. the "sleeping beauty," dreaming of the prince, with lips just parted and breath very gently coming and going. dotty would not believe at first that her waxen bosom palpitated by clockwork. there were distorted mirrors, which horace held flyaway up to peep into, that he might enjoy her bewilderment when she saw her face twisted into strange shapes. the cardiff giant, which horace said "you might depend upon was a hoax." an egyptian dromedary, which fly "just knew" had a sore throat; and a stuffed gorilla in "buffalo coat and leather gloves." then they had a lunch at delmonico's, quite as good, prudy admitted, "as what you found in boston." after this, to dotty's dismay, they went to the academy of design, and criticised pictures. the statue of eve horace regarded with some contempt. "no wonder she didn't know any better than to eat the apple! what do you expect of a woman with such a small head as that? look here who do you suppose was eve's shoemaker? cain?" "shoemaker? why, horace, she's barefoot." "so she is, now, dot; but she's worn shoes long enough to cramp her toes." "strange i never noticed that before," said mrs. pragoff. "i think the sculptor ought to know your criticism, master horace." "she's a woman that understands what a boy is worth," thought horace, very much flattered. "tell you what, i never saw a more sensible person than mrs. pragoff." "now, dears, shall we go to stewart's?" "o, no'm; please don't," cried dotty. "because," added she, checking herself, "their curtains are all down; and don't you s'spose mr. stewart and the clerks have gone off somewhere?" mrs. pragoff laughed, but, concluding the child was very tired, proposed going home; and, to dotty's great joy, they started at once. "i shall so grieve to part with you!" said mrs. pragoff, as they went along. "i wish you were mine to keep, every soul of you." but dotty noticed that while she spoke she was looking at prudy. chapter xi. the jewel cabinet. alas for the diamond and the ruby rings! new york is "a city of magnificent distances," and by the time the children were safely at home, there was a great stir through the house. colonel allen and wife had come. too late now to think of hunting for anything. "where are my little folks?" rang uncle augustus's cheery voice through the hall; and in he came, not looking ill in the least. his eyes were as black as ever, and he carried just as much flesh on his tall, large frame. somehow, he cheered one's heart like an open fire. so did aunt madge. there wasn't so much of her in size, but there was what you might call a "warm tone" over her whole face, which made you think of sunshine and fair weather. so in walked "an open fire" and a "ray of sunshine," and "took off their things." of course there were laughing and kissing; and fly, without being requested, hugged uncle 'gustus like a little "grizzle." "sorry i cried so 'bout you bein' sick. didn't 'spect you'd get well." "beg pardon for disappointing you. how many tears, did you waste, little crocodile? why, children, you're as welcome, all of you, as crocuses in spring. but no; it's you who should bid _us_ welcome. i understand you are keeping house, and auntie and i have come visiting?" "o, no, no, no," cried prudy; "we've got all over that; and i tell you, auntie, now you've come home, i feel as if an elephant had rolled right off my heart." "why, i hope nothing serious has happened," said mrs. allen, looking at the pile of nutshells fly had just dropped on the carpet, and at dotty's cloak, which lay beside horace's cap on the piano-stool. "yes'm, there is sumpin happened," spoke up fly from the floor, where she sat with "chestnuts in her lap, and munched, and munched, and munched." "i've had the fever, but i didn't die in it." "she wasn't much sick, auntie; but it frightened us. mrs. fixfax rolled her up six yards deep in blankets, and we thought 'what is home without a mother?' and then, you see, i didn't know the least thing about cooking, for all i pretended. i tell you, auntie, it's very different not to have anybody to ask how to do things." "such messes, you ought to seen 'em, auntie," struck in dotty, without the least pity. "pshaw! we didn't starve, nor anywhere near it," cried horace. "i wouldn't say anything, dot, for prue worked like a trojan, and you dawdled round with rings on your thumbs." at the mention of rings, dotty blushed, and stole a glance at mrs. allen. "see, auntie," said she, taking off her rosary, "this is my christmas present; but it doesn't make me a catholic--does it?" "how beautiful, my child! a full rosary of one hundred and fifty beads. it is called 'a chaplet of spiritual roses.' red, white, and damask. pray, who could have given it to you?" "a lady that ran away from poland. now don't you know? sleeps with a feather bed over her, covered with satin." "mrs. pragoff? you haven't been to her house?" "yes'm, we did, and to her church in trinity; and she made a party for us, and we staid all night." "that's a remarkable joke," said colonel allen, rubbing his hands. "she must have had a bee in her bonnet with all these rollicking children round her." "no'm, she never; but i had the nosy-bleed on the _pew-quishon_ awful. had to be tookened home. didn't eat no supper." "you don't tell me there was a scene in church," cried aunt madge, looking at uncle augustus, who rubbed his hands again, and laughed heartily. "how happened you to go, horace?" "it wasn't my doings, auntie. topknot had been lying in a steam all night, and i told mrs. fixfax she wasn't fit to go out of the house; but no attention was paid to what _i_ said. notice was served on me to take the little thing off visiting, and i had to obey. but i tell you i was thankful she didn't do anything worse than to bump her nose, though she did scream murder, and we followed her out in a straight line." "and this transpired at trinity church," said colonel allen, intensely amused. "rather severe for a woman who worships saint grundy." "saint who? i thought she was queer, or she wouldn't run away," said dotty, much shocked. "fie, augustus!" said aunt madge, who was laughing herself. "i wouldn't have had this happen on any account. mrs. pragoff asked me, before the children came, if i would let them visit her; but i gave her no decided answer; thought, perhaps i might go with them just to drink tea. but the idea of her taking them while i was gone! and her house so full of elegant little trifles! how much did fly break?" "nothing, auntie," replied horace. "i didn't let her stir but i was after her. i flatter myself i saved considerable property." "there, margery, don't mind it," said uncle augustus. "mrs. pragoff needed all this mortification to humble her pride. come here, fly; here's a bonbon for you. they say you are going about doing good without any more intention of it than the goose that saved rome." "that reminds me to inquire," said aunt madge, "if fly's blind girl came that day?" "yes, auntie, and she was so sorry you were gone; but they will be here again to-morrow." "it was too bad to disappoint her," said aunt madge, with such lovely pity in her face that prudy seized one of her hands and kissed it. "i tell you what it is," broke in dotty; "i always thought mrs. pragoff must be queer as soon as i heard she came from poland, where grandma's cropple-crown hen came from; don't you remember, prudy? the one that hatched the duck's eggs. but i didn't know she worshipped things. only i noticed that she didn't buy any black pins when those pitiful little boys ran after us, and said, 'o, lady! please, lady!' i thought that was mean." "miss dotty dimple, come sit on my knee, and let me explain. mrs. pragoff is no heathen. she only loves to dress elegantly, and your auntie and i sometimes think she cares too much about it, and about what other people say. that was what i meant by her 'worshipping saint grundy;' but it was ill-natured of me to criticise her. as for the black pins, she is a remarkably benevolent woman, puss; but she can't buy black pins _all_ the time; you may set that down as a fact. why, fly, what now?" the child had snapped her bonbon, and, instead of candy, had found a red paper riding cap trimmed with gold fringe; with this on her head, she was climbing the drop-light, ã  la monkey. fortunately the gas had been lighted only in the chandelier; but three inches more, and fly's gold tassels would have been on fire. uncle augustus rose in alarm; but horace laughed, believing the little witch could be trusted to keep out of fire and water. after dinner, as they were returning to the parlor, uncle augustus said to his wife,-"between us, margery, i don't believe you'd dare invite that little will-o'-the-wisp here again without her mother." "never," returned auntie, laughing,- "'till a' the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi' the sun.'" they all sat chatting around the parlor fire,--uncle augustus always would have an open fire,--when dotty slipped out unobserved, and went round the house hunting for the lost rings. she went first to auntie's chamber, and looked in the blue pocket; but it was empty. the wardrobe and closet had been restored to perfect order, and the jewel cabinet was not to be seen. then she went slowly along to the housekeeper's room, and knocked, with her heart in her mouth. "how do you do, mrs. fixfax? isn't it nice to get that old stove out? i thought you'd let me come in and look to see if i've--i've left anything." "certainly, dear. what have you lost?" mrs. fixfax went on with her reading, and did not seem to hear dotty's muttered answer about "running round so when fly was sick. didn't know but she'd put--wasn't sure.--guessed not." "why, you see," said dotty, to herself, as she left the room with downcast eyes, "it's no use to hunt there. cupboard's gone, stove's gone. nothing in the bathroom but soap and towels. i believe auntie's cat has swallowed those rings." she went back to mrs. allen's room, turned the gas higher, and looked mournfully at herself in the glass. "shall i tell her the truth, that they're gone, and i lost them? would my dear aunt madge go and take all father's money away? mother says we must do what is right, and god will take care of the rest." just then fly entered, followed by mrs. allen. "you here, dotty? i see my chamber is in excellent order. let me look at the drawers. what? my jewel cabinet? didn't i lock that in the safe? all right, no doubt, but i'll examine it." she wheeled up a little easy-chair, sat down, and poured the jewels into her lap. what were dotty's feelings as she stood there looking on? the gas-light seemed to turn the glittering diamonds into points of flame; but dotty could not help gazing. why, what was that? did her eyes deceive her? that ring with glass raspberry seeds! and, o, was it possible? the one like a drop of blood with ice frozen over it! both there. she learned afterwards that mrs. fixfax had found the rings in the bottom of the ivory bathing-tub, where fly had had her "turkey wash." hark! auntie was counting: "one, two, three, four. all safe. not that i supposed any one would meddle with my cabinet, of course." "auntie," burst forth dotty, her face tingling with shame, "_i_ did. i wore two of those rings, and lost 'em off my thumbs. i don't see how they ever came back in that cabinet, for the only thing i know certain true is, i never put 'em there. o, auntie, if i had't found 'em, i was 'most afraid to tell you about it, because my father's so poor." "child, child, you wouldn't have deceived me? i could bear anything better than that. and, dotty, i don't believe it of you. you would have told the truth." "yes, auntie, i do guess i should. it's better to eat fried pork than to act out a lie." what the truth had to do with eating fried pork, aunt madge could not imagine; but she assured dotty she fully believed her when she promised not to meddle in future; and the child bounded down stairs with a heart like a bubble. fly had come up to go to bed. "i've found sumpin," cried she, peeping into a basket behind the door. "it's got eyes, and i know it's a doggie." "you little rogue! i didn't mean you should see that dog to-night." "o, it's no matter 'bout me. if _dotty'd_ seen it, she'd been _'spectin'_ it!" the quick-witted child knew just as well then as she did next morning, that the dog--a king charles spaniel--was intended for her. mrs. allen was so amused that she could scarcely sing fly's by-low hymn:-- "sleep, little one, like a lamb in the fold. shut from the tempest, safe from the cold; sleep, little one, like a star in the sky, wrapped in a cloud, while the storm-wind sweeps by." it was quite as hard to keep a grave face when fly added to her evening prayer the petition,-"god f'give me speakin' a naughty word _'fore miss perdigoff_." "what naughty word, darling?" "hunkydory," replied fly, with a deep sense of guilt. not that she thought it wrong to use a coarse word, only wrong to use it "'fore miss perdigoff." aunt madge entered into a short explanation of the true nature of right and wrong; but her words were thrown away, for that "curly dog" filled every nook and corner of fly's little mind. chapter xii. "folded eyes." "folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do." it stormed next day; but as "brooks don't mind the weather," maria and her mother appeared again. when aunt madge went down to see them, maria was sitting near the dining-room door, the scarlet spots of excitement coming and going in her cheeks. she could think of nothing but the wonderful, unknown doctor, who would know in one moment whether she could ever see or not. "we hadn't ought to have come in this snow-storm, ma'am," said mrs. brooks; "but poor maria, she couldn't be denied. she said she must come, whether or no. but of course we don't hold you to your promise, ma'am, and i hope you don't think we're that sort of folks." while mrs. brooks was talking, with her nose moving up and down, maria's face was turned towards mrs. allen, her quick ears eager to catch the first sound of her voice. what if the word should be no? but aunt madge was never known to break a child's heart. "who minds a snow-storm?" said she, gayly. "i love it as well as any snow-bird. i am very sorry you were disappointed the other day. i'll have my wraps on in two minutes." the children watched from the bay-window as john came round with the carriage, and the three ladies got in. "she's a rare one," remarked horace, with a sweep of his thumb. "who? maria?" "no, dot; the one in front; the handsomest woman in the city of new york. tell you what, 'tisn't everybody would go round and look up the poor the way she does; and she rich as mud, too." "why, horace, that's the very reason she ought to do it. what would be the use of her being rich if she didn't?" "poh!" said horace, with a look of unspeakable wisdom. "much as you know, prue. rich people are the stingiest in the world. the fact is, the more you have, the more you don't give away." "o, what a story!" said dotty. "the more i have, the more i do--i mean i _shall_, if i ever get my meeting-house full." horace laughed heartily. "what'd i say now, horace clifford?" "i was only thinking, dot, that's what's the matter with everybody; they're waiting to get their meeting-houses full." dotty did not understand the remark, but thought it safe to pout. "i can't help thinking about that poor maria," said prudy. "do you suppose, horace, the doctor can help her?" "yes, i presume he can. it will probably take him about five minutes," replied master horace, as decidedly as if he had studied medicine all his days. "but do you suppose he'll do it for nothing? not if he knows it. he'll see the carriage, and find out auntie has money; and then won't he make her pay over? just the way with 'em, prue. he's one of these doctors that's rolling in gold." "rollin' in gold," repeated fly, thinking how hard that must be for him, and how it would hurt. but horace was quite mistaken. the doctor did not say one word about money. he asked mrs. brooks to tell him just how and when maria had begun to grow blind. and though she made a tedious story of it, he listened patiently till she said,-"now, doctor, i am poor, and we've been unfortunate, and i don't know as i shall be able to pay you, and i--" "no matter for that, my good woman. i shan't charge you one penny. don't take up my time talking about money. it's my business to talk about eyes. lead the child to the window." the scarlet spots in maria's cheeks faded, leaving her very pale. she held her breath. would the doctor ever stop pulling open her eyelids? it was not half a minute, though. then he spoke:-"madam, are you willing to do exactly as i say? can you both be patient? if so, i have hope of this child." maria swayed forward at these words, and mrs. allen caught her in her arms. mrs. brooks ran around in a maze, crying, "we've killed her! we've killed her!" and wildly took up a case of instruments, to do, she knew not what; but the doctor stopped her, and dashed a little water in maria's face. when the dear little girl came out of her swoon, she was murmuring to herself,-"i thought god would be willing! i thought god would be willing!" she did not know any one heard her. mrs. brooks rushed up to her. "you are the best man alive, maria," said she. then she turned to the doctor, calling him "my dear little girl," and might have kissed him if he had not laughed. "why, i beg your pardon, sir," cried she, blushing. "i don't believe i know what i am about." "i don't believe you do, either, so i'll give my message to this other lady. i want the little girl to come again to-morrow without fail. it is well i saw her so soon. a few weeks longer, and she could not have been helped." "you don't say so, doctor! and i never thought of coming. i shouldn't have stirred a step if it hadn't been for this good, kind mrs. allen. o, what an amazing world this is!" "and you know, mrs. brooks," returned aunt madge, "i should never have heard of you if my baby niece hadn't run away. as you say, it is an amazing world!" "and there's one above who rules it," said the doctor, as he bowed them out. "yes, there's one above who rules it," thought happy maria, riding home in the carriage. "if i've asked him once, i've asked him five thousand times, and somehow i knew he'd attend to it after a while." "o, what did the doctor say to her? what did he do?" cried the children, the moment their aunt appeared in the parlor. "he says he can cure her if she will only be patient." prudy screamed for joy. "o, dear! why didn't he cure her right off?" cried dotty. "we s'posed she was seeing like everything." "why, child, do you expect things are going to be done by steam?" said horace, forgetting he had calculated it would take about five minutes. "well, if he didn't had no steam, he could 'a' tookened the sidders, and picked 'em open," sniffed fly, who had great contempt for slow people. "ah, little hopelover," laughed auntie, "you're like us grown folks all the world over, scolding about what you don't understand." * * * * * a few more days were spent in uninterrupted happiness. fly declared "santa claus _is_ a darlin'," when she received the king charles spaniel, which, by the way, had not been purchased without the full consent of horace, who was even willing, for his little sister's sake, to take him home in the cars. the youth, in his turn, was made happy by the gift of a silver-mounted rifle; while prudy rejoiced in a rosewood writing desk, and dotty in a gold pen. "all's well that ends well." uncle augustus was at home, and that in itself was as good as most fairy stories. fly had the kindness to "stay found" for the rest of the visit, and did not even take another cold. dotty was unmixed sweetness. maria came every day with such a beaming face that it was delightful to see her. mrs. pragoff asked for all their photographs, and gave the parlins some polish mittens to carry home to their mother. "i s'pose you know," said dotty, privately to prudy, "there's not another girl at my school been to new york, and treated with such attention; but o, i tell you, i shan't be proud. i shall always love tate penny just the same." when the day came to separate, it went hard with them all. "just as we got to having a good time," said dotty, her face in a hard knot. "but we shall all meet next summer," said prudy, hopefully. "i don't want to wait," moaned fly, going into her pocket-hangfiss--all but her back hair and the rest of her body. i have a great mind to let her stay there till we come to the next book, which is, aunt madge's story, told by herself. [illustration: sophie may's "little-folks" books.] "the authoress of the little prudy stories would be elected aunty-laureate if the children had an opportunity, for the wonderful books she writes for their amusement. she is the dickens of the nursery, and we do not hesitate to say develops the rarest sort of genius in the specialty of depicting smart little children."--_hartford post_. lee and shepard, publishers, boston. sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: sophie may] "the children will not be left without healthful entertainment and kindly instruction so long as sophie may (miss rebecca s. clarke) lives and wields her graceful pen in their behalf. miss clarke has made a close and loving study of childhood, and she is almost idolized by the crowd of 'nephews and nieces' who claim her as aunt. nothing to us can ever be quite so delightfully charming as were the 'dotty dimple' and the 'little prudy' books to our youthful imagination, but we have no doubt the little folks of to-day will find the story of 'flaxie frizzle' and her young friends just as fascinating. there is a sprightliness about all of miss clarke's books that attracts the young, and their purity, their absolute _cleanliness_, renders them invaluable in the eyes of parents and all who are interested in the welfare, of children."--_morning star_. "genius comes in with 'little prudy.' compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature; she alone is the real thing. all the quaintness of children, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite uncommon drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the naturalness of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its progress, all these united for dear little prudy to embody them."--_north american review_. sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: little prudy stories by sophie may illustrated six volumes] _illustrated, comprising:_-little prudy. little prudy's sister susie. little prudy's captain horace. little prudy's cousin grace. little prudy's story book. little prudy's dotty dimple. * * * * * in neat box. price 75 cents per volume. sophie may's "little-folks" books. little prudy. "i have been wanting to say a word about a book for children, perfect of its kind--i mean little prudy. it seems to me the greatest book of the season for children. the authoress has a genius for story-telling. prudy's letter to mr. 'gustus somebody must be genuine; if an invention, it shows a genius akin to that of the great masters. it is a positive kindness to the little ones to remind their parents that there is such a book as little prudy."--_springfield republican_. * * * * * little prudy's sister susie. "every little girl and boy who has made the acquaintance of that funny 'little prudy' will be eager to read this book, in which she figures quite as largely as her bigger sister, though the joys and troubles of poor susie make a very interesting story."--_portland transcript_. "certainly one of the most cunning, natural, and witty little books we ever read."--_hartford press_. * * * * * little prudy's captain horace. "these are such as none but sophie may can write, and we know not where to look for two more choice and beautiful volumes--susie for girls and horace for boys. they are not only amusing and wonderfully entertaining, but teach most effective lessons of patience, kindness, and truthfulness. our readers will find a good deal in them about prudy, for so many things are always happening to her that the author finds it impossible to keep her out." sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: "there were a few articles to be ironed for the bride; and prudy had a mind to try the jewish flatirons; so, with barbara's leave, she smoothed out some handkerchiefs on a chair."] specimen of "little prudy" cuts. sophie may's "little-folks" books. little prudy's story book. "this story book is a great favorite with the little folks, for it contains just such stories as they like to hear their aunt, and older sister tell; and learn them by heart and tell them over to one another as they set out the best infant tea-set, or piece a baby-quilt, or dress dolls, or roll marbles. a book to put on the book-shelf in the play-room where susie and prudy, captain horace, cousin grace, and all the rest of the 'little prudy' folks are kept."--_vermont record_. * * * * * little prudy's cousin grace. "an exquisite picture of little-girl life at school and at home, and gives an entertaining account of a secret society which originated in the fertile brain of grace, passed some comical resolutions at first, but was finally converted into a soldier's aid society. full of life, and fire, and good advice; the latter sugar-coated, of course, to suit the taste of little folks."--_press_. * * * * * little prudy's dotty dimple. "dotty dimple is the plague of prudy's life, and yet she loves her dearly. both are rare articles in juvenile literature, as real as eva and topsy of 'uncle tom' fame. witty and wise, full of sport and study, sometimes mixing the two in a confusing way, they run bubbling through many volumes, and make everybody wish they could never grow up or change, they are so bright and cute." sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: little prudy's captain horace.] "you wide-awake little boys, who make whistles of willow, and go fishing and training,--horace is very much like you, i suppose. he is by no means perfect, but he is brave and kind, and scorns a lie, i hope you and he will shake hands and be friends." * * * * * specimen of illustrations to prudy books. sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: dotty dimple stories dotty at play.] _six volumes. illustrated. comprising:_-dotty dimple at her grandmother's. dotty dimple out west. dotty dimple at home. dotty dimple at play. dotty dimple at school. dotty dimple's flyaway. * * * * * in a neat box. price 75 cents per volume. sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: dotty going west] "'please stop,' said dotty faintly, and the boy came to her, elbowing. 'i want some of that pop-corn so much! i could buy it if you'd hold this baby till i put my hand in my pocket.' the youth laughed, but for the sake of 'making a trade' set down his basket and took the '_enfant terrible_.' there was an instant attack upon his hair, which was so long and straggling as to prove an easy prey to the enemy." * * * * * specimen of "dotty dimple" illustrations sophie may's "little-folks" books. dotty dimple at her grandmother's. "sophie may's excellent pen has perhaps never written anything more pleasing to children, especially little girls, than dotty dimple. if the little reader who follows dotty through these dozen chapters,--from her visit to her grandmother to the swing under the trees,--he or she will say: 'it has been a treat to read about dotty dimple, she's so cunning.'"--_herald of gospel liberty_. * * * * * dotty dimple out west. "dotty's trip was jolly. in the cars where she saw so many people that she thought there'd be nobody left in any of the houses, she offers to hold somebody's baby, and when it begins to cry she stuffs pop-corn into its month, nearly choking it to death. afterwards, in pulling a man's hair, she is horrified at seeing his wig come off, and gasps out 'o dear, dear, dear, i didn't know your hair was so tender.' altogether, she is the cunningist chick that ever lived."--_oxford press_. * * * * * dotty dimple at home. "this little book is as full of spice as any of its predecessors and well sustains the author's reputation as the very cleverest of all write of this species of children's books. were there any doubt on this point, the matter might be easily tested by inquiry in half the households in the city, where the book is being revelled over."--_boston home journal_. sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: "as dotty seized two locks of the major's hair, one in each hand, and pulled them both as if she meant to draw them out by the roots, out they came! yes, entirely out; and more than that, all the rest of his hair came too. his head was left as smooth as an apple. you see how it was. he wore a wig, and just for play had slyly unfastened it, and allowed miss dotty to pull it off. the perfect despair of her little face amused him vastly, but he did not smile; he looked very severe. 'see what you have done,' said he. major laydie's entire head of hair lay at her feet, as brown and wavy as ever it was. dotty looked at it with horror. the idea of scalping a man."] * * * * * specimen of "dotty dimple" illustrations. sophie may's "little-folks" books. dotty dimple at school. "miss dotty is a peremptory little body, with a great deal of human nature in her, who wins our hearts by her comic speeches and funny ways. she complains of being _bewitched_ by people, and the wind 'blows her out,' and she thinks if her comrade dies in the snow-storm she will be 'dreadfully 'shamed of it,' and has rather a lively time, with all her trials in going to school."--_new york citizen_. * * * * * dotty dimple at play. "'charming dotty dimple' as she is so universally styled, has become decidedly a favorite with young and old, who are alike pleased with her funny sayings and doings.--dotty at play will be found very attractive, and the children, especially the girls, will be delighted with her adventures."--_boston express_. * * * * * dotty dimple's flyaway. "this is the final volume of the dotty dimple series. it relates how little flyaway provisioned herself with cookies and spectacles and got lost on a little hill while seeking to mount to heaven, and what a precious alarm there was until she was found, and the subsequent joy at her recovery, with lots of quaint speeches and funny incidents."--_north american_. "a little red riding-hoodish story, sprightly and takingly told."--_american farmer_. sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: little prudy's flyaway series] _six volumes. illustrated. comprising:_-little folks astray. prudy keeping house. aunt madge's story. little grandmother. little grandfather. miss thistledown. price 75 cents per volume. sophie may's "little-folks" books. little folks astray. "this is a book for the little ones of the nursery or play-room. it introduces all the old favorites of the prudy and dotty books with new characters and funny incidents. it is a charming book, wholesome and sweet in every respect, and cannot fail to interest children under twelve years of age."--_christian register_. * * * * * prudy keeping house. "how she kept it, why she kept it, and what a good time she had playing cook, and washer-woman, and ironer, is told as only sophie may can tell stories. all the funny sayings and doings of the queerest and cunningest little women ever tucked away in the covers of a book will please little folks and grown people alike."--_press_. * * * * * aunt madge's story. "tells of a little waif of a girl, who gets into every conceivable kind of scrape and out again with lightning rapidity, through the whole pretty little book. how she nearly drowns her bosom friend, and afterwards saves her by a very remarkable display of little-girl courage. how she gets left by a train of cars, and loses her kitten and finds it again, and is presented with a baby sister 'come down from heaven,' with lots of smart and funny sayings."--_boston traveller._ sophie may's "little-folks" books. [illustration: prudy keeping house.] "'oh, what a fascinating creature,' said the man in the moon, making an eye-glass with his thumb and fore-finger, and gazing at the lady boarder. 'are you a widow, mem?'" * * * * * specimen cut to "little prudy's flyaway series." sophie may's "little-folks" books. little grandmother. "grandmother parlen when a little girl is the subject. of course that was ever so long ago, when there were no lucifer matches, and steel and tinder were used to light fires; when soda and saleratus had never been heard of, but people made their pearl ash by soaking burnt crackers in water; when the dressmaker and the tailor and the shoemaker went from house to house twice a year to make the dresses and coats of the family."--_transcript_. * * * * * little grandfather. "the story of grandfather parlen's little boy life, of the days of knee breeches and cocked hats, full of odd incidents, queer and quaint sayings, and the customs of 'ye olden times.' these stories of sophie may's are so charmingly written that older folks may well amuse themselves by reading them. the same warm sympathy with childhood, the earnest naturalness, the novel charm of the preceding volumes will be found in this."--_christian messenger_. * * * * * miss thistledown. "one of the queerest of the prudy family. read the chapter heads and you will see just how much fun there must be in it: 'fly's heart,' 'taking a nap,' 'going to the fair,' 'the dimple dot,' 'the hole in the home,' 'the little bachelor,' 'fly's bluebeard,' 'playing mamma,' 'butter spots,' 'polly's secret,' 'the snow man,' 'the owl and the humming-bird,' 'talks of hunting deer,' and 'the parlen patchwork.'" [illustration: book cover] [illustration: unexpected results of jimmy's efforts to trap pigs. [_page_ 182]] the adventures of jimmy brown _written by himself_ and edited by w. l. alden illustrated [illustration] new york and london harper & brothers publishers 1902 copyright, 1885, by _harper & brothers_. _all rights reserved._ contents page mr. martin's game 5 mr. martin's scalp 10 a private circus 14 burglars 20 mr. martin's eye 24 playing circus 28 mr. martin's leg 35 our concert 40 our baby 46 our snow man 50 art 57 an awful scene 63 screw-heads 67 my monkey 71 the end of my monkey 77 the old, old story 83 bee-hunting 89 prompt obedience 93 our ice-cream 97 my pig 103 going to be a pirate 107 rats and mice 111 hunting the rhinoceros 117 down cellar 124 our baby again 131 studying wasps 135 a terrible mistake 139 our bull-fight 143 our balloon 150 our new walk 156 a steam chair 162 animals 168 a pleasing experiment 174 traps 180 an accident 184 a pillow fight 190 sue's wedding 196 our new dog 203 lightning 209 my camera 215 freckles 222 santa claus 228 illustrations. page _unexpected results of jimmy's efforts to trap pigs_ frontispiece _"oh, my!"_ 17 _the trapeze performance_ 31 _there was the awfullest fight you ever saw_ 43 _we built the biggest snow man i ever heard of_ 53 _the moment they saw the baby they said the most dreadful things_ 59 _screw-heads_ 68, 69 _my monkey_ 72-76 _the end of my monkey_ 78-82 _wasn't there a circus in that dining-room!_ 85 _sue's ice-cream party_ 99 _sue had opened the box_ 113 _then he fell into the hot-bed, and broke all the glass_ 119 _they thought they were both burglars_ 127 _he went twenty feet right up into the air_ 147 _presently it went slowly up_ 153 _prying the boys out_ 159 _it had shut up like a jack-knife_ 165 _"we've been playing we were pigs, ma"_ 171 _he lit right on the man's head_ 177 _he pinched just as hard as he could pinch_ 187 _i never was so frightened in my life_ 193 _she gave an awful shriek and fainted away_ 199 _how that dog did pull!_ 205 _we hurried into the room_ 211 _i did get a beautiful picture_ 219 _mother and sue made a dreadful fuss_ 225 _they got harry out all safe_ 233 the adventures of jimmy brown. mr. martin's game. what if he is a great deal older than i am! that doesn't give him any right to rumple my hair, does it? i'm willing to respect old age, of course, but i want my hair respected too. but rumpling hair isn't enough for mr. martin; he must call me "bub," and "sonny." i might stand "sonny," but i won't stand being called "bub" by any living man--not if i can help it. i've told him three or four times "my name isn't 'bub,' mr. martin. my name's jim, or jimmy," but he would just grin in an exhausperating kind of way, and keep on calling me "bub." my sister sue doesn't like him any better than i do. he comes to see her about twice a week, and i've heard her say, "goodness me there's that tiresome old bachelor again." but she treats him just as polite as she does anybody; and when he brings her candy, she says, "oh mr. martin you are _too_ good." there's a great deal of make-believe about girls, i think. now that i've mentioned candy, i will say that he might pass it around, but he never thinks of such a thing. mr. travers, who is the best of all sue's young men, always brings candy with him, and gives me a lot. then he generally gives me a quarter to go to the post-office for him, because he forgot to go, and expects something very important. it takes an hour to go to the post-office and back, but i'd do anything for such a nice man. one night--it was mr. travers's regular night--mr. martin came, and wasn't sue mad! she knew mr. travers would come in about half an hour, and she always made it a rule to keep her young men separate. she sent down word that she was busy, and would be down-stairs after a while. would mr. martin please sit down and wait. so he sat down on the front piazza and waited. i was sitting on the grass, practising mumble-te-peg a little, and by-and-by mr. martin says, "well, bub, what are you doing?" "playing a game," says i. "want to learn it?" "well, i don't care if i do," says he. so he came out and sat on the grass, and i showed him how to play. just then mr. travers arrived, and sue came down, and was awfully glad to see both her friends. "but what in the world are you doing?" she says to mr. martin. when she heard that he was learning the game, she said, "how interesting do play one game." mr. martin finally said he would. so we played a game, and i let him beat me very easy. he laughed lit to kill himself when i drew the peg, and said it was the best game he ever played. "is there any game you play any better than this, sonny?" said he, in his most irragravating style. "let's have another game," said i. "only you must promise to draw the peg fair, if i beat you." "all right," said he. "i'll draw the peg if you beat me, bub." o, he felt so sure he was a first-class player. i don't like a conceited man, no matter if he is only a boy. you can just imagine how quick i beat him. why, i went right through to "both ears" without stopping, and the first time i threw the knife over my head it stuck in the ground. i cut a beautiful peg out of hard wood--one of those sharp, slender pegs that will go through anything but a stone. i drove it in clear out of sight, and mr. martin, says he, "why, sonny, nobody couldn't possibly draw that peg." "i've drawn worse pegs than that," said i. "you've got to clear away the earth with your chin and front teeth, and then you can draw it." "that is nonsense," said mr. martin, growing red in the face. "this is a fair and square game," says i, "and you gave your word to draw the peg if i beat you." "i do hope mr. martin will play fair," said sue. "it would be too bad to cheat a little boy." so mr. martin got down and tried it, but he didn't like it one bit. "see here, jimmy," said he, "i'll give you half a dollar, and we'll consider the peg drawn." "that is bribery and corruption," said i. "mr. martin, i can't be bribed, and didn't think you'd try to hire me to let you break your promise." when he saw i wouldn't let up on him, he got down again and went to work. it was the best fun i ever knew. i just rolled on the ground and laughed till i cried. sue and mr. travers didn't roll, but they laughed till sue got up and ran into the house, where i could hear her screaming on the front-parlor sofa, and mother crying out, "my darling child where does it hurt you won't you have the doctor jane do bring the camphor." mr. martin gnawed away at the earth, and used swear-words to himself, and was perfectly raging. after a while he got the peg, and then he got up with his face about the color of a flower-pot, and put on his hat and went out of the front gate rubbing his face with his handkerchief, and never so much as saying good-night. he didn't come near the house again for two weeks. mr. travers gave me a half-dollar to go to the post-office to make up for the one i had refused, and told me that i had displayed roaming virtue, though i don't know exactly what he meant. he looked over this story, and corrected the spelling for me, only it is to be a secret that he helped me. i'd do almost anything for him, and i'm going to ask sue to marry him just to please me. mr. martin's scalp. after that game of mumble-te-peg that me and mr. martin played, he did not come to our house for two weeks. mr. travers said perhaps the earth he had to gnaw while he was drawing the peg had struck to his insides and made him sick, but i knew it couldn't be that. i've drawn pegs that were drove into every kind of earth, and it never hurt me. earth is healthy, unless it is lime; and don't you ever let anybody drive a peg into lime. if you were to swallow the least bit of lime, and then drink some water, it would burn a hole through you just as quick as anything. there was once a boy who found some lime in the closet, and thought it was sugar, and of course he didn't like the taste of it. so he drank some water to take the taste out of his mouth, and pretty soon his mother said, "i smell something burning goodness gracious the house is on fire." but the boy he gave a dreadful scream, and said, "ma, it's me!" and the smoke curled up out of his pockets and around his neck, and he burned up and died. i know this is true, because tom mcginnis went to school with him, and told me about it. mr. martin came to see susan last night for the first time since we had our game; and i wish he had never come back, for he got me into an awful scrape. this was the way it happened. i was playing indian in the yard. i had a wooden tomahawk and a wooden scalping-knife and a bownarrow. i was dressed up in father's old coat turned inside out, and had six chicken feathers in my hair. i was playing i was green thunder, the delaware chief, and was hunting for pale-faces in the yard. it was just after supper, and i was having a real nice time, when mr. travers came, and he said, "jimmy, what are you up to now?" so i told him i was green thunder, and was on the war-path. said he, "jimmy, i think i saw mr. martin on his way here. do you think you would mind scalping him?" i said i wouldn't scalp him for nothing, for that would be cruelty; but if mr. travers was sure that mr. martin was the enemy of the red man, then green thunder's heart would ache for revenge, and i would scalp him with pleasure. mr. travers said that mr. martin was a notorious enemy and oppressor of the indians, and he gave me ten cents, and said that as soon as mr. martin should come and be sitting comfortably on the piazza, i was to give the warwhoop and scalp him. well, in a few minutes mr. martin came, and he and mr. travers and susan sat on the piazza, and talked as if they were all so pleased to see each other, which was the highest-pocracy in the world. after a while mr. martin saw me, and said, "how silly boys are! that boy makes believe he's an indian, and he knows he's only a little nuisance." now this made me mad, and i thought i would give him a good scare, just to teach him not to call names if a fellow does beat him in a fair game. so i began to steal softly up the piazza steps, and to get around behind him. when i had got about six feet from him i gave a warwhoop, and jumped at him. i caught hold of his scalp-lock with one hand, and drew my wooden scalping-knife around his head with the other. i never got such a fright in my whole life. the knife was that dull that it wouldn't have cut butter; but, true as i sit here, mr. martin's whole scalp came right off in my hand. i thought i had killed him, and i dropped his scalp, and said, "for mercy's sake! i didn't go to do it, and i'm awfully sorry." but he just caught up his scalp, stuffed it in his pocket, and jammed his hat on his head, and walked off, saying to susan, "i didn't come here to be insulted by a little wretch that deserves the gallows." mr. travers and susan never said a word until he had gone, and then they laughed until the noise brought father out to ask what was the matter. when he heard what had happened, instead of laughing, he looked very angry, said that "mr. martin was a worthy man. my son, you may come up-stairs with me." if you've ever been a boy, you know what happened up-stairs, and i needn't say any more on a very painful subject. i didn't mind it so much, for i thought mr. martin would die, and then i would be hung, and put in jail; but before she went to bed susan came and whispered through the door that it was all right; that mr. martin was made that way, so he could be taken apart easy, and that i hadn't hurt him. i shall have to stay in my room all day to-day, and eat bread and water; and what i say is that if men are made with scalps that may come off any minute if a boy just touches them, it isn't fair to blame the boy. a private circus. there's going to be a circus here, and i'm going to it; that is, if father will let me. some people think it's wrong to go to a circus, but i don't. mr. travers says that the mind of man and boy requires circuses in moderation, and that the wicked boys in sunday-school books who steal their employers' money to buy circus tickets wouldn't steal it if their employers, or their fathers or uncles, would give them circus tickets once in a while. i'm sure i wouldn't want to go to a circus every night in the week. all i should want would be to go two or three evenings, and wednesday and saturday afternoons. there was once a boy who was awfully fond of going to the circus, and his employer, who was a very good man, said he'd cure him. so he said to the boy, "thomas, my son, i'm going to hire you to go to the circus every night. i'll pay you three dollars a week, and give you your board and lodging, if you'll go every night except sunday; but if you don't go, then you won't get any board and lodging or any money." and the boy said, "oh, you can just bet i'll go!" and he thought everything was lovely; but after two weeks he got so sick of the circus that he would have given anything to be let to stay away. finally he got so wretched that he deceived his good employer, and stole money from him to buy school-books with, and ran away and went to school. the older he grew the more he looked back with horror upon that awful period when he went to the circus every night. mr. travers says it finally had such an effect upon him that he worked hard all day and read books all night just to keep it out of his mind. the result was that before he knew it he became a very learned and a very rich man. of course it was very wrong for the boy to steal money to stay away from the circus with, but the story teaches us that if we go to the circus too much, we shall get tired of it, which is a very solemn thing. we had a private circus at our house last night--at least that's what father called it, and he seemed to enjoy it. it happened in this way. i went into the back parlor one evening, because i wanted to see mr. travers. he and sue always sit there. it was growing quite dark when i went in, and going towards the sofa, i happened to walk against a rocking-chair that was rocking all by itself, which, come to think of it, was an awfully curious thing, and i'm going to ask somebody about it. i didn't mind walking into the chair, for it didn't hurt me much, only i knocked it over, and it hit sue, and she said, "oh my get me something quick!" and then fainted away. mr. travers was dreadfully frightened, and said, "run, jimmy, and get the cologne, or the bay-rum, or something." so i ran up to sue's room, and felt round in the dark for her bottle of cologne that she always keeps on her bureau. i found a bottle after a minute or two, and ran down and gave it to mr. travers, and he bathed sue's face as well as he could in the dark, and she came to and said, "goodness gracious do you want to put my eyes out?" [illustration: "oh, my!"] just then the front-door bell rang, and mr. bradford (our new minister) and his wife and three daughters and his son came in. sue jumped up and ran into the front parlor to light the gas, and mr. travers came to help her. they just got it lit when the visitors came in, and father and mother came down-stairs to meet them. mr. bradford looked as if he had seen a ghost, and his wife and daughters said, "oh my!" and father said, "what on earth!" and mother just burst out laughing, and said, "susan, you and mr. travers seem to have had an accident with the ink-stand." you never saw such a sight as those poor young people were. i had made a mistake, and brought down a bottle of liquid blacking. mr. travers had put it all over sue's face, so that she was jet black, all but a little of one cheek and the end of her nose; and then he had rubbed his hands on his own face until he was like an ethiopian leopard, only he could change his spots if he used soap enough. you couldn't have any idea how angry sue was with me--just as if it was my fault, when all i did was to go up-stairs for her, and get a bottle to bring her to with; and it would have been all right if she hadn't left the blacking-bottle on her bureau; and i don't call that tidy, if she is a girl. mr. travers wasn't a bit angry; but he came up to my room and washed his face, and laughed all the time. and sue got awfully angry with him, and said she would never speak to him again after disgracing her in that heartless way. so he went home, and i could hear him laughing all the way down the street, and mr. bradford and his folks thought that he and sue had been having a minstrel show, and mother thinks they'll never come to the house again. as for father, he was almost as much amused as mr. travers, and he said it served sue right, and he wasn't going to punish the boy to please her. i'm going to try to have another circus some day, though this one was all an accident, and of course i was dreadfully sorry about it. burglars. some people are afraid of burglars. girls are awfully afraid of them. when they think there's a burglar in the house, they pull the clothes over their heads and scream "murder father jimmy there's a man in the house call the police fire!" just as if that would do any good. what you ought to do if there is a burglar is to get up and shoot him with a double-barrelled gun and then tie him and send the servant out to tell the police that if they will call after breakfast you will have something ready for them that will please them. i shouldn't be a bit frightened if i woke up and found a strange man in my room. i should just pretend that i was asleep and keep watching him and when he went to climb out of the window and got half way out i'd jump up and shut the window down on him and tie his legs. but you can't expect girls to have any courage, or to know what to do when anything happens. we had been talking about burglars one day last week just before i went to bed, and i thought i would put my bownarrow where it would be handy if a robber did come. it is a nice strong bow, and i had about thirty arrows with sharp points in the end about half an inch long, that i made out of some big black pins that susan had in her pin-cushion. my room is in the third story, just over sue's room, and the window comes right down on the floor, so that you can lie on the floor and put your head out. i couldn't go to sleep that night very well, though i ate about a quart of chestnuts after i went to bed and i've heard mother say that if you eat a little something delicate late at night it will make you go to sleep. a long while after everybody had gone to bed i heard two men talking in a low tone under the window, and i jumped up to see what was the matter. two dreadful ruffians were standing under sue's window, and talking so low that it was a wonder i could hear anything. one of them had something that looked like a tremendous big squash, with a long neck, and the other had something that looked like a short crowbar. it didn't take me long to understand what they were going to do. the man with the crowbar was intending to dig a hole in the foundation of the house and then the other man would put the big squash which was full of dynamighty in the hole and light a slow-match and run away and blow the house to pieces. so i thought the best thing would be to shoot them before they could do their dreadful work. i got my bownarrow and laid down on the floor and took a good aim at one of the burglars. i hit him in the leg, and he said, "ow! ow! i've run a thorn mornamile into my leg." then i gave the other fellow an arrow, and he said, "my goodness this place is full of thorns, there's one in my leg too." then they moved back a little and i began to shoot as fast as ever i could. i hit them every time, and they were frightened to death. the fellow with the thing like a squash dropped it on the ground and the other fellow jumped on it just as i hit him in the cheek and smashed it all to pieces. you can just believe that they did not stay in our yard very long. they started for the front gate on a run, yelling "ow! ow!" and i am sorry to say using the worst kind of swear-words. the noise woke up father and he lit the gas and i saw the two wretches in the street picking the arrows out of each other but they ran off as soon as they saw the light. father says that they were not burglars at all, but were only two idiots that had come to serenade sue; but when i asked him what serenading was he said it was far worse than burglary, so i know the men were the worst kind of robbers. i found a broken guitar in the yard the next morning, and there wasn't anything in it that would explode, but it would have been very easy for the robbers to have filled it with something that would have blown the house to atoms. i suppose they preferred to put it in a guitar so that if they met anybody nobody would suspect anything. neither mother nor sue showed any gratitude to me for saving their lives, though father did say that for once that boy had showed a little sense. when mr. travers came that evening and i told him about it he said, "jimmy! there's such a thing as being just a little too smart." i don't know what he meant, but i suppose he was a little cross, for he had hurt himself some way--he wouldn't tell me how--and had court-plaster on his cheek and on his hands and walked as if his legs were stiff. still, if a man doesn't feel well he needn't be rude. mr. martin's eye. i've made up my mind to one thing, and that is, i'll never have anything to do with mr. martin again. he ought to be ashamed of himself, going around and getting boys into scrapes, just because he's put together so miserably. sue says she believes it's mucilage, and i think she's right. if he couldn't afford to get himself made like other people, why don't he stay at home? his father and mother must have been awfully ashamed of him. why, he's liable to fall apart at any time, mr. travers says, and some of these days he'll have to be swept up off the floor and carried home in three or four baskets. there was a ghost one time who used to go around, up-stairs and down-stairs, in an old castle, carrying his head in his hand, and stopping in front of everybody he met, but never saying a word. this frightened all the people dreadfully, and they couldn't get a servant to stay in the house unless she had the policeman to sit up in the kitchen with her all night. one day a young doctor came to stay at the castle, and said he didn't believe in ghosts, and that nobody ever saw a ghost, unless they had been making beasts of themselves with mince-pie and wedding-cake. so the old lord of the castle he smiled very savage, and said, "you'll believe in ghosts before you've been in this castle twenty-four hours, and don't you forget it." well, that very night the ghost came into the young doctor's room and woke him up. the doctor looked at him, and said, "ah, i perceive: painful case of imputation of the neck. want it cured, old boy?" the ghost nodded; though how he could nod when his head was off i don't know. then the doctor got up and got a thread and needle, and sewed the ghost's head on, and pushed him gently out of the door, and told him never to show himself again. nobody ever saw that ghost again, for the doctor had sewed his head on wrong side first, and he couldn't walk without running into the furniture, and of course he felt too much ashamed to show himself. this doctor was mr. travers's own grandfather, and mr. travers knows the story is true. but i meant to tell you about the last time mr. martin came to our house. it was a week after i had scalped him; but i don't believe he would ever have come if father hadn't gone to see him, and urged him to overlook the rudeness of that unfortunate and thoughtless boy. when he did come, he was as smiling as anything; and he shook hands with me, and said, "never mind, bub, only don't do it again." by-and-by, when mr. martin and sue and mr. travers were sitting on the piazza, and i was playing with my new base-ball in the yard, mr. martin called out, "pitch it over here; give us a catch." so i tossed it over gently, and he pitched it back again, and said why didn't i throw it like a man, and not toss it like a girl. so i just sent him a swift ball--a regular daisy-cutter. i knew he couldn't catch it, but i expected he would dodge. he did try to dodge, but it hit him along-side of one eye, and knocked it out. you may think i am exaggelying, but i'm not. i saw that eye fly up against the side of the house, and then roll down the front steps to the front walk, where it stopped, and winked at me. i turned, and ran out of the gate and down the street as hard as ever i could. i made up my mind that mr. martin was spoiled forever, and that the only thing for me to do was to make straight for the spanish main and be a pirate. i had often thought i would be a pirate, but now there was no help for it; for a boy that had knocked out a gentleman's eye could never be let to live in a christian country. after a while i stopped to rest, and then i remembered that i wanted to take some provisions in a bundle, and a big knife to kill wolves. so i went back as soon as it was dark, and stole round to the back of the house, so i could get in the window and find the carving-knife and some cake. i was just getting in the window, when somebody put their arms around me, and said, "dear little soul! was he almost frightened to death?" it was sue, and i told her that i was going to be a pirate and wanted the carving-knife and some cake and she mustn't tell father and was mr. martin dead yet? so she told me that mr. martin's eye wasn't injured at all, and that he had put it in again, and gone home; and nobody would hurt me, and i needn't be a pirate if i didn't want to be. it's perfectly dreadful for a man to be made like mr. martin, and i'll never come near him again. sue says that he won't come back to the house, and if he does she'll send him away with something--i forget what it was--in his ear. father hasn't heard about the eye yet, but if he does hear about it, there will be a dreadful scene, for he bought a new rattan cane yesterday. there ought to be a law to punish men that sell rattan canes to fathers, unless they haven't any children. playing circus. the circus came through our town three weeks ago, and me and tom mcginnis went to it. we didn't go together, for i went with father, and tom helped the circus men water their horses, and they let him in for nothing. father said that circuses were dreadfully demoralizing, unless they were mixed with wild animals, and that the reason why he took me to this particular circus was that there were elephants in it, and the elephant is a scripture animal, jimmy, and it cannot help but improve your mind to see him. i agreed with father. if my mind had to be improved, i thought going to the circus would be a good way to do it. we had just an elegant time. i rode on the elephant, but it wasn't much fun for they wouldn't let me drive him. the trapeze was better than anything else, though the central african chariot races and the queen of the arena, who rode on one foot, were gorgeous. the trapeze performances were done by the patagonian brothers, and you'd think every minute they were going to break their necks. father said it was a most revolting sight and do sit down and keep still jimmy or i can't see what's going on. i think father had a pretty good time, and improved his mind a good deal, for he was just as nice as he could be, and gave me a whole pint of pea-nuts. mr. travers says that the patagonian brothers live on their trapezes, and never come down to the ground except when a performance is going to begin. they hook their legs around it at night, and sleep hanging with their heads down, just like the bats, and they take their meals and study their lessons sitting on the bar, without anything to lean against. i don't believe it; for how could they get their food brought up to them? and it's ridiculous to suppose that they have to study lessons. it grieves me very much to say so, but i am beginning to think that mr. travers doesn't always tell the truth. what did he mean by telling sue the other night that he loved cats, and that her cat was perfectly beautiful, and then when she went into the other room he slung the cat out of the window, clear over into the asparagus bed, and said get out you brute? we cannot be too careful about always telling the truth, and never doing anything wrong. tom and i talked about the circus all the next day, and we agreed we'd have a circus of our own, and travel all over the country, and make heaps of money. we said we wouldn't let any of the other boys belong to it, but we would do everything ourselves, except the elephants. so we began to practise in mr. mcginnis's barn every afternoon after school. i was the queen of the arena, and dressed up in one of sue's skirts, and won't she be mad when she finds that i cut the bottom off of it!--only i certainly meant to get her a new one with the very first money i made. i wore an old umbrella under the skirt, which made it stick out beautifully, and i know i should have looked splendid standing on mr. mcginnis's old horse, only he was so slippery that i couldn't stand on him without falling off and sticking all the umbrella ribs into me. tom and i were the madagascar brothers, and we were going to do everything that the patagonian brothers did. we practised standing on each other's head hours at a time, and i did it pretty well, only tom he slipped once when he was standing on my head, and sat down on it so hard that i don't much believe that my hair will ever grow any more. the barn floor was most too hard to practise on, so last saturday tom said we'd go into the parlor, where there was a soft carpet, and we'd put some pillows on the floor besides. all tom's folks had gone out, and there wasn't anybody in the house except the girl in the kitchen. so we went into the parlor, and put about a dozen pillows and a feather-bed on the floor. it was elegant fun turning somersaults backward from the top of the table; but i say it ought to be spelled summersets, though sue says the other way is right. we tried balancing things on our feet while we laid on our backs on the floor. tom balanced the musical box for ever so long before it fell; but i don't think it was hurt much, for nothing except two or three little wheels were smashed. and i balanced the water-pitcher, and i shouldn't have broken it if tom hadn't spoken to me at the wrong minute. [illustration: the trapeze performance.] we were getting tired, when i thought how nice it would be to do the trapeze performance on the chandeliers. there was one in the front parlor and one in the back parlor, and i meant to swing on one of them, and let go and catch the other. i swung beautifully on the front parlor chandelier, when, just as i was going to let go of it, down it came with an awful crash, and that parlor was just filled with broken glass, and the gas began to smell dreadfully. as it was about supper-time, and tom's folks were expected home, i thought i would say good-bye to tom, and not practise any more that day. so we shut the parlor doors, and i went home, wondering what would become of tom, and whether i had done altogether right in practising with him in his parlor. there was an awful smell of gas in the house that night, and when mr. mcginnis opened the parlor door he found what was the matter. he found the cat too. she was lying on the floor, just as dead as she could be. i'm going to see mr. mcginnis to-day and tell him i broke the chandelier. i suppose he will tell father, and then i shall wish that everybody had never been born; but i did break that chandelier, though i didn't mean to, and i've got to tell about it. mr. martin's leg. i had a dreadful time after that accident with mr. martin's eye. he wrote a letter to father and said that "the conduct of that atrocious young ruffian was such," and that he hoped he would never have a son like me. as soon as father said, "my son i want to see you up-stairs bring me my new rattan cane," i knew what was going to happen. i will draw some veils over the terrible scene, and will only say that for the next week i did not feel able to hold a pen unless i stood up all the time. last week i got a beautiful dog. father had gone away for a few days and i heard mother say that she wished she had a nice little dog to stay in the house and drive robbers away. the very next day a lovely dog that didn't belong to anybody came into our yard and i made a dog-house for him out of a barrel, and got some beefsteak out of the closet for him, and got a cat for him to chase, and made him comfortable. he is part bull-dog, and his ears and tail are gone and he hasn't but one eye and he's lame in one of his hind-legs and the hair has been scalded off part of him, and he's just lovely. if you saw him after a cat you'd say he was a perfect beauty. mother won't let me bring him into the house, and says she never saw such a horrid brute, but women haven't any taste about dogs anyway. his name is sitting bull, though most of the time when he isn't chasing cats he's lying down. he knows pretty near everything. some dogs know more than folks. mr. travers had a dog once that knew chinese. every time that dog heard a man speak chinese he would lie down and howl and then he would get up and bite the man. you might talk english or french or latin or german to him and he wouldn't pay any attention to it, but just say three words in chinese and he'd take a piece out of you. mr. travers says that once when he was a puppy a chinaman tried to catch him for a stew; so whenever he heard anybody speak chinese he remembered that time and went and bit the man to let him know that he didn't approve of the way chinamen treated puppies. the dog never made a mistake but once. a man came to the house who had lost his pilate and couldn't speak plain, and the dog thought he was speaking chinese and so he had his regular fit and bit the man worse than he had ever bit anybody before. sitting bull don't know chinese, but mr. travers says he's a "specialist in cats," which means that he knows the whole science of cats. the very first night i let him loose he chased a cat up the pear-tree and he sat under that tree and danced around it and howled all night. the neighbors next door threw most all their things at him but they couldn't discourage him. i had to tie him up after breakfast and let the cat get down and run away before i let him loose again, or he'd have barked all summer. the only trouble with him is that he can't see very well and keeps running against things. if he starts to run out of the gate he is just as likely to run head first into the fence, and when he chases a cat round a corner he will sometimes mistake a stick of wood, or the lawn-mower for the cat and try to shake it to death. this was the way he came to get me into trouble with mr. martin. he hadn't been at our house for so long (mr. martin i mean) that we all thought he never would come again. father sometimes said that his friend martin had been driven out of the house because my conduct was such and he expected i would separate him from all his friends. of course i was sorry that father felt bad about it, but if i was his age i would have friends that were made more substantial than mr. martin is. night before last i was out in the back yard with sitting bull looking for a stray cat that sometimes comes around the house after dark and steals the strawberries and takes the apples out of the cellar. at least i suppose it is this particular cat that steals the apples, for the cook says a cat does it and we haven't any private cat of our own. after a while i saw the cat coming along by the side of the fence, looking wicked enough to steal anything and to tell stories about it afterwards. i was sitting on the ground holding sitting bull's head in my lap and telling him that i did wish he'd take to rat-hunting like tom mcginnis's terrier, but no sooner had i seen the cat and whispered to sitting bull that she was in sight than he jumped up and went for her. he chased her along the fence into the front yard where she made a dive under the front piazza. sitting bull came round the corner of the house just flying, and i close after him. it happened that mr. martin was at that identicular moment going up the steps of the piazza, and sitting bull mistaking one of his legs for the cat jumped for it and had it in his teeth before i could say a word. when that dog once gets hold of a thing there is no use in reasoning with him, for he won't listen to anything. mr. martin howled and said, "take him off my gracious the dog's mad" and i said, "come here sir. good dog. leave him alone" but sitting bull hung on to the leg as if he was deaf and mr. martin hung on to the railing of the piazza and made twice as much noise as the dog. i didn't know whether i'd better run for the doctor or the police, but after shaking the leg for about a minute sitting bull gave it an awful pull and pulled it off just at the knee joint. when i saw the dog rushing round the yard with the leg in his mouth i ran into the house and told sue and begged her to cut a hole in the wall and hide me behind the plastering where the police couldn't find me. when she went down to help mr. martin she saw him just going out of the yard on a wheelbarrow with a man wheeling him on a broad grin. if he ever comes to this house again i'm going to run away. it turns out that his leg was made of cork and i suppose the rest of him is either cork or glass. some day he'll drop apart on our piazza then the whole blame will be put on me. our concert. there is one good thing about sue, if she is a girl: she is real charitable, and is all the time getting people to give money to missionaries and things. she collected mornahundred dollars from ever so many people last year, and sent it to a society, and her name was in all the papers as "miss susan brown," the young lady that gave a hundred dollars to a noble cause and may others go and do likewise. about a month ago she began to get up a concert for a noble object. i forget what the object was, for sue didn't make up her mind about it until a day or two before the concert; but whatever it was, it didn't get much money. sue was to sing in the concert, and mr. travers was to sing, and father was to read something, and the sunday-school was to sing, and the brass band was to play lots of things. mr. travers was real good about it, and attended to engaging the brass band, and getting the tickets printed. we've got a first-rate band. you just ought to hear it once. i'm going to join it some day, and play on the drum; that is, if they don't find out about the mistake i made with the music. when mr. travers went to see the leader of the band to settle what music was to be played at the concert he let me go with him. the man was awfully polite, and he showed mr. travers great stacks of music for him to select from. after a while he proposed to go and see a man somewheres who played in the band, and they left me to wait until they came back. i had nothing to do, so i looked at the music. the notes were all made with a pen and ink, and pretty bad they were. i should have been ashamed if i had made them. just to prove that i could have done it better than the man who did do it, i took a pen and ink and tried it. i made beautiful notes, and as a great many of the pieces of music weren't half full of notes, i just filled in the places where there weren't any notes. i don't know how long mr. travers and the leader of the band were gone, but i was so busy that i did not miss them, and when i heard them coming i sat up as quiet as possible, and never said anything about what i had done, because we never should praise ourselves or seem to be proud of our own work. now i solemnly say that i never meant to do any harm. all i meant to do was to improve the music that the man who wrote it had been too lazy to finish. why, in some of those pieces of music there were places three or four inches long without a single note, and you can't tell me that was right. but i sometimes think there is no use in trying to help people as i tried to help our brass band. people are never grateful, and they always manage to blame a boy, no matter how good he is. i shall try, however, not to give way to these feelings, but to keep on doing right no matter what happens. the next night we had the concert, or at any rate we tried to have it. the town-hall was full of people, and sue said it did seem hard that so much money as the people had paid to come to the concert should all have to go to charity when she really needed a new seal-skin coat. the performance was to begin with a song by sue, and the band was to play just like a piano while she was singing. the song was all about being so weary and longing so hard to die, and sue was singing it like anything, when all of a sudden the man with the big drum hit it a most awful bang, and nearly frightened everybody to death. people laughed out loud, and sue could hardly go on with her song. but she took a fresh start, and got along pretty well till the big drum broke out again, and the man hammered away at it till the leader went and took his drum-stick away from him. the people just howled and yelled, and sue burst out crying and went right off the stage and longed to die in real earnest. [illustration: there was the awfullest fight you ever saw.] when things got a little bit quiet, and the man who played the drum had made it up with the leader, the band began to play something on its own account. it began all right, but it didn't finish the way it was meant to finish. first one player and then another would blow a loud note in the wrong place, and the leader would hammer on his music-stand, and the people would laugh themselves 'most sick. after a while the band came to a place where the trombones seemed to get crazy, and the leader just jumped up and knocked the trombone-player down with a big horn that he snatched from another man. then somebody hit the leader with a cornet and knocked him into the big drum, and there was the awfullest fight you ever saw till somebody turned out the gas. there wasn't any more concert that night, and the people all got their money back, and now mr. travers and the leader of the band have offered a reward for "the person who maliciously altered the music"--that's what the notice says. but i wasn't malicious, and i do hope nobody will find out i did it, though i mean to tell father about it as soon as he gets over having his nose pretty near broke by trying to interfere between the trombone-player and the man with the french horn. our baby. mr. martin has gone away. he's gone to europe or hartford or some such place. anyway i hope we'll never see him again. the expressman says that part of him went in the stage and part of him was sent in a box by express, but i don't know whether it is true or not. i never could see the use of babies. we have one at our house that belongs to mother and she thinks everything of it. i can't see anything wonderful about it. all it can do is to cry and pull hair and kick. it hasn't half the sense of my dog, and it can't even chase a cat. mother and sue wouldn't have a dog in the house, but they are always going on about the baby and saying "ain't it perfectly sweet!" why, i wouldn't change sitting bull for a dozen babies, or at least i wouldn't change him if i had him. after the time he bit mr. martin's leg father said "that brute sha'n't stay here another day." i don't know what became of him, but the next morning he was gone and i have never seen him since. i have had great sorrows though people think i'm only a boy. the worst thing about a baby is that you're expected to take care of him and then you get scolded afterwards. folks say, "here, jimmy! just hold the baby a minute, that's a good boy," and then as soon as you have got it they say, "don't do that my goodness gracious the boy will kill the child hold it up straight you good-for-nothing little wretch." it is pretty hard to do your best and then be scolded for it, but that's the way boys are treated. perhaps after i'm dead folks will wish they had done differently. last saturday mother and sue went out to make calls and told me to stay home and take care of the baby. there was a base-ball match but what did they care? they didn't want to go to it and so it made no difference whether i went to it or not. they said they would be gone only a little while, and that if the baby waked up i was to play with it and keep it from crying and be sure you don't let it swallow any pins. of course i had to do it. the baby was sound asleep when they went out, so i left it just for a few minutes while i went to see if there was any pie in the pantry. if i was a woman i wouldn't be so dreadfully suspicious as to keep everything locked up. when i got back up-stairs again the baby was awake and was howling like he was full of pins; so i gave him the first thing that came handy to keep him quiet. it happened to be a bottle of french polish with a sponge in it on the end of a wire that sue uses to black her shoes, because girls are too lazy to use a regular blacking-brush. the baby stopped crying as soon as i gave him the bottle and i sat down to read. the next time i looked at him he'd got out the sponge and about half his face was jet-black. this was a nice fix, for i knew nothing could get the black off his face, and when mother came home she would say the baby was spoiled and i had done it. now i think an all black baby is ever so much more stylish than an all white baby, and when i saw the baby was part black i made up my mind that if i blacked it all over it would be worth more than it ever had been and perhaps mother would be ever so much pleased. so i hurried up and gave it a good coat of black. you should have seen how that baby shined! the polish dried just as soon as it was put on, and i had just time to get the baby dressed again when mother and sue came in. i wouldn't lower myself to repeat their unkind language. when you've been called a murdering little villain and an unnatural son it will wrinkle in your heart for ages. after what they said to me i didn't even seem to mind about father but went up-stairs with him almost as if i was going to church or something that wouldn't hurt much. the baby is beautiful and shiny, though the doctor says it will wear off in a few years. nobody shows any gratitude for all the trouble i took, and i can tell you it isn't easy to black a baby without getting it into his eyes and hair. i sometimes think that it is hardly worth while to live in this cold and unfeeling world. our snow man. i do love snow. there isn't anything except a bull-terrier that is as beautiful as snow. mr. travers says that seven hundred men once wrote a poem called "beautiful snow," and that even then, though they were all big strong men, they couldn't find words enough to tell how beautiful it was. there are some people who like snow, and some who don't. it's very curious, but that's the way it is about almost everything. there are the eskimos who live up north where there isn't anything but snow, and where there are no schools nor any errands, and they haven't anything to do but to go fishing and skating and hunting, and sliding down hill all day. well, the eskimos don't like it, for people who have been there and seen them say they are dreadfully dissatisfied. a nice set the eskimos must be! i wonder what would satisfy them. i don't suppose it's any use trying to find out, for father says there's no limit to the unreasonableness of some people. we ought always to be satisfied and contented with our condition and the things we have. i'm always contented when i have what i want, though of course nobody can expect a person to be contented when things don't satisfy him. sue is real contented, too, for she's got the greatest amount of new clothes, and she's going to be married very soon. i think it's about time she was, and most everybody else thinks so too, for i've heard them say so; and they've said so more than ever since we made the snow man. [illustration: we built the biggest snow man i ever heard of.] you see, it was the day before christmas, and there had been a beautiful snow-storm. all of us boys were sliding down hill, when somebody said, "let's make a snow man." everybody seemed to think the idea was a good one, and we made up our minds to build the biggest snow man that ever was, just for christmas. the snow was about a foot thick, and just hard enough to cut into slabs; so we got a shovel and went to work. we built the biggest snow man i ever heard of. we made him hollow, and tom mcginnis stood inside of him and helped build while the rest of us worked on the outside. just as fast as we got a slab of snow in the right place we poured water on it so that it would freeze right away. we made the outside of the man about three feet thick, and he was so tall that tom mcginnis had to keep climbing up inside of him to help build. tom came near getting into a dreadful scrape, for we forgot to leave a hole for him to get out of, and when the man was done, and frozen as hard as a rock, tom found that he was shut up as tight as if he was in prison. didn't he howl, though, and beg us to let him out! i told him that he would be very foolish not to stay in the man all night, for he would be as warm as the eskimos are in their snow huts, and there would be such fun when people couldn't find him anywhere. but tom wasn't satisfied; he began to talk some silly nonsense about wanting his supper. the idea of anybody talking about such a little thing as supper when they had such a chance to make a big stir as that. tom always was an obstinate sort of fellow, and he would insist upon coming out, so we got a hatchet and chopped a hole in the back of the man and let him out. the snow man was quite handsome, and we made him have a long beak, like a bird, so that people would be astonished when they saw him. it was that beak that made me think about the egyptian gods that had heads like hawks and other birds and animals, and must have frightened people dreadfully when they suddenly met them near graveyards or in lonesome roads. one of those egyptian gods was made of stone, and was about as high as the top of a house. he was called memnon, and every morning at sunrise he used to sing out with a loud voice, just as the steam-whistle at mr. thompson's mill blows every morning at sunrise to wake people up. the egyptians thought that memnon was something wonderful, but it has been found out, since the egyptians died, that a priest used to hide himself somewhere inside of memnon, and made all the noise. looking at the snow man and thinking about the egyptian gods, i thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to hide inside of him and say things whenever people went by. it would be a new way of celebrating christmas, too. they would be awfully astonished to hear a snow man talk. i might even make him sing a carol, and then he'd be a sort of christian memnon, and nobody would think i had anything to do with it. that evening when the moon got up--it was a beautiful moonlight night--i slipped out quietly and went up to the hill where the snow man was, and hid inside of him. i knew mr. travers and sue were out sleigh-riding, and they hadn't asked me to go, though there was lots of room, and i meant to say something to them when they drove by the snow man that would make sue wish she had been a little more considerate. presently i heard bells and looked out and saw a sleigh coming up the hill. i was sure it was mr. travers and sue; so i made ready for them. the sleigh came up the hill very slow, and when it was nearly opposite to me i said, in a solemn voice, "susan, you ought to have been married long ago." you see, i knew that would please mr. travers; and it was true, too. she gave a shriek, and said, "oh, what's that?" "we'll soon see," said a man's voice that didn't sound a bit like mr. travers's. "there's somebody round here that's spoiling for a thrashing." the man came right up to the snow man, and saw my legs through the hole, and got hold of one of them and began to pull. i didn't know it, but the boys had undermined the snow man on one side, and as soon as the man began to pull, over went the snow man and me right into the sleigh, and the woman screamed again, and the horse ran away and pitched us out, and-but i don't want to tell the rest of it, only father said that i must be taught not to insult respectable ladies like miss susan white, who is fifty years old, by telling them it is time they were married. art. our town has been very lively this winter. first we had two circuses, and then we had the small-pox, and now we've got a course of lectures. a course of lectures is six men, and you can go to sleep while they're talking, if you want to, and you'd better do it unless they are missionaries with real idols or a magic lantern. i always go to sleep before the lectures are through, but i heard a good deal of one of them that was all about art. art is almost as useful as history or arithmetic, and we ought all to learn it, so that we can make beautiful things and elevate our minds. art is done with mud in the first place. the art man takes a large chunk of mud and squeezes it until it is like a beautiful man or woman, or wild bull, and then he takes a marble gravestone and cuts it with a chisel until it is exactly like the piece of mud. if you want a solid photograph of yourself made out of marble, the art man covers your face with mud, and when it gets hard he takes it off, and the inside of it is just like a mould, so that he can fill it full of melted marble which will be an exact photograph of you as soon as it gets cool. this is what one of the men who belong to the course of lectures told us. he said he would have shown us exactly how to do art, and would have made a beautiful portrait of a friend of his, named vee nuss, right on the stage before our eyes, only he couldn't get the right kind of mud. i believed him then, but i don't believe him now. a man who will contrive to get an innocent boy into a terrible scrape isn't above telling what isn't true. he could have got mud if he'd wanted it, for there was mornamillion tons of it in the street, and it's my belief that he couldn't have made anything beautiful if he'd had mud a foot deep on the stage. as i said, i believed everything the man said, and when the lecture was over, and father said, "i do hope jimmy you've got some benefit from the lecture this time" and sue said, "a great deal of benefit that boy will ever get unless he gets it with a good big switch don't i wish i was his father o! i'd let him know," i made up my mind that i would do some art the very next day, and show people that i could get lots of benefit if i wanted to. i have spoken about our baby a good many times. it's no good to anybody, and i call it a failure. it's a year and three months old now, and it can't talk or walk, and as for reading or writing, you might as well expect it to play base-ball. i always knew how to read and write, and there must be something the matter with this baby, or it would know more. last monday mother and sue went out to make calls, and left me to take care of the baby. they had done that before, and the baby had got me into a scrape, so i didn't want to be exposed to its temptations; but the more i begged them not to leave me, the more they would do it, and mother said, "i know you'll stay and be a good boy while we go and make those horrid calls," and sue said, "i'd better or i'd get what i wouldn't like." after they'd gone i tried to think what i could do to please them, and make everybody around me better and happier. after a while i thought that it would be just the thing to do some art and make a marble photograph of the baby, for that would show everybody that i had got some benefit from the lectures, and the photograph of the baby would delight mother and sue. i took mother's fruit-basket and filled it with mud out of the back yard. it was nice thick mud, and it would stay in any shape that you squeezed it into, so that it was just the thing to do art with. i laid the baby on its back on the bed, and covered its face all over with the mud about two inches thick. a fellow who didn't know anything about art might have killed the baby, for if you cover a baby's mouth and nose with mud it can't breathe, which is very unhealthy, but i left its nose so it could breathe, and intended to put an extra piece of mud over that part of the mould after it was dry. of course the baby howled all it could, and it would have kicked dreadfully, only i fastened its arms and legs with a shawl-strap so that it couldn't do itself any harm. [illustration: the moment they saw the baby they said the most dreadful things.] the mud wasn't half dry when mother and sue and father came in, for he met them at the front gate. they all came up-stairs, and the moment they saw the baby they said the most dreadful things to me without waiting for me to explain. i did manage to explain a little through the closet door while father was looking for his rattan cane, but it didn't do the least good. i don't want to hear any more about art or to see any more lectures. there is nothing so ungrateful as people, and if i did do what wasn't just what people wanted, they might have remembered that i meant well, and only wanted to please them and elevate their minds. an awful scene. i have the same old, old story to tell. my conduct has been such again--at any rate, that's what father says; and i've had to go up-stairs with him, and i needn't explain what that means. it seems very hard, for i'd tried to do my very best, and i'd heard sue say, "that boy hasn't misbehaved for two days good gracious i wonder what can be the matter with him." there's a fatal litty about it, i'm sure. poor father! i must give him an awful lot of trouble, and i know he's had to get two new bamboo canes this winter just because i've done so wrong, though i never meant to do it. it happened on account of coasting. we've got a magnificent hill. the road runs straight down the middle of it, and all you have to do is to keep on the road. there's a fence on one side, and if you run into it something has got to break. john kruger, who is a stupid sort of a fellow, ran into it last week head-first, and smashed three pickets, and everybody said it was a mercy he hit it with his head, or he might have broken some of his bones and hurt himself. there isn't any fence on the other side, but if you run off the road on that side you'll go down the side of a hill that's steeper than the roof of the episcopal church, and about a mile long, with a brook full of stones down at the bottom. the other night mr. travers said-but i forgot to say that mr. martin is back again, and coming to our house worse than ever. he was there, and mr. travers and sue, all sitting in the parlor, where i was behaving, and trying to make things pleasant, when mr. travers said, "it's a bright moonlight night let's all go out and coast." sue said, "oh that would be lovely jimmy get your sled." i didn't encourage them, and i told father so, but he wouldn't admit that mr. travers or sue or mr. martin or anybody could do anything wrong. what i said was, "i don't want to go coasting. it's cold and i don't feel very well, and i think we ought all to go to bed early so we can wake up real sweet and good-tempered." but sue just said, "don't you preach jimmy if you're lazy just say so and mr. travers will take us out." then mr. martin he must put in and say, "perhaps the boy's afraid don't tease him he ought to be in bed anyhow." now i wasn't going to stand this, so i said, "come on. i wanted to go all the time, but i thought it would be best for old people to stay at home, and that's why i didn't encourage you." so i got out my double-ripper, and we all went out on the hill and started down. i sat in front to steer, and sue sat right behind me, and mr. travers sat behind her to hold her on, and mr. martin sat behind him. we went splendidly, only the dry snow flew so that i couldn't see anything, and that's why we got off the road and on to the side hill before i knew it. the hill was just one glare of ice, and the minute we struck the ice the sled started away like a hurricane. i had just time to hear mr. martin say, "boy mind what you're about or i'll get off," when she struck something--i don't know what--and everybody was pitched into the air, and began sliding on the ice without anything to help them, except me. i caught on a bare piece of rock, and stopped myself. i could see sue sitting up straight, and sliding like a streak of lightning, and crying, "jimmy father charles mr. martin o my help me." mr. travers was on his stomach, about a rod behind her, and gaining a little on her, and mr. martin was on his back, coming down head-first, and beating them both. all of a sudden he began to go to pieces. part of him would slide off one way, and then another part would try its luck by itself. i can tell you it was an awful and surreptitious sight. they all reached the bottom after a while, and when i saw they were not killed, i tried it myself, and landed all right. sue was sitting still, and mourning, and saying, "my goodness gracious i shall never be able to walk again my comb is broken and that boy isn't fit to live." mr. travers wasn't hurt very much, and he fixed himself all right with some pins i gave him, and his handkerchief; but his overcoat looked as if he'd stolen it from a scarecrow. when he had comforted sue a little (and i must say some people are perfectly sickening the way they go on), he and i collected mr. martin--all except his teeth--and helped put him together, only i got his leg on wrong side first, and then we helped him home. this was why father said that my conduct was such, and that his friend martin didn't seem to be able to come into his house without being insulted and injured by me. i never insulted him. it isn't my fault if he can't slide down a hill without coming apart. however, i've had my last suffering on account of him. the next time he comes apart where i am i shall not wait to be punished for it, but shall start straight for the north-pole, and if i discover it the british government will pay me mornamillion dollars. i'm able to sit down this morning, but my spirits are crushed, and i shall never enjoy life any more. screw-heads. i'm in an awful situation that a boy by the name of bellew got me into. he is one of the boys that writes stories and makes pictures for harper's young people, and i think people ought to know what kind of a boy he is. a little while ago he had a story in the young people about imitation screw-heads, and how he used to make them, and what fun he had pasting them on his aunt's bureau. i thought it was a very nice story, and i got some tin-foil and made a whole lot of screw-heads, and last saturday i thought i'd have some fun with them. father has a dreadfully ugly old chair in his study, that general washington brought over with him in the _mayflower_, and mr. travers says it is stiffer and uglier than any of the pilgrim fathers. but father thinks everything of that chair, and never lets anybody sit in it except the minister. i took a piece of soap, just as that bellew used to, and if his name is billy why don't he learn how to spell it that's what i'd like to know, and made what looked like a tremendous crack in the chair. then i pasted the screw-heads on the chair, and it looked exactly as if somebody had broken it and tried to mend it. [illustration] i couldn't help laughing all day when i thought how astonished father would be when he saw his chair all full of screws, and how he would laugh when he found out it was all a joke. as soon as he came home i asked him to please come into the study, and showed him the chair and said "father i cannot tell a lie i did it but i won't do it any more." [illustration] father looked as if he had seen some disgusting ghosts, and i was really frightened, so i hurried up and said, "it's all right father, it's only a joke look here they all come off," and rubbed off the screw-heads and the soap with my handkerchief, and expected to see him burst out laughing, just as bellew's aunt used to burst, but instead of laughing he said, "my son this trifling with sacred things must be stopped," with which remark he took off his slipper, and then-but i haven't the heart to say what he did. mr. travers has made some pictures about it, and perhaps people will understand what i have suffered. i think that boy bellew ought to be punished for getting people into scrapes. i'd just like to have him come out behind our barn with me for a few minutes. that is, i would, only i never expect to take any interest in anything any more. my heart is broken and a new chocolate cigar that was in my pocket during the awful scene. i've got an elegant wasps' nest with young wasps in it that will hatch out in the spring, and i'll change it for a bull-terrier or a shot-gun or a rattlesnake in a cage that rattles good with any boy that will send me one. my monkey. there never was such luck. i've always thought that i'd rather have a monkey than be a million heir. there is nothing that could be half so splendid as a real live monkey, but of course i knew that i never could have one until i should grow up and go to sea and bring home monkeys and parrots and shawls to mother just as sailors always do. but i've actually got a monkey and if you don't believe it just look at these pictures of him that mr. travers made for me. it was mr. travers that got the monkey for me. one day there came a woman with an organ and a monkey into our yard. she was an italian, but she could speak a sort of english and she said that the "murderin' spalpeen of a monkey was just wearing the life of her out." so says mr. travers "what will you take for him?" and says she "it's five dollars i'd be after selling him for, and may good-luck go wid ye!" [illustration] what did mr. travers do but give her the money and hand the monkey to me, saying, "here, jimmy! take him and be happy." wasn't i just happy though? jocko--that's the monkey's name--is the loveliest monkey that ever lived. i hadn't had him an hour when he got out of my arms and was on the supper-table before i could get him. the table was all set and bridget was just going to ring the bell, but the monkey didn't wait for her. [illustration] to see him eating the chicken salad was just wonderful. he finished the whole dish in about two minutes, and was washing it down with the oil out of the salad-bottle when i caught him. mother was awfully good about it and only said, "poor little beast he must be half starved susan how much he reminds me of your brother." a good mother is as good a thing as a boy deserves, no matter how good he is. [illustration] [illustration] [illustration] the salad someway did not seem to agree with jocko for he was dreadfully sick that night. you should have seen how limp he was, just like a girl that has fainted away and her young man is trying to lift her up. mother doctored him. she gave him castor-oil as if he was her own son, and wrapped him up in a blanket and put a mustard plaster on his stomach and soaked the end of his tail in warm water. he was all right the next day and was real grateful. i know he was grateful because he showed it by trying to do good to others, at any rate to the cat. our cat wouldn't speak to him at first, but he coaxed her with milk, just as he had seen me do and finally caught her. it must have been dreadfully aggravoking to the cat, for instead of letting her have the milk he insisted that she was sick and must have medicine. so he took bridget's bottle of hair-oil and a big spoon and gave the cat such a dose. when i caught him and made him let the cat go there were about six table-spoonfuls of oil missing. mr. travers said it was a good thing for it would improve the cat's voice and make her yowl smoother, and that he had felt for a long time that she needed to be oiled. mother said that the monkey was cruel and it was a shame but i know that he meant to be kind. he knew the oil mother gave him had done him good, and he wanted to do the cat good. i know just how he felt, for i've been blamed many a time for trying to do good, and i can tell you it always hurt my feelings. [illustration] the monkey was in the kitchen while bridget was getting dinner yesterday and he watched her broil the steak as if he was meaning to learn to cook and help her in her work, he's that kind and thoughtful. the cat was out-doors, but two of her kittens were in the kitchen, and they were not old enough to be afraid of the monkey. when dinner was served bridget went up-stairs and by-and-by mother says "what's that dreadful smell sure's you're alive susan the baby has fallen into the fire." everybody jumped up and ran up-stairs, all but me, for i knew jocko was in the kitchen and i was afraid it was he that was burning. when i got into the kitchen there was that lovely monkey broiling one of the kittens on the gridiron just as he had seen bridget broil the steak. the kitten's fur was singeing and she was mewing, and the other kitten was sitting up on the floor licking her chops and enjoying it and jocko was on his hind-legs as solemn and busy as an owl. i snatched the gridiron away from him and took the kitten off before she was burned any except her fur, and when mother and susan came down-stairs they couldn't understand what it was that had been burning. this is all the monkey has done since i got him day before yesterday. father has been away for a week but is coming back in a few days, and won't he be delighted when he finds a monkey in the house? the end of my monkey. i haven't any monkey now, and i don't care what becomes of me. his loss was an awful blow, and i never expect to recover from it. i am a crushed boy, and when the grown folks find what their conduct has done to me, they will wish they had done differently. [illustration] it was on a tuesday that i got the monkey, and by thursday everybody began to treat him coldly. it began with my littlest sister. jocko took her doll away, and climbed up to the top of the door with it, where he sat and pulled it to pieces, and tried its clothes on, only they wouldn't fit him, while sister, who is nothing but a little girl, stood and howled as if she was being killed. this made mother begin to dislike the monkey, and she said that if his conduct was such, he couldn't stay in her house. i call this unkind, for the monkey was invited into the house, and i've been told we must bear with visitors. [illustration] a little while afterwards, while mother was talking to susan on the front piazza, she heard the sewing-machine up-stairs, and said, "well i never that cook has the impudence to be sewing on my machine without ever asking leave." so she ran up-stairs, and found that jocko was working the machine like mad. he'd taken sue's gown and father's black coat and a lot of stockings, and shoved them all under the needle, and was sewing them all together. mother boxed his ears and then she and sue sat down and worked all the morning trying to unsew the things with the scissors. they had to give it up after a while, and the things are sewed together yet, like a man and wife, which no man can put asunder. all this made my mother more cool towards the monkey than ever, and i heard her call him a nasty little beast. [illustration] the next day was sunday, and as sue was sitting in the hall waiting for mother to go to church with her, jocko gets up on her chair, and pulls the feathers out of her bonnet. he thought he was doing right, for he had seen the cook pulling the feathers off of the chickens, but sue called him dreadful names, and either she or that monkey would leave the house. [illustration] [illustration] father came home early monday, and seemed quite pleased with the monkey. he said it was an interesting study, and he told susan that he hoped that she would be contented with fewer beaux, now that there was a monkey constantly in the house. in a little while father caught jocko lathering himself with the mucilage brush, and with a kitchen knife all ready to shave himself. he just laughed at the monkey, and told me to take good care of him, and not let him hurt himself. of course i was dreadfully pleased to find that father liked jocko, and i knew it was because he was a man, and had more sense than girls. but i was only deceiving myself and leaning on a broken weed. that very evening when father went into his study after supper he found jocko on his desk. he had torn all his papers to pieces, except a splendid new map, and that he was covering with ink, and making believe that he was writing a president's message about the panama canal. father was just raging. he took jocko by the scruff of the neck, locked him in the closet, and sent him away by express the next morning to a man in the city, with orders to sell him. the expressman afterwards told mr. travers that the monkey pretty nearly killed everybody on the train, for he got hold of the signal-cord and pulled it, and the engineer thought it was the conductor, and stopped the train, and another train just behind it came within an inch of running into it and smashing it to pieces. jocko did the same thing three times before they found out what was the matter, and tied him up so that he couldn't reach the cord. oh, he was just beautiful! but i shall never see him again, and mr. travers says that it's all right, and that i'm monkey enough for one house. that's because sue has been saying things against the monkey to him; but never mind. first my dog went, and now my monkey has gone. it seems as if everything that is beautiful must disappear. very likely i shall go next, and when i am gone, let them find the dog and the monkey, and bury us together. [illustration] the old, old story. we've had a most awful time in our house. there have been ever so many robberies in town, and everybody has been almost afraid to go to bed. the robbers broke into old dr. smith's house one night. dr. smith is one of those doctors that don't give any medicine except cold water, and he heard the robbers, and came down-stairs in his nigown, with a big umbrella in his hand, and said, "if you don't leave this minute, i'll shoot you." and the robbers they said, "oh no! that umbrella isn't loaded" and they took him and tied his hands and feet, and put a mustard-plaster over his mouth, so that he couldn't yell, and then they filled the wash-tub with water, and made him sit down in it, and told him that now he'd know how it was himself, and went away and left him, and he nearly froze to death before morning. father wasn't a bit afraid of the robbers, but he said he'd fix something so that he would wake up if they got in the house. so he put a coal-scuttle full of coal about half-way up the stairs, and tied a string across the upper hall just at the head of the stairs. he said that if a robber tried to come up-stairs he would upset the coal-scuttle, and make a tremendous noise, and that if he did happen not to upset it, he would certainly fall over the string at the top of the stairs. he told us that if we heard the coal-scuttle go off in the night, sue and mother and i were to open the windows and scream, while he got up and shot the robber. the first night, after father had fixed everything nicely for the robbers, he went to bed, and then mother told him that she had forgotten to lock the back door. so father he said, "why can't women sometimes remember something," and he got up and started to go down-stairs in the dark. he forgot all about the string, and fell over it with an awful crash, and then began to fall down-stairs. when he got half-way down he met the coal-scuttle, and that went down the rest of the way with him, and you never in your life heard anything like the noise the two of them made. we opened our windows, and cried murder and fire and thieves, and some men that were going by rushed in and picked father up, and would have taken him off to jail, he was that dreadfully black, if i hadn't told them who he was. but this was not the awful time that i mentioned when i began to write, and if i don't begin to tell you about it, i sha'n't have any room left on my paper. mother gave a dinner-party last thursday. there were ten ladies and twelve gentlemen, and one of them was that dreadful mr. martin with the cork leg, and other improvements, as mr. travers calls them. mother told me not to let her see me in the dining-room, or she'd let me know; and i meant to mind, only i forgot, and went into the dining-room, just to look at the table, a few minutes before dinner. i was looking at the raw oysters, when jane--that's the girl that waits on the table--said, "run, master jimmy; here's your mother coming." now i hadn't time enough to run, so i just dived under the table, and thought i'd stay there for a minute or two, until mother went out of the room again. it wasn't only mother that came in, but the whole company, and they sat down to dinner without giving me any chance to get out. i tell you, it was a dreadful situation. i had only room enough to sit still, and nearly every time i moved i hit somebody's foot. once i tried to turn around, and while i was doing it i hit my head against the table so hard that i thought i had upset something, and was sure that people would know i was there. but fortunately everybody thought that somebody else had joggled, so i escaped for that time. it was awfully tiresome waiting for those people to get through dinner. it seemed as if they could never eat enough, and when they were not eating, they were all talking at once. it taught me a lesson against gluttony, and nobody will ever find me sitting for hours and hours at the dinner-table. finally i made up my mind that i must have some amusement, and as mr. martin's cork-leg was close by me, i thought i would have some fun with that. there was a big darning-needle in my pocket, that i kept there in case i should want to use it for anything. i happened to think that mr. martin couldn't feel anything that was done to his cork-leg, and that it would be great fun to drive the darning-needle into it, and leave the end sticking out, so that people who didn't know that his leg was cork would see it, and think that he was suffering dreadfully, only he didn't know it. so i got out the needle, and jammed it into his leg with both hands, so that it would go in good and deep. [illustration: wasn't there a circus in that dining-room!] mr. martin gave a yell that made my hair run cold, and sprang up, and nearly upset the table, and fell over his chair backward, and wasn't there a circus in that dining-room! i had made a mistake about the leg, and run the needle into his real one. i was dragged out from under the table, and-but i needn't say what happened to me after that. it was "the old, old story," as sue says when she sings a foolish song about getting up at five o'clock in the morning--as if she'd ever been awake at that time in her whole life! bee-hunting. the more i see of this world the hollower i find everybody. i don't mean that people haven't got their insides in them, but they are so dreadfully ungrateful. no matter how kind and thoughtful any one may be, they never give him any credit for it. they will pretend to love you and call you "dear jimmy what a fine manly boy come here and kiss me," and then half an hour afterwards they'll say "where's that little wretch let me just get hold of him o! i'll let him know." deceit and ingratitude are the monster vices of the age and they are rolling over our beloved land like the flood. (i got part of that elegant language from the temperance lecturer last week, but i improved it a good deal.) there is aunt eliza. the uncle that belonged to her died two years ago, and she's awfully rich. she comes to see us sometimes with harry--that's her boy, a little fellow six years old--and you ought to see how mother and sue wait on her and how pleasant father is when she's in the room. now she always said that she loved me like her own son. she'd say to father, "how i envy you that noble boy what a comfort he must be to you," and father would say "yes he has some charming qualities" and look as if he hadn't laid onto me with his cane that very morning and told me that my conduct was such. you'll hardly believe that just because i did the very best i could and saved her precious harry from an apple grave, aunt eliza says i'm a young cain and knows i'll come to the gallows. she came to see us last friday, and on saturday i was going bee-hunting. i read all about it in a book. you take an axe and go out-doors and follow a bee, and after a while the bee takes you to a hollow tree full of honey and you cut the tree down and carry the honey home in thirty pails and sell it for ever so much. i and tom mcginnis were going and aunt eliza says "o take harry with you the dear child would enjoy it so much." of course no fellow that's twelve years old wants a little chap like that tagging after him but mother spoke up and said that i'd be delighted to take harry, and so i couldn't help myself. we stopped in the wood-shed and borrowed father's axe and then we found a bee. the bee wouldn't fly on before us in a straight line but kept lighting on everything, and once he lit on tom's hand and stung him good. however we chased the bee lively and by-and-by he started for his tree and we ran after him. we had just got to the old dead apple-tree in the pasture when we lost the bee and we all agreed that his nest must be in the tree. it's an awfully big old tree, and it's all rotted away on one side so that it stands as if it was ready to fall over any minute. nothing would satisfy harry but to climb that tree. we told him he'd better let a bigger fellow do it but he wouldn't listen to reason. so we gave him a boost and he climbed up to where the tree forked and then he stood up and began to say something when he disappeared. we thought he had fallen out of the tree and we ran round to the other side to pick him up but he wasn't there. tom said it was witches but i knew he must be somewhere so i climbed up the tree and looked. he had slipped down into the hollow of the tree and was wedged in tight. i could just reach his hair but it was so short that i couldn't get a good hold so as to pull him out. wasn't he scared though! he howled and said "o take me out i shall die," and tom wanted to run for the doctor. i told harry to be patient and i'd get him out. so i slid down the tree and told tom that the only thing to do was to cut the tree down and then open it and take harry out. it was such a rotten tree i knew it would come down easy. so we took turns chopping, and the fellow who wasn't chopping kept encouraging harry by telling him that the tree was 'most ready to fall. after working an hour the tree began to stagger and presently down she came with an awful crush and burst into a million pieces. tom and i said hurray! and then we poked round in the dust till we found harry. he was all over red dust and was almost choked, but he was awfully mad. just because some of his ribs were broke--so the doctor said--he forget all tom and i had done for him. i shouldn't have minded that much, because you don't expect much from little boys, but i did think his mother would have been grateful when we brought him home and told her what we had done. then i found what all her professions were worth. she called father and told him that i and the other miscurrent had murdered her boy. tom was so frightened at the awful name she called him that he ran home, and father told me i could come right up-stairs with him. they couldn't have treated me worse if i'd let harry stay in the tree and starve to death. i almost wish i had done it. it does seem as if the more good a boy does the more the grown folks pitch into him. the moment sue is married to mr. travers i mean to go and live with him. he never scolds, and always says that susan's brother is as dear to him as his own, though he hasn't got any. prompt obedience. i haven't been able to write anything for some time. i don't mean that there has been anything the matter with my fingers so that i couldn't hold a pen, but i haven't had the heart to write of my troubles. besides, i have been locked up for a whole week in the spare bedroom on bread and water, and just a little hash or something like that, except when sue used to smuggle in cake and pie and such things, and i haven't had any penanink. i was going to write a novel while i was locked up by pricking my finger and writing in blood with a pin on my shirt; but you can't write hardly anything that way, and i don't believe all those stories of conspirators who wrote dreadful promises to do all sorts of things in their blood. before i could write two little words my finger stopped bleeding, and i wasn't going to keep on pricking myself every few minutes; besides, it won't do to use all your blood up that way. there was once a boy who cut himself awful in the leg with a knife, and he bled to death for five or six hours, and when he got through he wasn't any thicker than a newspaper, and rattled when his friends picked him up just like the morning paper does when father turns it inside out. mr. travers told me about him, and said this was a warning against bleeding to death. of course you'll say i must have been doing something dreadfully wrong, but i don't think i have; and even if i had, i'll leave it to anybody if aunt eliza isn't enough to provoke a whole company of saints. the truth is, i got into trouble this time just through obeying promptly as soon as i was spoken to. i'd like to know if that was anything wrong. oh, i'm not a bit sulky, and i am always ready to admit i've done wrong when i really have; but this time i tried to do my very best and obey my dear mother promptly, and the consequence was that i was shut up for a week, besides other things too painful to mention. this world is a fleeting show, as our minister says, and i sometimes feel that it isn't worth the price of admission. aunt eliza is one of those women that always know everything, and know that nobody else knows anything, particularly us men. she was visiting us, and finding fault with everybody, and constantly saying that men were a nuisance in a house and why didn't mother make father mend chairs and whitewash the ceiling and what do you let that great lazy boy waste all his time for? there was a little spot in the roof where it leaked when it rained, and aunt eliza said to father, "why don't you have energy enough to get up on the roof and see where that leak is i would if i was a man thank goodness i ain't." so father said, "you'd better do it yourself, eliza." and she said, "i will this very day." so after breakfast aunt eliza asked me to show her where the scuttle was. we always kept it open for fresh air, except when it rained, and she crawled up through it and got on the roof. just then mother called me, and said it was going to rain, and i must close the scuttle. i began to tell her that aunt eliza was on the roof, but she wouldn't listen, and said, "do as i tell you this instant without any words why can't you obey promptly?" so i obeyed as prompt as i could, and shut the scuttle and fastened it, and then went down-stairs, and looked out to see the shower come up. it was a tremendous shower, and it struck us in about ten minutes; and didn't it pour! the wind blew, and it lightened and thundered every minute, and the street looked just like a river. i got tired of looking at it after a while, and sat down to read, and in about an hour, when it was beginning to rain a little easier, mother came where i was, and said, "i wonder where sister eliza is do you know, jimmy?" and i said i supposed she was on the roof, for i left her there when i fastened the scuttle just before it began to rain. nothing was done to me until after they had got two men to bring aunt eliza down and wring the water out of her, and the doctor had come, and she had been put to bed, and the house was quiet again. by that time father had come home, and when he heard what had happened-but, there! it is over now, and let us say no more about it. aunt eliza is as well as ever, but nobody has said a word to me about prompt obedience since the thunder-shower. our ice-cream. after that trouble with aunt eliza--the time she stayed up on the roof and was rained on--i had no misfortunes for nearly a week. aunt eliza went home as soon as she was well dried, and father said that he was glad she was gone, for she talked so much all the time that he couldn't hear himself think, though i don't believe he ever did hear himself think. i tried it once. i sat down where it was real still, and thought just as regular and steady as i could; but i couldn't hear the least sound. i suppose our brains are so well oiled that they don't creak at all when we use them. however, mr. travers told me of a boy he knew when he was a boy. his name was ananias g. smith, and he would run round all day without any hat on, and his hair cut very short, and the sun kept beating on his head all day, and gradually his brains dried so that whenever he tried to think, they would rattle and creak like a wheelbarrow-wheel when it hasn't any grease on it. of course his parents felt dreadfully, for he couldn't go to school without disturbing everybody as soon as he began to think about his lessons, and he couldn't stay home and think without keeping the baby awake. as i was saying, there was pretty nearly a whole week that i kept out of trouble; but it didn't last. boys are born to fly upward like the sparks that trouble, and yesterday i was "up to mischief again," as sue said, though i never had the least idea of doing any mischief. how should an innocent boy, who might easily have been an orphan had things happened in that way, know all about cooking and chemistry and such, i should like to know. it was really sue's fault. nothing would do but she must give a party, and of course she must have ice-cream. now the ice-cream that our cake-shop man makes isn't good enough for her, so she got father to buy an ice-cream freezer, and said she would make the ice-cream herself. i was to help her, and she sent me to the store to order some salt. i asked her what she wanted of salt, and she said that you couldn't freeze ice-cream without plenty of salt, and that it was almost as necessary as ice. i went to the store and ordered the salt, and then had a game or two of ball with the boys, and didn't get home till late in the afternoon. there was sue freezing the ice-cream, and suffering dreadfully, so she said. she had to go and dress right away, and told me to keep turning the ice-cream freezer till it froze and don't run off and leave me to do everything again you good-for-nothing boy i wonder how you can do it. i turned that freezer for ever so long, but nothing would freeze; so i made up my mind that it wanted more salt. i didn't want to disturb anybody, so i quietly went into the kitchen and got the salt-cellar, and emptied it into the ice-cream. it began to freeze right away; but i tasted it, and it was awfully salt, so i got the jug of golden sirup and poured about a pint into the ice-cream, and when it was done it was a beautiful straw-color. [illustration: sue's ice-cream party.] but there was an awful scene when the party tried to eat that ice-cream. sue handed it round, and said to everybody, "this is my ice-cream, and you must be sure to like it." the first one she gave it to was dr. porter. he is dreadfully fond of ice-cream, and he smiled such a big smile, and said he was sure it was delightful, and took a whole spoonful. then he jumped up as if something had bit him, and went out of the door in two jumps, and we didn't see him again. then three more men tasted their ice-cream, and jumped up, and ran after the doctor, and two girls said, "oh my!" and held their handkerchiefs over their faces, and turned just as pale. and then everybody else put their ice-cream down on the table, and said thank you they guessed they wouldn't take any. the party was regularly spoiled, and when i tasted the ice-cream i didn't wonder. it was worse than the best kind of strong medicine. sue was in a dreadful state of mind, and when the party had gone home--all but one man, who lay under the apple-tree all night and groaned like he was dying, only we thought it was cats--she made me tell her all about the salt and the golden sirup. she wouldn't believe that i had tried to do my best, and didn't mean any harm. father took her part, and said i ought to eat some of the ice-cream, since i made it; but i said i'd rather go up-stairs with him. so i went. some of these days people will begin to understand that they are just wasting and throwing away a boy who always tries to do his best, and perhaps they'll be sorry when it is too late. my pig. i don't say that i didn't do wrong, but what i do say is that i meant to do right. but that don't make any difference. it never does. i try to do my very best, and then something happens, and i am blamed for it. when i think what a disappointing world this is, full of bamboo-canes and all sorts of switches, i feel ready to leave it. it was sue's fault in the beginning; that is, if it hadn't been for her it wouldn't have happened. one sunday she and i were sitting in the front parlor, and she was looking out of the window and watching for mr. travers; only she said she wasn't, and that she was just looking to see if it was going to rain, and solemnizing her thoughts. i had just asked her how old she was, and couldn't mr. travers have been her father if he had married mother, when she said, "dear me how tiresome that boy is do take a book and read for gracious sake." i said, "what book?" so she gets up and gives me the _observer_, and says, "there's a beautiful story about a good boy and a pig do read it and keep still if you know how and i hope it will do you some good." well, i read the story. it told all about a good boy whose name was james, and his father was poor, and so he kept a pig that cost him twenty-five cents, and when it grew up he sold it for thirty dollars, and he brought the money to his father and said, "here father! take this o how happy i am to help you when you're old and not good for much," and his father burst into tears, but i don't know what for. i wouldn't burst into tears much if anybody gave me thirty dollars; and said, "bless you my noble boy you and your sweet pig have saved me from a watery grave," or something like that. it was a real good story, and it made me feel like being likewise. so i resolved that i would get a little new pig for twenty-five cents, and keep it till it grew up, and then surprise father with twenty-nine dollars, and keep one for myself as a reward for my good conduct. only i made up my mind not to let anybody know about it till after the pig should be grown up, and then how the family would be delighted with my "thoughtful and generous act!" for that's what the paper said james's act was. the next day i went to farmer smith, and got him to give me a little pig for nothing, only i agreed to help him weed his garden all summer. it was a beautiful pig, about as big as our baby, only it was a deal prettier, and its tail was elegant. i wrapped it up in an old shawl, and watched my chance and got it up into my room, which is on the third story. then i took my trunk and emptied it, and bored some holes in it for air, and put the pig in it. i had the best fun that ever was, all that day and the next day, taking care of that dear little pig. i gave him one of my coats for a bed, and fed him on milk, and took him out of the trunk every little while for exercise. nobody goes into my room very often, except the girl to make the bed, and when she came i shut up the trunk, and she never suspected anything. i got a whole coal-scuttleful of the very best mud, and put it in the corner of the room for him to play in, and when i heard bridget coming, i meant to throw the bedquilt over it, so she wouldn't suspect anything. after i had him two days i heard mother say, "seems to me i hear very queer noises every now and then up-stairs." i knew what the matter was, but i never said anything, and i felt so happy when i thought what a good boy i was to raise a pig for my dear father. bridget went up to my room about eight o'clock one evening, just before i was going to bed, to take up my clean clothes. we were all sitting in the dining-room, when we heard her holler as if she was being murdered. we all ran out to see what was the matter, and were half-way up the stairs when the pig came down and upset the whole family, and piled them up on the top of himself at the foot of the stairs, and before we got up bridget came down and fell over us, and said she had just opened the young masther's thrunk and out jumps the ould satan himself and she must see the priest or she would be a dead woman. you wouldn't believe that, though i told them that i was raising the pig to sell it and give the money to father, they all said that they had never heard of such an abandoned and peremptory boy, and father said, "come up-stairs with me and i'll see if i can't teach you that this house isn't a pig-pen." i don't know what became of the pig, for he broke the parlor window and ran away, and nobody ever heard of him again. i'd like to see that boy james. i don't care how big he is. i'd show him that he can't go on setting good examples to innocent boys without suffering as he deserves to suffer. going to be a pirate. i don't know if you are acquainted with tom mcginnis. everybody knows his father, for he's been in congress, though he is a poor man, and sells hay and potatoes, and i heard father say that mr. mcginnis is the most remarkable man in the country. well, tom is mr. mcginnis's boy, and he's about my age, and thinks he's tremendously smart; and i used to think so too, but now i don't think quite so much of him. he and i went away to be pirates the other day, and i found out that he will never do for a pirate. you see, we had both got into difficulties. it wasn't my fault, i am sure, but it's such a painful subject that i won't describe it. i will merely say that after it was all over, i went to see tom to tell him that it was no use to put shingles under your coat, for how is that going to do your legs any good, and i tried it because tom advised me to. i found that he had just had a painful scene with his father on account of apples; and i must say it served him right, for he had no business to touch them without permission. so i said, "look here, tom, what's the use of our staying at home and being laid onto with switches and our best actions misunderstood and our noblest and holiest emotions held up to ridicule?" that's what i heard a young man say to sue one day, but it was so beautiful that i said it to tom myself. "oh, go 'way," said tom. "that's what i say," said i. "let's go away and be pirates. there's a brook that runs through deacon sammis's woods, and it stands to reason that it must run into the spanish main, where all the pirates are. let's run away, and chop down a tree, and make a canoe, and sail down the brook till we get to the spanish main, and then we can capture a schooner, and be regular pirates." "hurrah!" says tom. "we'll do it. let's run away to-night. i'll take father's hatchet, and the carving-knife, and some provisions, and meet you back of our barn at ten o'clock." "i'll be there," said i. "only, if we're going to be pirates, let's be strictly honest. don't take anything belonging to your father. i've got a hatchet, and a silver knife with my name on it, and i'll save my supper and take it with me." so that night i watched my chance, and dropped my supper into my handkerchief, and stuffed it into my pocket. when ten o'clock came, i tied up my clothes in a bundle, and took my hatchet and the silver knife and some matches, and slipped out the back door, and met tom. he had nothing with him but his supper and a backgammon board and a bag of marbles. we went straight for the woods, and after we'd selected a big tree to cut down, we ate our supper. just then the moon went under a cloud, and it grew awfully dark. we couldn't see very well how to chop the tree, and after tom had cut his fingers, we put off cutting down the tree till morning, and resolved to build a fire. we got a lot of fire-wood, but i dropped the matches, and when we found them again they were so damp that they wouldn't light. all at once the wind began to blow, and made a dreadful moaning in the woods. tom said it was bears, and that though he wanted to be a pirate, he hadn't calculated on having any bears. then he said it was cold, and so it was, but i told him that it would be warm enough when we got to the spanish main, and that pirates ought not to mind a little cold. pretty soon it began to rain, and then tom began to cry. it just poured down, and the way our teeth chattered was terrible. by-and-by tom jumped up, and said he wasn't going to be eaten up by bears and get an awful cold, and he started on a run for home. of course i wasn't going to be a pirate all alone, for there wouldn't be any fun in that, so i started after him. he must have been dreadfully frightened, for he ran as fast as he could, and as i was in a hurry, i tried to catch up with him. if he hadn't tripped over a root, and i hadn't tripped over him, i don't believe i could have caught him. when i fell on him, you ought to have heard him yell. he thought i was a bear, but any sensible pirate would have known i wasn't. tom left me at his front gate, and said he had made up his mind he wouldn't be a pirate, and that it would be a great deal more fun to be a plumber and melt lead. i went home, and as the house was locked up, i had to ring the front-door bell. father came to the door himself, and when he saw me, he said, "jimmy, what in the world does this mean?" so i told him that tom and me had started for the spanish main to be pirates, but tom had changed his mind, and that i thought i'd change mine too. father had me put to bed, and hot bottles and things put in the bed with me, and before i went to sleep, he came and said, "good-night, jimmy. we'll try and have more fun at home, so that there won't be any necessity of your being a pirate." and i said, "dear father, i'd a good deal rather stay with you, and i'll never be a pirate without your permission." this is why i say that tom mcginnis will never make a good pirate. he's too much afraid of getting wet. rats and mice. it's queer that girls are so dreadfully afraid of rats and mice. men are never afraid of them, and i shouldn't mind if there were mornamillion mice in my bedroom every night. mr. travers told sue and me a terrible story one day about a woman that was walking through a lonely field, when she suddenly saw a field-mouse right in front of her. she was a brave woman; so after she had said, "oh my! save me, somebody!" she determined to save herself if she could, for there was nobody within miles of her. there was a tree not very far off, and she had just time to climb up the tree and seat herself in the branches, when the mouse reached its foot. there that animal stayed for six days and nights, squeaking in a way that made the woman's blood run cold, and waiting for her to come down. on the seventh day, when she was nearly exhausted, a man with a gun came along, and shot the mouse, and saved her life. i don't believe this story, and i told mr. travers so; for a woman couldn't climb a tree, and even if she could, what would hinder the mouse from climbing after her? sue has a new young man, who comes every monday and wednesday night. one day he said, "jimmy, if you'll get me a lock of your sister's hair, i'll give you a nice dog." i told him he was awfully kind, but i didn't think it would be honest for me to take sue's best hair, but that i'd try to get him some of her every-day hair. and he said, "what on earth do you mean, jimmy?" and i said that sue had got some new back hair a little while ago, for i was with her when she bought it, and i knew she wouldn't like me to take any of that. so he said it was no matter, and he'd give me the dog anyway. i told sue afterwards all about it, just to show her how honest i was, and instead of telling me i was a good boy, she said, "oh you little torment g'way and never let me see you again," and threw herself down on the sofa and howled dreadfully, and mother came and said, "jimmy, if you want to kill your dear sister, you can just keep on doing as you do." such is the gratitude of grown-up folks. mr. withers--that's the new young man--brought the dog, as he said he would. he's a beautiful scotch terrier, and he said he would kill rats like anything, and was two years old, and had had the distemper; that is, mr. withers said the dog would kill rats, and of course mr. withers himself never had the distemper. of course i wanted to see the dog kill rats, so i took him to a rat-hole in the kitchen, but he barked at it so loud that no rat would think of coming out. if you want to catch rats, you mustn't begin by barking and scratching at rat-holes, but you must sit down and kind of wink with one eye and lay for them, just as cats do. i told mr. withers that the dog couldn't catch any rats, and he said he would bring me some in a box, and i could let them out, and the dog would kill every single one of them. the next evening sue sent me down to the milliner's to bring her new bonnet home, and don't you be long about it either you idle worthless boy. well, i went to the milliner's shop, but the bonnet wasn't done yet; and as i passed mr. withers's office, he said, "come here, jimmy; i've got those rats for you." he gave me a wooden box like a tea-chest, and told me there were a dozen rats in it, and i'd better have the dog kill them at once, or else they'd gnaw out before morning. when i got home, sue met me at the door, and said, "give me that bandbox this instant you've been mornanour about it." i tried to tell her that it wasn't her box; but she wouldn't listen, and just snatched it and went into the parlor, where there were three other young ladies who had come to see her, and slammed the door; but the dog slipped in with her. in about a minute i heard the most awful yells that anybody ever heard. it sounded as if all the furniture in the parlor was being smashed into kindling wood, and the dog kept barking like mad. the next minute a girl came flying out of the front window, and another girl jumped right on her before she had time to get out of the way, and they never stopped crying, "help murder let me out oh my!" [illustration: sue had opened the box.] i knew, of course, that sue had opened the box and let the rats out, and though i wanted ever so much to know if the dog had killed them all, i thought she would like it better if i went back to the milliner's and waited a few hours for the bonnet. i brought it home about nine o'clock; but sue had gone to bed, and the servant had just swept up the parlor, and piled the pieces of furniture on the piazza. father won't be home till next week, and perhaps by that time sue will get over it. i wish i did know if the dog killed all those rats, and how long it took him. hunting the rhinoceros. we ought always to be useful, and do good to everybody. i used to think that we ought always to improve our minds, and i think so some now, though i have got into dreadful difficulties all through improving my mind. but i am not going to be discouraged. i tried to be useful the other day, and do good to the heathen in distant lands, and you wouldn't believe what trouble it made. there are some people who would never do good again if they had got into the trouble that i got into; but the proverb says that if at first you don't succeed, cry, cry again; and there was lots of crying, i can tell you, over our rhinoceros, that we thought was going to do so much good. it all happened because aunt eliza was staying at our house. she had a sunday-school one afternoon, and tom mcginnis and i were the scholars, and she told us about a boy that got up a panorama about the _pilgrim's progress_ all by himself, and let people see it for ten cents apiece, and made ten dollars, and sent it to the missionaries, and they took it and educated mornahundred little heathens with it, and how nice it would be if you dear boys would go and do likewise and now we'll sing "hold the fort." well, tom and i thought about it, and we said we'd get up a menagerie, and we'd take turns playing animals, and we'd let folks see it for ten cents apiece, and make a lot of money, and do ever so much good. we got a book full of pictures of animals, and we made skins out of cloth to go all over us, so that we'd look just like animals when we had them on. we had a lion's and a tiger's and a bear's and a rhinoceros's skin, besides a whole lot of others. as fast as we got the skins made, we hung them up in a corner of the barn where nobody would see them. the way we made them was to show the pictures to mother and to aunt eliza, and they did the cutting out and the sewing, and sue she painted the stripes on the tiger, and the fancy touches on the other animals. our rhinoceros was the best animal we had. the rhinoceros is a lovely animal when he's alive. he is almost as big as an elephant, and he has a skin that is so thick that you can't shoot a bullet through it unless you hit it in a place that is a little softer than the other places. he has a horn on the end of his nose, and he can toss a tiger with it till the tiger feels sick, and says he won't play any more. the rhinoceros lives in africa, and he would toss 'most all the natives if it wasn't that they fasten an india-rubber ball on the end of his horn, so that when he tries to toss anybody, the horn doesn't hurt, and after a while the rhinoceros gets discouraged, and says, "oh, well, what's the good anyhow?" and goes away into the forest. at least this is what mr. travers says, but i don't believe it; for the rhinoceros wouldn't stand still and let the natives put an india-rubber ball on his horn, and they wouldn't want to waste india-rubber balls that way when they could play lawn-tennis with them. last saturday afternoon we had our first grand consolidated exhibition of the greatest menagerie on earth. we had two rows of chairs in the back yard, and all our folks and all tom's folks came, and we took in a dollar and sixty cents at the door, which was the back gate. i was a bear, first of all, and growled so natural that everybody said it was really frightful. then it was tom's turn to be an animal, and he was to be the raging rhinoceros of central africa. i helped dress him in the barn, and when he was dressed he looked beautiful. the rhinoceros's skin went all over him, and was tied together so that he couldn't get out of it without help. his horn was made of wood painted white, and his eyes were two agates. of course he couldn't see through them, but they looked natural, and as i was to lead him, he didn't need to see. [illustration: then he fell into the hot-bed, and broke all the glass.] i had just got him outside the barn, and had begun to say, "ladies and gentlemen, this is the raging rhinoceros," when he gave the most awful yell you ever heard, and got up on his hind-legs, and began to rush around as if he was crazy. he rushed against aunt eliza, and upset her all over the mcginnis girls, and then he banged up against the water-barrel, and upset that, and then he fell into the hot-bed, and broke all the glass. you never saw such an awful sight. the rhinoceros kept yelling all the time, only nobody could understand what he said, and pulling at his head with his fore-paws, and jumping up and down, and smashing everything in his way, and i went after him just as if i was a central african hunting a rhinoceros. i was almost frightened, and as for the folks, they ran into the house, all except aunt eliza, who had to be carried in. i kept as close behind the rhinoceros as i could, begging him to be quiet, and tell me what was the matter. after a while he lay down on the ground, and i cut the strings of his skin, so that he could get his head out and talk. he said he was 'most dead. the wasps had built a nest in one of his hind-legs as it was hanging in the barn, and they had stung him until they got tired. he said he'd never have anything more to do with the menagerie, and went home with his mother, and my mother said i must give him all the money, because he had suffered so much. but, as i said, i won't be discouraged, and will try to do good, and be useful to others the next time i see a fair chance. down cellar. we have had a dreadful time at our house, and i have done very wrong. oh, i always admit it when i've done wrong. there's nothing meaner than to pretend that you haven't done wrong when everybody knows you have. i didn't mean anything by it, though, and sue ought to have stood by me, when i did it all on her account, and just because i pitied her, if she was my own sister, and it was more her fault, i really think, than it was mine. mr. withers is sue's new young man, as i have told you already. he comes to see her every monday, wednesday, and friday evening, and mr. travers comes all the other evenings, and mr. martin is liable to come any time, and generally does--that is, if he doesn't have the rheumatism. though he hasn't but one real leg, he has twice as much rheumatism as father, with all his legs, and there is something very queer about it; and if i was he, i'd get a leg of something better than cork, and perhaps he'd have less pain in it. it all happened last tuesday night. just as it was getting dark, and sue was expecting mr. travers every minute, who should come in but mr. martin! now mr. martin is such an old acquaintance, and father thinks so much of him, that sue had to ask him in, though she didn't want him to meet mr. travers. so when she heard somebody open the front gate, she said, "oh, mr. martin i'm so thirsty and the servant has gone out, and you know just where the milk is for you went down cellar to get some the last time you were here do you think you would mind getting some for me?" mr. martin had often gone down cellar to help himself to milk, and i don't see what makes him so fond of it, so he said, "certainly with great pleasure," and started down the cellar stairs. it wasn't mr. travers, but mr. withers, who had come on the wrong night. he had not much more than got into the parlor when sue came rushing out to me, for i was swinging in the hammock on the front piazza, and said, "my goodness gracious jimmy what shall i do here's mr. withers and mr. travers will be here in a few minutes and there's mr. martin down cellar and i feel as if i should fly what shall i do?" i was real sorry for her, and thought i'd help her, for girls are not like us. they never know what to do when they are in a scrape, and they are full of absence of mind when they ought to have lots of presence of mind. so i said: "i'll fix it for you, sue. just leave it all to me. you stay here and meet mr. travers, who is just coming around the corner, and i'll manage mr. withers." sue said, "you darling little fellow there don't muss my hair;" and i went in, and said to mr. withers, in an awfully mysterious way, "mr. withers, i hear a noise in the cellar. don't tell sue, for she's dreadfully nervous. won't you go down and see what it is?" of course i knew it was mr. martin who was making the noise, though i didn't say so. "oh, it's nothing but rats, jimmy," said he, "or else the cat, or maybe it's the cook." "no, it isn't," said i. "if i was you, i'd go and see into it. sue thinks you're awfully brave." well, after a little more talk, mr. withers said he'd go, and i showed him the cellar-door, and got him started down-stairs, and then i locked the door, and went back to the hammock, and sue and mr. travers they sat in the front parlor. pretty soon i heard a heavy crash down cellar; as if something heavy had dropped, and then there was such a yelling and howling, just as if the cellar was full of murderers. mr. travers jumped up, and was starting for the cellar, when sue fainted away, and hung tight to him, and wouldn't let him go. i stayed in the hammock, and wouldn't have left it if father hadn't come down-stairs, but when i saw him going down cellar, i went after him to see what could possibly be the matter. [illustration: they thought they were both burglars.] father had a candle in one hand and a big club in another. you ought to have been there to see mr. martin and mr. withers. one of them had run against the other in the dark, and they thought they were both burglars. so they got hold of each other, and fell over the milk-pans and upset the soap-barrel, and then rolled round the cellar floor, holding on to each other, and yelling help murder thieves, and when we found them, they were both in the ash-bin, and the ashes were choking them. father would have pounded them with the club if i hadn't told him who they were. he was awfully astonished, and though he wouldn't say anything to hurt mr. martin's feelings, he didn't seem to care much for mine or mr. withers's, and when mr. travers finally came down, father told him that he was a nice young man, and that the whole house might have been murdered by burglars while he was enjoying himself in the front parlor. mr. martin went home after he got a little of the milk and soap and ashes and things off of him, but he was too angry to speak. mr. withers said he would never enter the house again, and mr. travers didn't even wait to speak to sue, he was in such a rage with mr. withers. after they were all gone, sue told father that it was all my fault, and father said he would attend to my case in the morning: only, when the morning came, he told me not to do it again, and that was all. i admit that i did do wrong, but i didn't mean it, and my only desire was to help my dear sister. you won't catch me helping her again very soon. our baby again. after this, don't say anything more to me about babies. there's nothing more spiteful and militious than a baby. our baby got me into an awful scrape once--the time i blacked it. but i don't blame it so much that time, because, after all, it was partly my fault; but now it has gone and done one of the meanest things a baby ever did, and came very near ruining me. it has been a long time since mother and sue said they would never trust me to take care of the baby again, but the other day they wanted awfully to go to a funeral. it was a funeral of one of their best friends, and there was to be lots of flowers, and they expected to see lots of people, and they said they would try me once more. they were going to be gone about two hours, and i was to take care of the baby till they came home again. of course i said i would do my best, and so i did; only when a boy does try to do his best, he is sure to get himself into trouble. how many a time and oft have i found this to be true! ah! this is indeed a hard and hollow world. the last thing sue said when she went out of the door was, "now be a good boy if you play any of your tricks i'll let you know." i wish mr. travers would marry her, and take her to china. i don't believe in sisters, anyway. they hadn't been gone ten minutes when the baby woke up and cried, and i knew it did it on purpose. now i had once read in an old magazine that if you put molasses on a baby's fingers, and give it a feather to play with, it will try to pick that feather off, and amuse itself, and keep quiet for ever so long. i resolved to try it; so i went straight down-stairs and brought up the big molasses jug out of the cellar. then i made a little hole in one of mother's pillows, and pulled out a good handful of feathers. the baby stopped crying as soon as it saw what i was at, and so led me on, just on purpose to get me into trouble. well, i put a little molasses on the baby's hands, and put the feathers in its lap, and told it to be good and play real pretty. the baby began to play with the feathers, just as the magazine said it would, so i thought i would let it enjoy itself while i went up to my room to read a little while. that baby never made a sound for ever so long, and i was thinking how pleased mother and sue would be to find out a new plan for keeping it quiet. i just let it enjoy itself till about ten minutes before the time when they were to get back from the funeral, and then i went down to mother's room to look after the "little innocent," as sue calls it. much innocence there is about that baby! i never saw such a awful spectacle. the baby had got hold of the molasses jug, which held mornagallon, and had upset it and rolled all over in it. the feathers had stuck to it so close that you couldn't hardly see its face, and its head looked just like a chicken's head. you wouldn't believe how that molasses had spread over the carpet. it seemed as if about half the room was covered with it. and there sat that wretched "little innocent" laughing to think how i'd catch it when the folks came home. now wasn't it my duty to wash that baby, and get the feathers and molasses off it? any sensible person would say that it was. i tried to wash it in the wash-basin, but the feathers kept sticking on again as fast as i got them off. so i took it to the bath-tub and turned the water on, and held the baby right under the stream. the feathers were gradually getting rinsed away, and the molasses was coming off beautifully, when something happened. the water made a good deal of noise, and i was standing with my back to the bath-room door, so that i did not hear anybody come in. the first thing i knew sue snatched the baby away, and gave me such a box over the ear. then she screamed out, "ma! come here this wicked boy is drowning the baby o you little wretch won't you catch it for this." mother came running up-stairs, and they carried the baby into mother's room to dry it. you should have heard what they said when sue slipped and sat down in the middle of the molasses, and cried out that her best dress was ruined, and mother saw what a state the carpet was in! i wouldn't repeat their language for worlds. it was personal, that's what it was, and i've been told fifty times never to make personal remarks. i should not have condescended to notice it if mother hadn't begun to cry; and of course i went and said i was awfully sorry, and that i meant it all for the best, and wouldn't have hurt the baby for anything, and begged her to forgive me and not cry any more. when father came home they told him all about it. i knew very well they would, and i just lined myself with shingles so as to be good and ready. but he only said, "my son, i have decided to try milder measures with you. i think you are punished enough when you reflect that you have made your mother cry." that was all, and i tell you i'd rather a hundred times have had him say, "my son, come up-stairs with me." and now if you don't admit that nothing could be meaner than the way that baby acted, i shall really be surprised and shocked. studying wasps. we had a lecture at our place the other day, because our people wanted to get even with the people of the next town, who had had a returned missionary with a whole lot of idols the week before. the lecture was all about wasps and beetles and such, and the lecturer had a magic lantern and a microscope, and everything that was adapted to improve and vitrify the infant mind, as our minister said when he introduced him. i believe the lecturer was a wicked, bad man, who came to our place on purpose to get me into trouble. else why did he urge the boys to study wasps, and tell us how to collect wasps' nests without getting stung? the grown-up people thought it was all right, however, and mr. travers said to me, "listen to what the gentleman says, jimmy, and improve your mind with wasps." well, i thought i would do as i was told, especially as i knew of a tremendous big wasps' nest under the eaves of our barn. i got a ladder and a lantern the very night after the lecture, and prepared to study wasps. the lecturer said that the way to do was to wait till the wasps go to bed, and then to creep up to their nest with a piece of thin paper all covered with wet mucilage, and to clap it right over the door of the nest. of course the wasps can't get out when they wake up in the morning, and you can take the nest and hang it up in your room; and after two or three days, when you open the nest and let the wasps out, and feed them with powdered sugar, they'll be so tame and grateful that they'll never think of stinging you, and you can study them all day long, and learn lots of useful lessons. now is it probable that any real good man would put a boy up to any such nonsense as this? it's my belief that the lecturer was hired by somebody to come and entice all our boys to get themselves stung. as i was saying, i got a ladder and a lantern, and a piece of paper covered with mucilage, and after dark i climbed up to the wasps' nest, and stopped up the door, and then brought the nest down in my hand. i was going to carry it up to my room, but just then mother called me; so i put the nest under the seat of our carriage, and went into the house, where i was put to bed for having taken the lantern out to the barn; and the next morning i forgot all about the nest. i forgot it because i was invited to go on a picnic with mr. travers and my sister sue and a whole lot of people, and any fellow would have forgot it if he had been in my place. mr. travers borrowed father's carriage, and he and sue were to sit on the back seat, and mr. travers's aunt, who is pretty old and cross, was to sit on the front seat with dr. jones, the new minister, and i was to sit with the driver. we all started about nine o'clock, and a big basket of provisions was crowded into the carriage between everybody's feet. we hadn't gone mornamile when mr. travers cries out: "my good gracious! sue, i've run an awful pin into my leg. why can't you girls be more careful about pins?" sue replied that she hadn't any pins where they could run into anybody, and was going to say something more, when she screamed as if she was killed, and began to jump up and down and shake herself. just then dr. jones jumped about two feet straight into the air, and said, "oh my!" and miss travers took to screaming, "fire! murder! help!" and slapping herself in a way that was quite awful. i began to think they were all going crazy, when all of a sudden i remembered the wasps' nest. somehow the wasps had got out of the nest, and were exploring all over the carriage. the driver stopped the horses to see what was the matter, and turned pale with fright when he saw dr. jones catch the basket of provisions and throw it out of the carriage, and then jump straight into it. then mr. travers and his aunt and sue all came flying out together, and were all mixed up with dr. jones and the provisions on the side of the road. they didn't stop long, however, for the wasps were looking for them; so they got up and rushed for the river, and went into it as if they were going to drown themselves--only it wasn't more than two feet deep. george--he's the driver--was beginning to ask, "is thishyer some swimmin' match that's goin' on?" when a wasp hit him on the neck, and another hit me on the cheek. we left that carriage in a hurry, and i never stopped till i got to my room and rolled myself up in the bedclothes. all the wasps followed me, so that mr. travers and sue and the rest of them were left in peace, and might have gone to the picnic, only they felt as if they must come home for arnica, and, besides, the horses had run away, though they were caught afterwards, and didn't break anything. this was all because that lecturer advised me to study wasps. i followed his directions, and it wasn't my fault that the wasps began to study mr. travers and his aunt, and sue and dr. jones, and me and george. but father, when he was told about it, said that my "conduct was such," and the only thing that saved me was that my legs were stung all over, and father said he didn't have the heart to do any more to them with a switch. a terrible mistake. i have been in the back bedroom up-stairs all the afternoon, and i am expecting father every minute. it was just after one o'clock when he told me to come up-stairs with him, and just then mr. thompson came to get him to go down town with him, and father said i'd have to excuse him for a little while and don't you go out of that room till i come back. so i excused him, and he hasn't come back yet; but i've opened one of the pillows and stuffed my clothes full of feathers, and i don't care much how soon he comes back now. it's an awful feeling to be waiting up-stairs for your father, and to know that you have done wrong, though you really didn't mean to do so much wrong as you have done. i am willing to own that nobody ought to take anybody's clothes when he's in swimming, but anyhow they began it first, and i thought just as much as could be that the clothes were theirs. the real boys that are to blame are joe wilson and amzi willetts. a week ago saturday tom mcginnis and i went in swimming down at the island. it's a beautiful place. the island is all full of bushes, and on one side the water is deep, where the big boys go in, and on the other it is shallow, where we fellows that can't swim very much where the water is more than two feet deep go in. while tom and i were swimming, joe and amzi came and stole our clothes, and put them in their boat, and carried them clear across the deep part of the river. we saw them do it, and we had an awful time to get the clothes back, and i think it was just as mean. tom and i said we'd get even with them, and i know it was wrong, because it was a revengeful feeling, but anyhow we said we'd do it; and i don't think revenge is so very bad when you don't hurt a fellow, and wouldn't hurt him for anything, and just want to play him a trick that is pretty nearly almost quite innocent. but i don't say we did right, and when i've done wrong i'm always ready to say so. well, tom and i watched, and last saturday we saw joe and amzi go down to the island, and go in swimming on the shallow side; so we waded across and sneaked down among the bushes, and after a while we saw two piles of clothes. so we picked them up and ran away with them. the boys saw us, and made a terrible noise; but we sung out that they'd know now how it felt to have your clothes carried off, and we waded back across the river, and carried the clothes up to amzi's house, and hid them in his barn, and thought that we'd got even with joe and amzi, and taught them a lesson which would do them a great deal of good, and would make them good and useful men. this was in the morning about noon, and when i had my dinner i thought i'd go and see how the boys liked swimming, and offer to bring back their clothes if they'd promise to be good friends. i never was more astonished in my life than i was to find that they were nowhere near the island. i was beginning to be afraid they'd been drowned, when i heard some men calling me, and i found squire meredith and amzi willetts's father, who is a deacon, hiding among the bushes. they told me that some villains had stolen their clothes while they were in swimming, and they'd give me fifty cents if i'd go up to their houses and get their wives to give me some clothes to bring down to them. i said i didn't want the fifty cents, but i'd go and try to find some clothes for them. i meant to go straight up to amzi's barn and to bring the clothes back, but on the way i met amzi with the clothes in a basket bringing them down to the island, and he said, "somebody's goin' to be arrested for stealing father's and squire meredith's clothes. i saw the fellows that stole 'em, and i'm going to tell." you see, tom and i had taken the wrong clothes, and squire meredith and deacon willetts, who had been in swimming on the deep side of the island, had been about two hours trying to play they were zulus, and didn't need to wear any clothes, only they found it pretty hard work. deacon willetts came straight to our house, and told father that his unhappy son--that's what he called me, and wasn't i unhappy, though--had stolen his clothes and squire meredith's; but for the sake of our family he wouldn't say very much about it, only if father thought best to spare the rods and spoil a child, he wouldn't be able to regard him as a man and a brother. so father called me and asked me if i had taken deacon willetts's clothes, and when i said yes, and was going to explain how it happened, he said that my conduct was such, and that i was bringing his gray hairs down, only i wouldn't hurt them for fifty million dollars, and i've often heard him say he hadn't a gray hair in his head. and now i'm waiting up-stairs for the awful moment to arrive. i deserve it, for they say that squire meredith and deacon willetts are mornhalf eaten up by mosquitoes, and are confined to the house with salt and water, and crying out all the time that they can't stand it. i hope the feathers will work, but if they don't, no matter. i think i shall be a missionary, and do good to the heathen. i think i hear father coming in the front gate now, so i must close. our bull-fight. i'm going to stop improving my mind. it gets me into trouble all the time. grown-up folks can improve their minds without doing any harm, for nobody ever tells them that their conduct is such, and that there isn't the least excuse in the world for them; but just as sure as a boy tries to improve his mind, especially with animals, he gets into dreadful difficulties. there was a man came to our town to lecture a while ago. he had been a great traveller, and knew all about rome and niagara falls and the north pole, and such places, and father said, "now, jimmy, here's an opportunity for you to learn something and improve your mind go and take your mother and do take an interest in something besides games." well, i went to the lecture. the man told all about the australian savages and their boomerangs. he showed us a boomerang, which is a stick with two legs, and an australian will throw it at a man, and it will go and hit him, and come back of its own accord. then he told us about the way the zulus throw their assegais--that's the right way to spell it--and spear an englishman that is mornten rods away from them. then he showed a long string with a heavy lead ball on each end, and said the south americans would throw it at a wild horse, and it would wind around the horse's legs, and tie itself into a bow-knot, and then the south americans would catch the horse. but the best of all was the account of a bull-fight which he saw in spain, with the queen sitting on a throne, and giving a crown of evergreens to the chief bull-fighter. he said that bull-fighting was awfully cruel, and that he told us about it so that we might be thankful that we are so much better than those dreadful spanish people, who will watch a bull-fight all day, and think it real fun. the next day i told mr. travers about the boomerang, and he said it was all true. once there was an australian savage in a circus, and he got angry, and he threw his boomerang at a man who was in the third story of a hotel. the boomerang went down one street and up another, and into the hotel door, and up-stairs, and knocked the man on the head, and came back the same way right into the australian savage's hand. i was so anxious to show father that i had listened to the lecture that i made a boomerang just like the one the lecturer had. when it was done, i went out into the back yard, and slung it at a cat on the roof of our house. it never touched the cat, but it went right through the dining-room window, and gave mr. travers an awful blow in the eye, besides hitting sue on the nose. it stopped right there in the dining-room, and never came back to me at all, and i don't believe a word the lecturer said about it. i don't feel courage to tell what father said about it. then i tried to catch mr. thompson's dog, that lives next door to us, with two lead balls tied on the ends of a long string. i didn't hit the dog any more than i did the cat, but i didn't do any harm except to mrs. thompson's cook, and she ought to be thankful that it was only her arm, for the doctor said that if the balls had hit her on the head they would have broken it, and the consequences might have been serious. it was a good while before i could find anything to make an assegai out of; but after hunting all over the house, i came across a lovely piece of bamboo about ten feet long, and just as light as a feather. then i got a big knife-blade that hadn't any handle to it, and that had been lying in father's tool-chest for ever so long, and fastened it on the end of the bamboo. you wouldn't believe how splendidly i could throw that assegai, only the wind would take it, and you couldn't tell when you threw it where it would bring up. i don't see how the zulus ever manage to hit an englishman; but mr. travers says that the englishmen are all so made that you can't very well miss them. and then perhaps the zulus, when they want to hit them, aim at something else. one day i was practising with the assegai at our barn-door, making believe that it was an englishman, when mr. carruthers, the butcher, drove by, and the assegai came down and went through his foot, and pinned it to the wagon. but he didn't see me, and i guess he got it out after a while, though i never saw it again. but what the lecturer taught us about bull-fights was worse than anything else. tom mcginnis's father has a terrible bull in the pasture, and tom and i agreed that we'd have a bull-fight, only, of course, we wouldn't hurt the bull. all we wanted to do was to show our parents how much we had learned about the geography and habits of the spaniards. tom mcginnis's sister jane, who is twelve years old, and thinks she knows everything, said she'd be the queen of spain, and give tom and me evergreen wreaths. i got an old red curtain out of the dining-room, and divided it with tom, so that we could wave it in the bull's face. when a bull runs after a bull-fighter, the other bull-fighter just waves his red rag, and the bull goes for him and lets the first bull-fighter escape. the lecturer said that there wasn't any danger so long as one fellow would always wave a red rag when the bull ran after the other fellow. pretty nearly all the school came down to the pasture to see our bull-fight. the queen of spain sat on the fence, because there wasn't any other throne, and the rest of the fellows and girls stood behind the fence. the bull was pretty savage; but tom and i had our red rags, and we weren't afraid of him. as soon as we went into the pasture the bull came for me, with his head down, and bellowing as if he was out of his mind. tom rushed up and waved his red rag, and the bull stopped running after me, and went after tom, just as the lecturer said he would. [illustration: he went twenty feet right up into the air.] i know i ought to have waved my red rag, so as to rescue tom, but i was so interested that i forgot all about it, and the bull caught up with tom. i should think he went twenty feet right up into the air, and as he came down he hit the queen of spain, and knocked her about six feet right against mr. mcginnis, who had come down to the pasture to stop the fight. the doctor says they'll all get well, though tom's legs are all broke, and his sister's shoulder is out of joint, and mr. mcginnis has got to get a new set of teeth. father didn't do a thing to me--that is, with anything--but he talked to me till i made up my mind that i'd never try to learn anything from a lecturer again, not even if he lectures about indians and scalping-knives. our balloon. i've made up my mind that half the trouble boys get into is the fault of the grown-up folks that are always wanting them to improve their minds. i never improved my mind yet without suffering for it. there was the time i improved it studying wasps, just as the man who lectured about wasps and elephants and other insects told me to. if it hadn't been for that man i never should have thought of studying wasps. one time our school-teacher told me that i ought to improve my mind by reading history, so i borrowed the history of _blackbeard the pirate_, and improved my mind for three or four hours every day. after a while father said, "bring that book to me, jimmy, and let's see what you're reading," and when he saw it, instead of praising me, he-but what's the use of remembering our misfortunes? still, if i was grown up, i wouldn't get boys into difficulty by telling them to do all sorts of things. there was a professor came to our house the other day. a professor is a kind of man who wears spectacles up on the top of his head and takes snuff and doesn't talk english very plain. i believe professors come from somewhere near germany, and i wish this one had stayed in his own country. they live mostly on cabbage and such, and mr. travers says they are dreadfully fierce, and that when they are not at war with other people, they fight among themselves, and go on in the most dreadful way. this professor that came to see father didn't look a bit fierce, but mr. travers says that was just his deceitful way, and that if we had had a valuable old bone or a queer kind of shell in the house, the professor would have got up in the night, and stolen it and killed us all in our beds; but sue said it was a shame, and that the professor was a lovely old gentleman, and there wasn't the least harm in his kissing her. well, the professor was talking after dinner to father about balloons, and when he saw i was listening, he pretended to be awfully kind, and told me how to make a fire-balloon, and how he'd often made them and sent them up in the air; and then he told about a man who went up on horseback with his horse tied to a balloon; and father said, "now listen to the professor, jimmy, and improve your mind while you've got a chance." the next day tom mcginnis and i made a balloon just as the professor had told me to. it was made out of tissue-paper, and it had a sponge soaked full of alcohol, and when you set the alcohol on fire the tumefaction of the air would send the balloon mornamile high. we made it out in the barn, and thought we'd try it before we said anything to the folks about it, and then surprise them by showing them what a beautiful balloon we had, and how we'd improved our minds. just as it was all ready, sue's cat came into the barn, and i remembered the horse that had been tied to a balloon, and told tom we'd see if the balloon would take the cat up with it. [illustration: presently it went slowly up.] so we tied her with a whole lot of things so she would hang under the balloon without being hurt a bit, and then we took the balloon into the yard to try it. after the alcohol had burned a little while the balloon got full of air, and presently it went slowly up. there wasn't a bit of wind, and when it had gone up about twice as high as the house it stood still. you ought to have seen how that cat howled; but she was nothing compared with sue when she came out and saw her beloved beast. she screamed to me to bring her that cat this instant you good-for-nothing cruel little wretch won't you catch it when father comes home. now i'd like to know how i could reach a cat that was a hundred feet up in the air, but that's all the reasonableness that girls have. the balloon didn't stay up very long. it began to come slowly down, and when it struck the ground, the way that cat started on a run for the barn, and tried to get underneath it with the balloon all on fire behind her, was something frightful to see. by the time i could get to her and cut her loose, a lot of hay took fire and began to blaze, and tom ran for the fire-engine, crying out "fire!" with all his might. the firemen happened to be at the engine-house, though they're generally all over town, and nobody can find them when there is a fire. they brought the engine into our yard in about ten minutes, and just as sue and the cook and i had put the fire out. but that didn't prevent the firemen from working with heroic bravery, as our newspaper afterwards said. they knocked in our dining-room windows with axes, and poured about a thousand hogsheads of water into the room before we could make them understand that the fire was down by the barn, and had been put out before they came. this was all the professor's fault, and it has taught me a lesson. the next time anybody wants me to improve my mind i'll tell him he ought to be ashamed of himself. our new walk. for once i have done right. i always used to think that if i stuck to it, and tried to do what was right, i would hit it some day; but at last i pretty nearly gave up all hope, and was beginning to believe that no matter what i did, some of the grown-up folks would tell me that my conduct was such. but i have done a real useful thing that was just what father wanted, and he has said that he would overlook it this time. perhaps you think that this was not very encouraging to a boy; but if you had been told to come up-stairs with me my son as often as i have been, just because you had tried to do right, and hadn't exactly managed to suit people, you would be very glad to hear your father say that for once he would overlook it. did you ever play you were a ghost? i don't think much of ghosts, and wouldn't be a bit afraid if i was to see one. there was once a ghost that used to frighten people dreadfully by hanging himself to a hook in the wall. he was one of those tall white ghosts, and they are the very worst kind there is. this one used to come into the spare bedroom of the house where he lived before he was dead, and after walking round the room, and making as if he was in dreadfully low spirits, he would take a rope out of his pocket, and hang himself to a clothes-hook just opposite the bed, and the person who was in the bed would faint away with fright, and pull the bedclothes over his head, and be in the most dreadful agony until morning, when he would get up, and people would say, "why how dreadful you look your hair is all gray and you are whiternany sheet." one time a man came to stay at the house who wasn't afraid of anything, and he said, "i'll fix that ghost of yours; i'm a terror on wooden wheels when any ghosts are around, i am." so he was put to sleep in the room, and before he went to bed he loosened the hook, so that it would come down very easy, and then he sat up in bed and read till twelve o'clock. just when the clock struck, the ghost came in and walked up and down as usual, and finally got out his rope and hung himself; but as soon as he kicked away the chair he stood on when he hung himself, down came the hook, and the ghost fell all in a heap on the floor, and sprained his ankle, and got up and limped away, dreadfully ashamed, and nobody ever saw him again. father has been having the front garden walk fixed with an askfelt pavement. askfelt is something like molasses, only four times as sticky when it is new. after a while it grows real hard, only ours hasn't grown very hard yet. i watched the men put it down, and father said, "be careful and don't step on it until it gets hard or you'll stick fast in it and can't ever get out again. i'd like to see half a dozen meddlesome boys stuck in it and serve them right." as soon as i heard dear father mention what he'd like, i determined that he should have his wish, for there is nothing that is more delightful to a good boy than to please his father. that afternoon i mentioned to two or three boys that i knew were pretty bad boys that our melons were ripe, and that father was going to pick them in a day or two. the melon patch is at the back of the house, and after dark i dressed myself in one of mother's gowns, and hid in the wood-shed. about eleven o'clock i heard a noise, and looked out, and there were six boys coming in the back gate, and going for the melon patch. i waited till they were just ready to begin, and then i came out and said, in a hollow and protuberant voice, "beware!" they dropped the melons, and started to run, but they couldn't get to the back gate without passing close to me, and i knew they wouldn't try that. so they started to run round the house to the front gate, and i ran after them. when they reached the new front walk, they seemed to stop all of a sudden, and two or three of them fell down. [illustration: prying the boys out.] i didn't wait to hear what they had to say, but went quietly back, and got into the house through the kitchen-window, and went up-stairs to my room. i could hear them whispering, and now and then one or two of them would cry a little; but i thought it wouldn't be honorable to listen to them, so i went to sleep. in the morning there were five boys stuck in the askfelt, and frightened 'most to death. i got up early, and called father, and told him that there seemed to be something the matter with his new walk. when he came out and saw five boys caught in the pavement, and an extra pair of shoes that belonged to another boy who had wriggled out of them and gone away and left them, he was the most astonished man you ever saw. i told him how i had caught the boys stealing melons, and had played i was a ghost and frightened them away, and he said that if i'd help the coachman pry the boys out, he would overlook it. so he sat upon the piazza and overlooked the coachman and me while we pried the boys out, and they came out awfully hard, and the askfelt is full of pieces of trousers and things. i don't believe it will ever be a handsome walk; but whenever father looks at it he will think what a good boy i have been, which will give him more pleasure than a hundred new askfelt walks. a steam chair. i don't like mr. travers as much as i did. of course i know he's a very nice man, and he's going to be my brother when he marries sue, and he used to bring me candy sometimes, but he isn't what he used to be. one time--that was last summer--he was always dreadfully anxious to hear from the post-office, and whenever he came to see sue, and he and she and i would be sitting on the front piazza, he would say, "jimmy, i think there must be a letter for me; i'll give you ten cents if you'll go down to the post-office;" and then sue would say, "don't run, jimmy; you'll get heart disease if you do;" and i'd walk 'way down to the post-office, which is pretty near half a mile from our house. but now he doesn't seem to care anything about his letters; and he and sue sit in the back parlor, and mother says i mustn't go in and disturb them; and i don't get any more ten cents. i've learned that it won't do to fix your affections on human beings, for even the best of men won't keep on giving you ten cents forever. and it wasn't fair for mr. travers to get angry with me the other night, when it was all an accident--at least 'most all of it; and i don't think it's manly for a man to stand by and see a sister shake a fellow that isn't half her size, and especially when he never supposed that anything was going to happen to her even if it did break. when aunt eliza came to our house the last time, she brought a steam chair: that's what she called it, though there wasn't any steam about it. she brought it from europe with her, and it was the queerest sort of chair, that would all fold up, and had a kind of footstool to it, so that you put your legs out and just lie down in it. well, one day it got broken. the back of the seat fell down, and shut aunt eliza up in the chair so she couldn't get out, and didn't she just howl till somebody came and helped her! she was so angry that she said she never wanted to see that chair again, and you may have it if you want it jimmy for you are a good boy sometimes when you want to be. so i took the chair and mended it. the folks laughed at me, and said i couldn't mend it to save my life; but i got some nails and some mucilage, and mended it elegantly. then mother let me get some varnish, and i varnished the chair, and when it was done it looked so nice that sue said we'd keep it in the back parlor. now i'm never allowed to sit in the back parlor, so what good would my chair do me? but sue said, "stuff and nonsense that boy's indulged now till he can't rest." so they put my chair in the back parlor, just as if i'd been mending it on purpose for mr. travers. i didn't say anything more about it; but after it was in the back parlor i took out one or two screws that i thought were not needed to hold it together, and used them for a boat that i was making. that night mr. travers came as usual, and after he had talked to mother awhile about the weather, and he and father had agreed that it was a shame that other folks hadn't given more money to the michigan sufferers, and that they weren't quite sure that the sufferers were a worthy object, and that a good deal of harm was done by giving away money to all sorts of people, sue said, "perhaps we had better go into the back parlor; it is cooler there, and we won't disturb father, who wants to think about something." so she and mr. travers went into the back parlor, and shut the door, and talked very loud at first about a whole lot of things, and then quieted down, as they always did. i was in the front parlor, reading "robinson crusoe," and wishing i could go and do likewise--like crusoe, i mean; for i wouldn't go and sit quietly in a back parlor with a girl, like mr. travers, not if you were to pay me for it. i can't see what some fellows see in sue. i'm sure if mr. martin or mr. travers had her pull their hair once the way she pulls mine sometimes, they wouldn't trust themselves alone with her very soon. all at once we heard a dreadful crash in the back parlor, and mr. travers said good something very loud, and sue shrieked as if she had a needle run into her. father and mother and i and the cook and the chambermaid all rushed to see what was the matter. [illustration: it had shut up like a jack-knife.] the chair that i had mended, and that sue had taken away from me, had broken down while mr. travers was sitting in it, and it had shut up like a jack-knife, and caught him so he couldn't get out. it had caught sue too, who must have run to help him, or she never would have been in that fix, with mr. travers holding her by the waist, and her arm wedged in so she couldn't pull it away. father managed to get them loose, and then sue caught me and shook me till i could hear my teeth rattle, and then she ran up-stairs and locked herself up; and mr. travers never offered to help me, but only said, "i'll settle with you some day, young man," and then he went home. but father sat down on the sofa and laughed, and said to mother, "i guess sue would have done better if she'd have let the boy keep his chair." animals. i should like to be an animal. not an insect, of course, nor a snake, but a nice kind of animal, like an elephant or a dog with a good master. animals are awfully intelligent, but they haven't any souls. there was once an elephant in a circus, and one day a boy said to him, "want a lump of sugar, old fellow?" the elephant he nodded, and felt real grateful, for elephants are very fond of lump-sugar, which is what they live on in their native forests. but the boy put a cigar instead of a lump of sugar in his mouth. the sagacious animal, instead of eating up the cigar or trying to smoke it and making himself dreadfully sick, took it and carried it across the circus to a man who kept a candy and cigar stand, and made signs that he'd sell the cigar for twelve lumps of sugar. the man gave the elephant the sugar and took the cigar, and then the intelligent animal sat down on his hind-legs and laughed at the boy who had tried to play a joke on him, until the boy felt that much ashamed that he went right home and went to bed. in the days when there were fairies--only i don't believe there ever were any fairies, and mr. travers says they were rubbish--boys were frequently changed into animals. there was once a boy who did something that made a wicked fairy angry, and she changed him into a cat, and thought she had punished him dreadfully. but the boy after he was a cat used to come and get on her back fence and yowl as if he was ten or twelve cats all night long, and she couldn't get a wink of sleep, and fell into a fever, and had to take lots of castor-oil and dreadful medicines. so she sent for the boy who was a cat, you understand, and said she'd change him back again. but he said, "oh no; i'd much rather be a cat, for i'm so fond of singing on the back fence." and the end of it was that she had to give him a tremendous pile of money before he'd consent to be changed back into a boy again. boys can play being animals, and it's great fun, only the other boys who don't play they are animals get punished for it, and i say it's unjust, especially as i never meant any harm at all, and was doing my very best to amuse the children. this is the way it happened. aunt sarah came to see us the other day, and brought her three boys with her. i don't think you ever heard of aunt sarah, and i wish i never had. she's one of father's sisters, and he thinks a great deal more of her than i would if she was my sister, and i don't think it's much credit to anybody to be a sister anyway. the boys are twins, that is, two of them are, and they are all about three or four years old. well, one day just before christmas, when it was almost as warm out-doors as it is in summer, aunt sarah said, "jimmy, i want you to take the dear children out and amuse them a few hours. i know you're so fond of your dear little cousins and what a fine manly boy you are!" so i took them out, though i didn't want to waste my time with little children, for we are responsible for wasting time, and ought to use every minute to improve ourselves. the boys wanted to see the pigs that belong to mr. taylor, who lives next door, so i took them through a hole in the fence, and they looked at the pigs, and one of them said, "oh my how sweet they are and how i would like to be a little pig and never be washed and have lots of swill!" so i said, "why don't you play you are pigs, and crawl round and grunt? it's just as easy, and i'll look at you." you see, i thought i ought to amuse them, and that this would be a nice way to teach them to amuse themselves. well, they got down on all fours and ran round and grunted, until they began to get tired of it, and then wanted to know what else pigs could do, so i told them that pigs generally rolled in the mud, and the more mud a pig could get on himself the happier he would be, and that there was a mud puddle in our back yard that would make a pig cry like a child with delight. the boys went straight to that mud puddle, and they rolled in the mud until there wasn't an inch of them that wasn't covered with mud so thick that you would have to get a crowbar to pry it off. [illustration: "we've been playing we were pigs, ma."] just then aunt sarah came to the door and called them, and when she saw them she said, "good gracious what on earth have you been doing?" and tommy, that's the oldest boy, said, "we've been playing we were pigs ma and it's real fun and wasn't jimmy good to show us how?" i think they had to boil the boys in hot water before they could get the mud off, and their clothes have all got to be sent to the poor people out west whose things were all lost in the great floods. if you'll believe it, i never got the least bit of thanks for showing the boys how to amuse themselves, but aunt sarah said that i'd get something when father came home, and she wasn't mistaken. i'd rather not mention what it was that i got, but i got it mostly on the legs, and i think bamboo canes ought not to be sold to fathers any more than poison. i was going to tell why i should like to be an animal; but as it is getting late, i must close. a pleasing experiment. every time i try to improve my mind with science i resolve that i will never do it again, and then i always go and do it. science is so dreadfully tempting that you can hardly resist it. mr. travers says that if anybody once gets into the habit of being a scientific person there is little hope that he will ever reform, and he says he has known good men who became habitual astronomers, and actually took to prophesying weather, all because they yielded to the temptation to look through telescopes, and to make figures on the black-board with chalk. i was reading a lovely book the other day. it was all about balloons and parachutes. a parachute is a thing that you fall out of a balloon with. it is something like an open umbrella, only nobody ever borrows it. if you hold a parachute over your head and drop out of a balloon, it will hold you up so that you will come down to the ground so gently that you won't be hurt the least bit. i told tom mcginnis about it, and we said we would make a parachute, and jump out of the second-story window with it. it is easy enough to make one, for all you have to do is to get a big umbrella and open it wide, and hold on to the handle. last saturday afternoon tom came over to my house, and we got ready to try what the book said was "a pleasing scientific experiment." we didn't have the least doubt that the book told the truth. but tom didn't want to be the first to jump out of the window--neither did i--and we thought we'd give sue's kitten a chance to try a parachute, and see how she liked it. sue had an umbrella that was made of silk, and was just the thing to suit the kitten. i knew sue wouldn't mind lending the umbrella, and as she was out making calls, and i couldn't ask her permission, i borrowed the umbrella and the kitten, and meant to tell her all about it as soon as she came home. we tied the kitten fast to the handle of the umbrella, so as not to hurt her, and then dropped her out of the window. the wind was blowing tremendously hard, which i supposed was a good thing, for it is the air that holds up a parachute, and of course the more wind there is, the more air there is, and the better the parachute will stay up. the minute we dropped the cat and the umbrella out of the window, the wind took them and blew them clear over the back fence into deacon smedley's pasture before they struck the ground. this was all right enough, but the parachute didn't stop after it struck the ground. it started across the country about as fast as a horse could run, hitting the ground every few minutes, and then bouncing up into the air and coming down again, and the kitten kept clawing at everything, and yowling as if she was being killed. by the time tom and i could get down-stairs the umbrella was about a quarter of a mile off. we chased it till we couldn't run any longer, but we couldn't catch it, and the last we saw of the umbrella and the cat they were making splendid time towards the river, and i'm very much afraid they were both drowned. tom and i came home again, and when we got a little rested we said we would take the big umbrella and try the pleasing scientific experiment; at least i said that tom ought to try it, for we had proved that a little silk umbrella would let a kitten down to the ground without hurting her, and of course a great big umbrella would hold tom up all right. i didn't care to try it myself, because tom was visiting me, and we ought always to give up our own pleasures in order to make our visitors happy. after a while tom said he would do it, and when everything was ready he sat on the window-ledge, with his legs hanging out, and when the wind blew hard he jumped. [illustration: he lit right on the han's head.] it is my opinion, now that the thing is all over, that the umbrella wasn't large enough, and that if tom had struck the ground he would have been hurt. he went down awfully fast, but by good-luck the grocer's man was just coming out of the kitchen-door as tom came down, and he lit right on the man's head. it is wonderful how lucky some people are, for the grocer's man might have been hurt if he hadn't happened to have a bushel basket half full of eggs with him, and as he and tom both fell into the eggs, neither of them was hurt. they were just getting out from among the eggs when sue came in with some of the ribs of her umbrella that somebody had fished out of the river and given to her. there didn't seem to be any kitten left, for sue didn't know anything about it, but father and mr. mcginnis came in a few minutes afterwards, and i had to explain the whole thing to them. this is the last "pleasing scientific experiment" i shall ever try. i don't think science is at all nice, and, besides, i am awfully sorry about the kitten. traps. a boy ought always to stand up for his sister, and protect her from everybody, and do everything to make her happy, for she can only be his sister once, and he would be so awfully sorry if she died and then he remembered that his conduct towards her had sometimes been such. mr. withers doesn't come to our house any more. one night sue saw him coming up the garden-walk, and father said, "there's the other one coming, susan; isn't this travers's evening?" and then sue said, "i do wish somebody would protect me from him he is that stupid don't i wish i need never lay eyes on him again." i made up my mind that nobody should bother my sister while she had a brother to protect her. so the next time i saw mr. withers i spoke to him kindly and firmly--that's the way grown-up people speak when they say something dreadfully unpleasant--and told him what sue had said about him, and that he ought not to bother her any more. mr. withers didn't thank me and say that he knew i was trying to do him good, which was what he ought to have said, but he looked as if he wanted to hurt somebody, and walked off without saying a word to me, and i don't think he was polite about it. he has never been at our house since. when i told sue how i had protected her she was so overcome with gratitude that she couldn't speak, and just motioned me with a book to go out of her room and leave her to feel thankful about it by herself. the book very nearly hit me on the head, but it wouldn't have hurt much if it had. mr. travers was delighted about it, and told me that i had acted like a man, and that he shouldn't forget it. the next day he brought me a beautiful book all about traps. it told how to make mornahundred different kinds of traps that would catch everything, and it was one of the best books i ever saw. our next-door neighbor, mr. schofield, keeps pigs, only he don't keep them enough, for they run all around. they come into our garden and eat up everything, and father said he would give almost anything to get rid of them. now one of the traps that my book told about was just the thing to catch pigs with. it was made out of a young tree and a rope. you bend the tree down and fasten the rope to it so as to make a slippernoose, and when the pig walks into the slippernoose the tree flies up and jerks him into the air. i thought that i couldn't please father better than to make some traps and catch some pigs; so i got a rope, and got two irishmen that were fixing the front walk to bend down two trees for me and hold them while i made the traps. this was just before supper, and i expected that the pigs would come early the next morning and get caught. it was bright moonlight that evening, and mr. travers and sue said the house was so dreadfully hot that they would go and take a walk. they hadn't been out of the house but a few minutes when we heard an awful shriek from sue, and we all rushed out to see what was the matter. mr. travers had walked into a trap, and was swinging by one leg, with his head about six feet from the ground. nobody knew him at first except me, for when a person is upside down he doesn't look natural; but i knew what was the matter, and told father that it would take two men to bend down the tree and get mr. travers loose. so they told me to run and get mr. schofield to come and help, and they got the step-ladder so that sue could sit on the top of it and hold mr. travers's head. i was so excited that i forgot all about the other trap, and, besides, sue had said things to me that hurt my feelings, and that prevented me from thinking to tell mr. schofield not to get himself caught. he ran ahead of me, because he was so anxious to help, and the first thing i knew there came an awful yell from him, and up he went into the air, and hung there by both legs, which i suppose was easier than the way mr. travers hung. then everybody went at me in the most dreadful way, except sue, who was holding mr. travers's head. they said the most unkind things to me, and sent me into the house. i heard afterwards that father got mr. schofield's boy to climb up and cut mr. travers and mr. schofield loose, and they fell on the gravel, but it didn't hurt them much, only mr. schofield broke some of his teeth, and says he is going to bring a lawsuit against father. mr. travers was just as good as he could be. he only laughed the next time he saw me, and he begged them not to punish me, because it was his fault that i ever came to know about that kind of trap. mr. travers is the nicest man that ever lived, except father, and when he marries sue i shall go and live with him, though i haven't told him yet, for i want to keep it as a pleasant surprise for him. an accident. aunt eliza never comes to our house without getting me into difficulties. i don't really think she means to do it, but it gets itself done just the same. she was at our house last week, and though i meant to behave in the most exemplifying manner, i happened by accident to do something which she said ought to fill me with remorse for the rest of my days. remorse is a dreadful thing to have. some people have it so bad that they never get over it. there was once a ghost who suffered dreadfully from remorse. he was a tall white ghost, with a large cotton umbrella. he haunted a house where he used to walk up and down, carrying his umbrella and looking awfully solemn. people used to wonder what he wanted of an umbrella, but they never asked him, because they always shrieked and fainted away when they saw the ghost, and when they were brought to cried, "save me take it away take it away." one time a boy came to the house to spend christmas. he was just a terror, was this boy. he had been a district telegraph messenger boy, and he wasn't afraid of anything. the folks told him about the ghost, but he said he didn't care for any living ghost, and had just as soon see him as not. that night the boy woke up, and saw the ghost standing in his bedroom, and he said, "thishyer is nice conduct, coming into a gentleman's room without knocking. what do you want, anyway?" the ghost replied in the most respectful way that he wanted to find the owner of the umbrella. "i stole that umbrella when i was alive," he said, "and i am filled with remorse." "i should think you would be," said the boy, "for it is the worst old cotton umbrella i ever saw." "if i can only find the owner and give it back to him," continued the ghost, "i can get a little rest; but i've been looking for him for ninety years, and i can't find him." "serves you right," said the boy, "for not sending for a messenger. you're in luck to meet me. gimme the umbrella, and i'll give it back to the owner." "bless you," said the ghost, handing the umbrella to the boy; "you have saved me. now i will go away and rest," and he turned to go out of the door, when the boy said, "see here; it's fifty cents for taking an umbrella home, and i've got to be paid in advance." "but i haven't got any money," said the ghost. "can't help that," said the boy. "you give me fifty cents, or else take your umbrella back again. we don't do any work in our office for nothing." well, the end of it all was that the ghost left the umbrella with the boy, and the next night he came back with the money, though where he got it nobody will ever know. the boy kept the money, and threw the umbrella away, for he was a real bad boy, and only made believe that he was going to find the owner, and the ghost was never seen again. but i haven't told about the trouble with aunt eliza yet. the day she came to our house mother bought a lot of live crabs from a man, and put them in a pail in the kitchen. tom mcginnis was spending the day with me, and i said to him what fun it would be to have crab races, such as we used to have down at the sea-shore last summer. he said wouldn't it, though; so each of us took three crabs, and went up-stairs into the spare bedroom, where we could be sure of not being disturbed. we had a splendid time with the crabs, and i won more than half the races. all of a sudden i heard mother calling me, and tom and i just dropped the crabs into an empty work-basket, and pushed it under the sofa out of sight, and then went down-stairs. i meant to get the crabs and take them back to the kitchen again, but i forgot all about it, for aunt eliza came just after mother had called me, and everybody was busy talking to her. of course she was put into the spare room, and as she was very tired, she said she'd lie down on the sofa until dinner-time and take her hair down. [illustration: he pinched just as hard as he could pinch.] about an hour afterwards we heard the most dreadful cries from aunt eliza's room, and everybody rushed up-stairs, because they thought she must certainly be dead. mother opened the door, and we all went in. aunt eliza was standing in the middle of the floor, and jumping up and down, and crying and shrieking at the top of her voice. one crab was hanging on to one of her fingers, and he pinched just as hard as he could pinch, and there were two more hanging on to the ends of her hair. you see, the crabs had got out of the work-basket, and some of them had climbed up the sofa while aunt eliza was asleep. of course they said it was all my fault, and perhaps it was. but i'd like to know if it's a fair thing to leave crabs where they can tempt a fellow, and then to be severe with him when he forgets to put them back. however, i forgive everybody, especially aunt eliza, who really doesn't mean any harm. a pillow fight. we've been staying at the sea-shore for a week, and having a beautiful time. i love the sea-shore, only it would be a great deal nicer if there wasn't any sea; then you wouldn't have to go in bathing. i don't like to go in bathing, for you get so awfully wet, and the water chokes you. then there are ticks on the sea-shore in the grass. a tick is an insect that begins and bites you, and never stops till you're all ettup, and then you die, and the tick keeps on growing bigger all the time. there was once a boy and a tick got on him and bit him, and kept on biting for three or four days, and it ettup the boy till the tick was almost as big as the boy had been, and the boy wasn't any bigger than a marble, and he died, and his folks felt dreadfully about it. i never saw a tick, but i know that there are lots of them on the sea-shore, and that's reason enough not to like it. we stayed at a boarding-house while we were at the sea-shore. a boarding-house is a place where they give you pure country air and a few vegetables and a little meat, and i say give me a jail where they feed you if they do keep you shut up in the dark. there were a good many people in our boarding-house, and i slept up-stairs on the third story with three other boys, and there were two more boys on the second story, and that's the way all the trouble happened. there is nothing that is better fun than a pillow fight; that is, when you're home and have got your own pillows, and know they're not loaded, as mr. travers says. he was real good about it, too, and i sha'n't forget it, for 'most any man would have been awfully mad, but he just made as if he didn't care, only sue went on about it as if i was the worst boy that ever lived. you see, we four boys on the third story thought it would be fun to have a pillow fight with the two boys on the second story. we waited till everybody had gone to bed, and then we took our pillows and went out into the hall just as quiet as could be, only charley thompson he fell over a trunk in the hall and made a tremendous noise. one of the boarders opened his door and said who's there, but we didn't answer, and presently he said "i suppose it's that cat people ought to be ashamed of themselves to keep such animals," and shut his door again. after a little while charley was able to walk, though his legs were dreadfully rough where he'd scraped them against the trunk. so we crept down-stairs and went into the boys' room, and began to pound them with the pillows. they knew what was the matter, and jumped right up and got their pillows, and went at us so fierce that they drove us out into the hall. of course this made a good deal of noise, for we knocked over the wash-stand in the room, and upset a lot of lamps that were on the table in the hall, and every time i hit one of the boys he would say "ouch!" so loud that anybody that was awake could hear him. we fought all over the hall, and as we began to get excited we made so much noise that mr. travers got up and came out to make us keep quiet. it was pretty dark in the hall, and though i knew mr. travers, i thought he couldn't tell me from the other boys, and i thought i would just give him one good whack on the head, and then we'd all run up-stairs. he wouldn't know who hit him, and, besides, who ever heard of a fellow being hurt with a pillow? so i stood close up by the wall till he came near me, and then i gave him a splendid bang over the head. it sounded as if you had hit a fellow with a club, and mr. travers dropped to the floor with an awful crash, and never spoke a word. [illustration: i never was so frightened in my life.] i never was so frightened in my life, for i thought mr. travers was killed. i called murder help fire, and every body ran out of their rooms, and fell over trunks, and there was the most awful time you ever dreamed of. at last somebody got a lamp, and somebody else got some water and picked mr. travers up and carried him into his room, and then he came to and said, "where am i susan what is the matter o now i know." he was all right, only he had a big bump on one side of his head, and he said that it was all an accident, and that he wouldn't have sue scold me, and that it served him right for not remembering that boarding-house pillows are apt to be loaded. the next morning he made me bring him my pillow, and then he found out how it came to hurt him. all the chicken bones, and the gravel-stones, and the chunks of wood that were in the pillow had got down into one end of it while we were having the fight, and when i hit mr. travers they happened to strike him on his head where it was thin, and knocked him senseless. nobody can tell how glad i am that he wasn't killed, and it's a warning to me never to have pillow fights except with pillows that i know are not loaded with chicken bones and things. i forgot to say that after that night my mother and all the boys' mothers took all the pillows away from us, for they said they were too dangerous to be left where boys could get at them. sue's wedding. sue ought to have been married a long while ago. that's what everybody says who knows her. she has been engaged to mr. travers for three years, and has had to refuse lots of offers to go to the circus with other young men. i have wanted her to get married, so that i could go and live with her and mr. travers. when i think that if it hadn't been for a mistake i made she would have been married yesterday, i find it dreadfully hard to be resigned. but we ought always to be resigned to everything when we can't help it. before i go any further i must tell about my printing-press. it belonged to tom mcginnis, but he got tired of it and sold it to me real cheap. he was going to write to the young people's post-office box and offer to exchange it for a bicycle, a st. bernard dog, and twelve good books, but he finally let me have it for a dollar and a half. it prints beautifully, and i have printed cards for ever so many people, and made three dollars and seventy cents already. i thought it would be nice to be able to print circus bills in case tom and i should ever have another circus, so i sent to the city and bought some type mornaninch high, and some beautiful yellow paper. last week it was finally agreed that sue and mr. travers should be married without waiting any longer. you should have seen what a state of mind she and mother were in. they did nothing but buy new clothes, and sew, and talk about the wedding all day long. sue was determined to be married in church, and to have six bridesmaids and six bridegrooms, and flowers and music and things till you couldn't rest. the only thing that troubled her was making up her mind who to invite. mother wanted her to invite mr. and mrs. mcfadden and the seven mcfadden girls, but sue said they had insulted her, and she couldn't bear the idea of asking the mcfadden tribe. everybody agreed that old mr. wilkinson, who once came to a party at our house with one boot and one slipper, couldn't be invited; but it was decided that every one else that was on good terms with our family should have an invitation. sue counted up all the people she meant to invite, and there was nearly three hundred of them. you would hardly believe it, but she told me that i must carry around all the invitations and deliver them myself. of course i couldn't do this without neglecting my studies and losing time, which is always precious, so i thought of a plan which would save sue the trouble of directing three hundred invitations and save me from wasting time in delivering them. i got to work with my printing-press, and printed a dozen splendid big bills about the wedding. when they were printed i cut a lot of small pictures of animals and ladies riding on horses out of some old circus bills and pasted them on the wedding bills. they were perfectly gorgeous, and you could see them four or five rods off. when they were all done i made some paste in a tin pail, and went out after dark and pasted them in good places all over the village. i put one on mr. wilkinson's front-door, and one on the fence opposite the mcfaddens' house, so they would be sure to see it. [illustration: she gave an awful shriek and fainted away.] the next afternoon father came into the house looking very stern, and carrying one of the wedding bills in his hand. he handed it to sue and said, "susan, what does this mean? these bills are pasted all over the village, and there are crowds of people reading them." sue read the bill, and then she gave an awful shriek, and fainted away, and i hurried down to the post-office to see if the mail had come in. this is what was on the wedding bills, and i am sure it was spelled all right: miss susan brown announces that she will marry mr. james travers at the church next thursday at half past seven, sharp. all the friends of the family with the exception of the mcfadden tribe and old mr. wilkinson are invited. come early and bring lots of flowers. now what was there to find fault with in that? it was printed beautifully, and every word was spelled right, with the exception of the name of the church, and i didn't put that in because i wasn't quite sure how to spell it. the bill saved sue all the trouble of sending out invitations, and it said everything that anybody could want to know about the wedding. any other girl but sue would have been pleased, and would have thanked me for all my trouble, but she was as angry as if i had done something real bad. mr. travers was almost as angry as sue, and it was the first time he was ever angry with me. i am afraid now that he won't let me ever come and live with him. he hasn't said a word about my coming since the wedding bills were put up. as for the wedding, it has been put off, and sue says she will go to new york to be married, for she would perfectly die if she were to have a wedding at home after that boy's dreadful conduct. what is worse, i am to be sent away to boarding-school, and all because i made a mistake in printing the wedding bills without first asking sue how she would like to have them printed. our new dog. i've had another dog. that makes three dogs that i've had, and i haven't been allowed to keep any of them. grown-up folks don't seem to care how much a boy wants society. perhaps if they were better acquainted with dogs they'd understand boys better than they do. about a month ago there were lots of burglars in our town, and father said he believed he'd have to get a dog. mr. withers told father he'd get a dog for him, and the next day he brought the most beautiful siberian blood-hound you ever saw. the first night we had him we chained him up in the yard, and the neighbors threw things at him all night. nobody in our house got a wink of sleep, for the dog never stopped barking except just long enough to yell when something hit him. there was mornascuttleful of big lumps of coal in the yard in the morning, besides seven old boots, two chunks of wood, and a bushel of broken crockery. father said that the house was the proper place for the dog at night; so the next night we left him in the front hall. he didn't bark any all night, but he got tired of staying in the front hall, and wandered all over the house. i suppose he felt lonesome, for he came into my room, and got on to the bed, and nearly suffocated me. i woke up dreaming that i was in a melon patch, and had to eat three hundred green watermelons or be sent to jail, and it was a great comfort when i woke up and found it was only the dog. he knocked the water-pitcher over with his tail in the morning, and then thought he saw a cat under my bed, and made such an awful noise that father came up, and told me i ought to be ashamed to disturb the whole family so early in the morning. after that the dog was locked up in the kitchen at night, and father had to come down early and let him out, because the cook didn't dare to go into the kitchen. we let him run loose in the yard in the daytime, until he had an accident with mr. martin. we'd all been out to take tea and spend the evening with the wilkinsons, and when we got home about nine o'clock, there was mr. martin standing on the piazza, with the dog holding on to his cork-leg. mr. martin had come to the house to make a call at about seven o'clock, and as soon as he stepped on the piazza the dog caught him by the leg without saying a word. every once in a while the dog would let go just long enough to spit out a few pieces of cork and take a fresh hold, but mr. martin didn't dare to stir for fear he would take hold of the other leg, which of course would have hurt more than the cork one. mr. martin was a good deal tired and discouraged, and couldn't be made to understand that the dog thought he was a burglar, and tried to do his duty, as we should all try to do. the way i came to lose the dog was this: aunt eliza came to see us last week, and brought her little boy harry, who once went bee-hunting with me. harry, as i told you, is six years old, and he isn't so bad as he might be considering his age. the second day after they came, harry and i were in tom mcginnis's yard, when tom said he knew where there was a woodchuck down in the pasture, and suppose we go and hunt him. so i told harry to go home and get the dog, and bring him down to the pasture where tom said the woodchuck lived. i told him to untie the dog--for we had kept him tied up since his accident with mr. martin--and to keep tight hold of the rope, so that the dog couldn't get away from him. harry said he'd tie the rope around his waist, and then the dog couldn't possibly pull it away from him, and tom and i both said it was a good plan. [illustration: how that dog did pull!] well, we waited for that boy and the dog till six o'clock, and they never came. when i got home everybody wanted to know what had become of harry. he was gone and the dog was gone, and nobody knew where they were, and aunt eliza was crying, and said she knew that horrid dog had eaten her boy up. father and i and mr. travers had to go and hunt for harry. we hunted all over the town, and at last a man told us that he had seen a boy and a dog going on a run across deacon smith's corn-field. so we went through the corn-field and found their track, for they had broken down the corn just as if a wagon had driven through it. when we came to the fence on the other side of the field we found harry on one side of the fence and the dog on the other. harry had tied the dog's rope round his waist, and couldn't untie it again, and the dog had run away with him. when they came to the fence the dog had squeezed through a hole that was too small for harry, and wouldn't come back again. so they were both caught in a trap. how that dog did pull! harry was almost cut in two, for the dog kept pulling at the rope all the time with all his might. when we got home aunt eliza said that either she or that brute must leave, and father gave the dog away to the butcher. he was the most elegant dog i ever had, and i don't suppose i shall ever have another. lightning. mr. franklin was one of the greatest men that ever lived. he could carry a loaf of bread in each hand and eat another, all at the same time, and he could invent anything that anybody wanted, without hurting himself or cutting his fingers. his greatest invention was lightning, and he invented it with a kite. he made a kite with sticks made out of telegraph wire, and sent it up in a thunder-storm till it reached where the lightning is. the lightning ran down the string, and franklin collected it in a bottle, and sold it for ever so much money. so he got very rich after a while, and could buy the most beautiful and expensive kites that any fellow ever had. i read about mr. franklin in a book that father gave me. he said i was reading too many stories, and just you take this book and read it through carefully and i hope it will do you some good anyway it will keep you out of mischief. i thought that it would please father if i should get some lightning just as franklin did. i told tom mcginnis about it, and he said he would help if i would give him half of all i made by selling the lightning. i wouldn't do this, of course, but finally tom said he'd help me anyhow, and trust me to pay him a fair price; so we went to work. we made a tremendously big kite, and the first time there came a thunder-storm we put it up; but the paper got wet, and it came down before it got up to the lightning. so we made another, and covered it with white cloth that used to be one of mrs. mcginnis's sheets, only tom said he knew she didn't want it any more. we sent up this kite the next time there was a thunder-storm, and tied the string to the second-story window where the blinds hook on, and let the end of the string hang down into a bottle. it only thundered once or twice, but the lightning ran down the string pretty fast, and filled the bottle half full. it looked like water, only it was a little green, and when it stopped running into the bottle we took the lightning down-stairs to try it. i gave a little of it to the cat to drink, but it didn't hurt her a bit, and she just purred. at last tom said he didn't believe it would hurt anything; so he tasted some of it, but it didn't hurt him at all. the trouble was that the lightning was too weak to do any harm. the thunder-shower had been such a little one that it didn't have any strong lightning in it; so we threw away what was in the bottle, and agreed to try to get some good strong lightning whenever we could get a chance. it didn't rain for a long time after that, and i nearly forgot all about franklin and lightning, until one day i heard mr. travers read in the newspaper about a man who was found lying dead on the road with a bottle of jersey lightning, and that, of course, explains what was the matter with him my dear susan. i understood more about it than susan did, for she does not know anything about franklin being a girl, though i will admit it isn't her fault. you see, the cork must have come out of the man's bottle, and the lightning had leaked out and burned him to death. the very next day we had a tremendous thunder-shower, and i told tom that now was the time to get some lightning that would be stronger than anything they could make in new jersey. so we got the kite up, and got ourselves soaked through with water. we tied it to the window-ledge just as we did the first time, and put the end of the string in a tin pail, so that we could collect more lightning than one bottle would hold. it was so cold standing by the window in our wet clothes that we thought we'd go to my room and change them. [illustration: we hurried into the room.] all at once there was the most awful flash of lightning and the most tremendous clap of thunder that was ever heard. father and mother and sue were down-stairs, and they rushed up-stairs crying the darling boy is killed. that meant me. but i wasn't killed, neither was tom, and we hurried into the room where we were collecting lightning to see what was the matter. there we found the tin pail knocked into splinters and the lightning spilled all over the floor. it had set fire to the carpet, and burned a hole right through the floor into the kitchen, and pretty much broke up the whole kitchen stove. father cut the kite-string and let the kite go, and told me that it was as much as my life was worth to send up a kite in a thunder-storm. you see, so much lightning will come down the string that it will kill anybody that stands near it. i know this is true, because father says so, but i'd like to know how franklin managed. i forgot to say that father wasn't a bit pleased. my camera. i had a birthday last week. when i woke up in the morning i found right by the side of my bed a mahogany box, with a round hole on one side of it and a ground-glass door on the other side. i thought it was a new kind of rat-trap; and so i got out of bed and got a piece of cheese, and set the trap in the garret, which is about half full of rats. but it turned out that the box wasn't a rat-trap. mr. travers gave it to me, and when he came to dinner he explained that it was a camera for taking photographs, and that it would improve my mind tremendously if i would learn to use it. i soon found out that there isn't anything much better than a camera, except, of course, a big dog, which i can't have, because mother says a dog tracks dirt all over the house, and father says a dog is dangerous, and sue says a dog jumps all over you and tears your dresses a great good-for-nothing ugly beast. it's very hard to be kept apart from dogs; but our parents always know what is best for us, though we may not see it at the time; and i don't believe father really knows how it feels when your trousers are thin and you haven't any boots on, so it stings your legs every time. but i was going to write about the camera. you take photographs with the camera--people and things. there's a lens on one end of it, and when you point it at anything, you see a picture of it upside down on the little glass door at the back of the camera. then you put a dry plate, which is a piece of glass with chemicals on it, in the camera, and then you take it out and put it in some more chemicals, the right name of which is a developer, and then you see a picture on the dry plate, only it is right side up, and not like the one on the ground-glass door. it's the best fun in the world taking pictures; and i can't see that it improves your mind a bit--at least not enough to worry you. you have to practise a great deal before you can take a picture, and everybody who knows anything about it tells you to do something different. there are five men in our town who take photographs, and each one tells me to use a different kind of dry plate and a different kind of developer, and that all the other men may mean well, and they hope they do, but people ought not to tell a boy to use bad plates and poor developers; and don't you pay any attention to them, jimmy, but do as i tell you. i've got so now that i make beautiful pictures. i took a photograph of sue the other day, and another of old deacon brewster, and you can tell which is which just as easy as anything, if you look at them in the right way, and remember that deacon brewster, being a man, is smoking a pipe, and that, of course, a picture of sue wouldn't have a pipe in it. sue don't like to have me take pictures, but that's because she is a girl, and girls haven't the kind of minds that can understand art. mr. mcginnis--tom's father--don't like my camera either; but that's because he is near-sighted, and thought it was a gun when i pointed it at him, and he yelled, "don't shoot, for mercy's sake!" and went out of our front yard and over the fence in lessenasecond. when he found out what it was he said he never dreamed of being frightened, but had business down-town, and he didn't think boys ought to be trusted with such things, anyway. i made a great discovery last week. you know i said that when you look through the camera at anything you see it upside down on the ground glass. this doesn't look right, and unless you stand on your head when you take a photograph, which is very hard work, you can't help feeling that the picture is all wrong. i was going to take a photograph of a big engraving that belongs to father, when i thought of turning it upside down. this made it look all right on the ground glass. this is my discovery; and if men who take photographs could only get the people they photograph to stand on their heads, they would get beautiful pictures. mr. travers says that i ought to get a patent for this discovery, but so far it has only got me into trouble. saturday afternoon everybody was out of the house except me and the baby and the nurse, and she was down in the kitchen, and the baby was asleep. so i thought i would take a picture of the baby. of course it wouldn't sit still for me; so i thought of the way the indians strap their babies to a flat board, which keeps them from getting round-shouldered, and is very convenient besides. i got a nice flat piece of board and tied the baby to it, and put him on a table, and leaned him up against the wall. then i remembered my discovery, and just stood the baby on his head so as to get a good picture of him. [illustration: i did get a beautiful picture.] i did get a beautiful picture. at least i am sure it would have been if i hadn't been interrupted while i was developing it. i forgot to put the baby right side up, and in about ten minutes mother came in and found it, and then she came up into my room and interrupted me. father came home a little later and interrupted me some more. so the picture was spoiled, and so was father's new rattan. of course i deserved it for forgetting the baby; but it didn't hurt it any to stand on its head a little while, for babies haven't any brains like boys and grown-up people, and, besides, it's the solemn truth that i meant to turn the baby right side up, only i forgot it. freckles. after the time i tried to photograph the baby, my camera was taken away from me and locked up for ever so long. sue said i wasn't to be trusted with it and it would go off some day when you think it isn't loaded and hurt somebody worse than you hurt the baby you good-for-nothing little nuisance. father kept the camera locked up for about a month, and said when i see some real reformation in you james you shall have it back again. but i shall never have it back again now, and if i did, it wouldn't be of any use, for i'm never to be allowed to have any more chemicals. father is going to give the camera to the missionaries, so that they can photograph heathen and things, and all the chemicals i had have been thrown away, just because i made a mistake in using them. i don't say it didn't serve me right, but i can't help wishing that father would change his mind. i have never said much about my other sister, lizzie, because she is nothing but a girl. she is twelve years old, and of course she plays with dolls, and doesn't know enough to play base-ball or do anything really useful. she scarcely ever gets me into scrapes, though, and that's where sue might follow her example. however, it was lizzie who got me into the scrape about my chemicals, though she didn't mean to, poor girl. one night mr. travers came to tea, and everybody was talking about freckles. mr. travers said that they were real fashionable, and that all the ladies were trying to get them. i am sure i don't see why. i've mornamillion freckles, and i'd be glad to let anybody have them who would agree to take them away. sue said she thought freckles were perfectly lovely, and it's a good thing she thinks so, for she has about as many as she can use; and lizzie said she'd give anything if she only had a few nice freckles on her cheeks. mother asked what made freckles, and mr. travers said the sun made them just as it makes photographs. "jimmy will understand it," said mr. travers. "he knows how the sun makes a picture when it shines on a photograph plate, and all his freckles were made just in the same way. without the sun there wouldn't be any freckles." this sounded reasonable, but then mr. travers forgot all about chemicals. as i said, the last time i wrote, chemicals is something in a bottle like medicine, and you have to put it on a photograph plate so as to make the picture that the sun has made show itself. now if chemicals will do this with a photograph plate, it ought to do it with a girl's cheek. you take a girl and let the sun shine on her cheek, and put chemicals on her, and it ought to bring out splendid freckles. i'm very fond of lizzie, though she is a girl, because she minds her own business, and don't meddle with my things and get me into scrapes. i'd have given her all my freckles if i could, as soon as i knew she wanted them, and as soon as mr. travers said that freckles were made just like photographs, i made up my mind i would make some for her. so i told her she should have the best freckles in town if she'd come up to my room the next morning, and let me expose her to the sun and then put chemicals on her. lizzie has confidence in me, which is one of her best qualities, and shows that she is a good girl. she was so pleased when i promised to make freckles for her; and as soon as the sun got up high enough to shine into my window she came up to my room all ready to be freckled. i exposed her to the sun for six seconds. i only exposed my photograph plates three seconds, but i thought that lizzie might not be quite as sensitive, and so i exposed her longer. then i took her into the dark closet where i kept the chemicals, and poured chemicals on her cheeks. i made her hold her handkerchief on her face so that the chemicals couldn't get into her eyes and run down her neck, for she wanted freckles only on her cheeks. i watched her very carefully, but the freckles didn't come out. i put more chemicals on her, and rubbed it in with a cloth; but it was no use, the freckles wouldn't come. i don't know what the reason was. perhaps i hadn't exposed her long enough, or perhaps the chemicals was weak. anyway, not a single freckle could i make. [illustration: mother and sue made a dreadful fuss.] so after a while i gave it up, and told her it was no use, and she could go and wash her face. she cried a little because she was disappointed, but she cried more afterwards. you see, the chemicals made her cheek almost black, and she couldn't wash it off. mother and sue made a dreadful fuss about it, and sent for the doctor, who said he thought it would wear off in a year or so, and wouldn't kill the child or do her very much harm. this is the reason why they took my chemicals away, and promised to give my camera to the missionaries. all i meant was to please lizzie, and i never knew the chemicals would turn her black. but it isn't the first time i have tried to be kind and have been made to suffer for it. santa claus. the other day i was at tom mcginnis's house, and he had some company. he was a big boy, and something like a cousin of tom's. would you believe it, that fellow said there wasn't any santa claus? now that boy distinctly did tell--but i won't mention it. we should never reveal the wickedness of other people, and ought always to be thankful that we are worse than anybody else. otherwise we should be like the pharisee, and he was very bad. i knew for certain that it was a fib tom mcginnis's cousin told. but all the same, the more i thought about it the more i got worried. if there is a santa claus--and of course there is--how could he get up on the top of the house, so he could come down the chimney, unless he carried a big ladder with him; and if he did this, how could he carry presents enough to fill mornahundred stockings? and then how could he help getting the things all over soot from the chimney, and how does he manage when the chimney is all full of smoke and fire, as it always is at christmas! but then, as the preacher says, he may be supernatural--i had to look that word up in the dictionary. the story tom mcginnis's cousin told kept on worrying me, and finally i began to think how perfectly awful it would be if there was any truth in it. how the children would feel! there's going to be no end of children at our house this christmas, and aunt eliza and her two small boys are here already. i heard mother and aunt eliza talking about christmas the other day, and they agreed that all the children should sleep on cot bedsteads in the back parlor, so that they could open their stockings together, and mother said, "you know, eliza, there's a big fireplace in that room, and the children can hang their stockings around the chimney." now i know i did wrong, but it was only because i did not want the children to be disappointed. we should always do to others and so on, and i know i should have been grateful if anybody had tried to get up a santa claus for me in case of the real one being out of repair. neither do i blame mother, though if she hadn't spoken about the fireplace in the way she did, it would never have happened. but i do think that they ought to have made a little allowance for me, since i was only trying to help make the christmas business successful. it all happened yesterday. tom mcginnis had come to see me, and all the folks had gone out to ride except aunt eliza's little boy harry. we were talking about christmas, and i was telling tom how all the children were to sleep in the back parlor, and how there was a chimney there that was just the thing for santa claus. we went and looked at the chimney, and then i said to tom what fun it would be to dress up and come down the chimney and pretend to be santa claus, and how it would amuse the children, and how pleased the grown-up folks would be, for they are always wanting us to amuse them. tom agreed with me that it would be splendid fun, and said we ought to practise coming down the chimney, so that we could do it easily on christmas-eve. he said he thought i ought to do it, because it was our house; but i said no, he was a visitor, and it would be mean and selfish in me to deprive him of any pleasure. but tom wouldn't do it. he said that he wasn't feeling very well, and that he didn't like to take liberties with our chimney, and, besides, he was afraid that he was so big that he wouldn't fit the chimney. then we thought of harry, and agreed that he was just the right size. of course harry said he'd do it when we asked him, for he isn't afraid of anything, and is so proud to be allowed to play with tom and me that he would do anything we asked him to do. well, harry took off his coat and shoes, and we all went up to the roof, and tom and i boosted harry till he got on the top of the chimney and put his legs in it and slid down. he went down like a flash, for he didn't know enough to brace himself the way the chimney-sweeps do. tom and i we hurried down to the back parlor to meet him; but he had not arrived yet, though the fireplace was full of ashes and soot. we supposed he had stopped on the way to rest; but after a while we thought we heard a noise, like somebody calling, that was a great way off. we went up on the roof, thinking harry might have climbed back up the chimney, but he wasn't there. when we got on the top of the chimney we could hear him plain enough. he was crying and yelling for help, for he was stuck about half-way down the chimney, and couldn't get either up or down. we talked it over for some time, and decided that the best thing to do was to get a rope and let it down to him, and pull him out. so i got the clothes-line and let it down, but harry's arms were jammed close to his sides, so he couldn't get hold of it. tom said we ought to make a slippernoose, catch it over harry's head, and pull him out that way, but i knew that harry wasn't very strong, and i was afraid if we did that he might come apart. then i proposed that we should get a long pole and push harry down the rest of the chimney, but after hunting all over the yard we couldn't find a pole that was long enough, so we had to give that plan up. all this time harry was crying in the most discontented way, although we were doing all we could for him. that's the way with little boys. they never have any gratitude, and are always discontented. as we couldn't poke harry down, tom said let's try to poke him up. so we told harry to be patient and considerate, and we went down-stairs again, and took the longest pole we could find and pushed it up the chimney. bushels of soot came down, and flew over everything, but we couldn't reach harry with the pole. by this time we began to feel discouraged. we were awfully sorry for harry, because, if we couldn't get him out before the folks came home, tom and i would be in a dreadful scrape. then i thought that if we were to build a little fire the draught might draw harry out. tom thought it was an excellent plan. so i started a fire, but it didn't loosen harry a bit, and when we went on the roof to meet him we heard him crying louder than ever, and saying that something was on fire in the chimney and was choking him. i knew what to do, though tom didn't, and, to tell the truth, he was terribly frightened. we ran down and got two pails of water, and poured them down the chimney. that put the fire out, but you would hardly believe that harry was more unreasonable than ever, and said we were trying to drown him. there is no comfort in wearing yourself out in trying to please little boys. you can't satisfy them, no matter how much trouble you take, and for my part i am tired of trying to please harry, and shall let him amuse himself the rest of the time he is at our house. [illustration: they got harry out all safe.] we had tried every plan we could think of to get harry out of the chimney, but none of them succeeded. tom said that if we were to pour a whole lot of oil down the chimney it would make it so slippery that harry would slide right down into the back parlor, but i wouldn't do it, because i knew the oil would spoil harry's clothes, and that would make aunt eliza angry. all of a sudden i heard a carriage stop at our gate, and there were the grown folks, who had come home earlier than i had supposed they would. tom said that he thought he would go home before his own folks began to get uneasy about him, so he went out of the back gate, and left me to explain things. they had to send for some men to come and cut a hole through the wall. but they got harry out all safe; and after they found that he wasn't a bit hurt, instead of thanking me for all tom and i had done for him, they seemed to think that i deserved the worst punishment i ever had, and i got it. i shall never make another attempt to amuse children on christmas-eve. the end proofreading team. up-the-ladder club series. round one play. the knights of the white shield. by edward a. rand author of "school and camp series:" "pushing ahead; or, big brother dave," "roy's dory at the sea-shore," and "little brown-top;" "bark cabin on kearsarge," "schooner on the beach," "nellie's new year," "christmas jack," "kindling-wood jimmy," etc. 1886. new york. dedicated to ken and the other boys. contents chapter i. making a club ii. the grand march iii. for sunday-school scholars, an offer iv. the "pammerrammer" v. the nation's birthday vi. a sick patriot vii. the nailed door and window viii. the entertainment ix. the cupola x. aunt stanshy's boarder xi. the club in splinters xii. the club mended xiii. a knight goes to sea xiv. setting a trap xv. the fair xvi. the fire xvii. two mud-turtles xviii. a new departure xix. the wreck xx. the round higher up up-the-ladder club. chapter i. making a club. there was a clattering of feet on the stairs leading to the chamber of aunt stanshy's barn. first there popped up one head and a pair of curious eyes. then there popped up a second head and two more eyes. then there popped up a third head and two more eyes. "jolly! don't she beat all?" it was sid waters who said this. "it's de best barn in de lane," said juggie jones, a little colored boy, his dark eyes lighting up with true interest. "well, i think it is a pretty good barn," rejoined charlie macomber, with apparent unconcern. at the same time a secret pride was dwelling in his bosom, that suddenly made his jacket too tight for him. if seamont, in which the barn was located, was one of the best of towns in the opinion of its inhabitants, this particular barn, in charlie's estimate, was one of the best structures of that sort in the place. below, on the first floor, there was a chance of a stall for brindle, now grazing in a little pasture adjoining the garden. there was, also, a stall for a horse, and an extra stall, though empty, always gives dignity to a barn, suggesting what has been, and, while speaking of a glory departed, hints of that which may be another day. but the chamber! what palace of gold ever had a room equal to that chamber? it had a row of barrels, behind which or in which you could safely hide. it had a ladder that would let you smartly bump your head against the highest rafter in the roof, a cross-beam, too, from which you could suspend a swing, and a window in the rear from which you could look upon the missigatchee river (supposed to have been christened by the indians). this river-view you could have had, if the window had not been boarded up, but there was a front window, whose big square shutter was generally open. this gave a boy a view of the lane and, if maliciously disposed, a chance to safely let drive an apple or a snow-ball at any "down-townie" that might rashly invade the neighborhood. there was also a window high up, at one end, well latticed with cobwebs. then there was a closet, which was splendid for "hy-spy," and--notice!--honor upon honor--there was a "cupelo," as charlie called it, on top of the barn. through the slats of the "cupelo," one could look upon the river shining gloriously at sunset, as if the sun were a chinese mandarin that at this hour spread his yellow silk robe upon the river in a vain attempt to warm up the cold waters just from the sea. besides this there were various attractions, such as oars in the corner, nets hanging from nails, and let it not be forgotten that a big strip of dried halibut dangled from a spike in the wall. to a hungry boy what is there better than such a halibut, unless it be two halibuts? already there had been sly, toothsome pickings of this. it is no wonder, then, that the soul of sid waters, to say nothing of his stomach in view of the halibut, was powerfully affected, and again he cried out, "jolly!" then he clapped his hands, shouting, "just the place for a club!" "a club" said juggie jones. "got nuff dose on my wood-pile." "he means an or-gorgan-gangor--" charlie spoke very hesitatingly. it was a long word and threatened to catch crosswise in his windpipe and choke him. "organization?" inquired sid. "o i will show you. we had plenty of 'em in boston." as sid had just moved from the city, and especially a city so full of knowledge as boston, charlie and juggie received this piece of news with all possible respect. "we can make one right here," suggested charlie. "yes, straight off," said the late citizen of boston. "but whar's de boys?" asked juggie. "o three will do," said sid waters, "for you don't want many to start with. i know the club will be popular after she has been started. and then, fellers," he said, in a quiet tone, "there's a better chance for offices in a small club, you know. we can fill 'em all now and get good berths." it was a great temptation, but a conviction of the importance of numbers finally prevailed. the three pioneers in this great club movement saw also it would look better to defer all elections until others had joined, as it would give these a chance for position. the magnanimity native to the three conquered, and it was decided to accumulate more material before making the club. "we might adjourn and meet in an hour," suggested sid. "that would give us more opportunity to invite other fellers in." how charlie did admire sid for his easy flow of language! the "lane," as seamont called the narrow street before the barn, was now searched for recruits, and the barn-chamber was deserted a whole hour. the big horse-flies sawed on their bass-viols at their leisure. the warm gold of the sunshine undisturbed continued to decorate the floor of the chamber. hark! there's a noise in the yard! it grows to a harried, breathless scramble on the stairs. finally eight boys appeared, the future members of the club, save one or two later additions. there was sid or sidney waters, aged eleven. he was the oldest boy present, and the brains really of the enterprise. he was a bit vain, rather selfish, and liked to have his own way, a very rare failing among boys. still, he was a bright boy, and he had his generous impulses as well as his selfish ones. rick grimes, aged ten, was a stout, dutchy kind of lad, rather slow and heavy, but well-meaning and pretty resolute. there was also billy grimes, rick's cousin, and a year younger. you would have said that these two boys came from the same ancestral stock when you saw their cheeks. these had a well-filled look, as if padded for thanksgiving. this peculiarity of feature gave the cousins special titles in whose selection the boy-instinct for nicknames had shown its unerring accuracy of aim. one was "choppy," and the other, billy, was "cousin choppy." their playmates were generally considerate and did not apply these titles unless they "got mad." forgetting themselves, these titles might be sent flying about freely as snow-balls in a january thaw. there was worthington wentworth. it takes a long breath and a very straight throat to say that, and we will not repeat it, but will call him wort wentworth, as the boys did. his hair was twisted all over his head, like a brush fence, and his black eyes were very lively. he was one of the rogues of the club, and at school took more rattannings, as a mark of his teacher's affection, than any other boy. juggie jones--full name jugurtha bonaparte jones--was a little colored fellow lately from the south, now living with his granny, a washer-woman, in a little yellow house at the head of the lane. he was always laughing and showing his white teeth. he was a great favorite with the boys. wort and juggie were of the same age as charlie,--nine. pip or piper peckham, aged eight, was a big-eyed, black-haired, little fellow with a peaked face. timid, sensitive to neglect, very fond of notice, he was sometimes a subject for the tricks of his playmates. then there was tony or antonio blanco, a late arrival at seamont. he was an olive-faced, black-haired, shy little fellow. when he spoke, he used english, but his accent was italian. he was rarely heard from. an air of mystery encircled him. whether his father was a count in italy or a seller of pea-nuts in new york, no one at seamont had been able to say for a month, and that was a long time in circles of gossip. it was finally asserted that his father lived in italy. tony was of the same age as pip. concerning charlie we shall find out farther along. "will the gentlemen please come to order," shouted sid waters, pompously," and sit--sit--on the floor?" the meeting obeyed at once. "ahem--i 'spose we had better fill the offices first. who will be president?" this magnanimous tender of the office to any one present was received in silence. the meeting was overawed by the thought of this mighty honor so nigh at hand. all recovered in a short time, and several, including pip peckham, were about to sacrifice themselves for the common good, when sid dexterously presented himself as an offering ahead of them all, and said: "well, if nobody wants it, as i don't like to see an office go a-beggin', i'll--i'll take it!" "three cheers for our president!" said charlie, magnanimously, and the three were given, though it must be confessed that several disappointed souls cheered faintly. "we ought to have a governor," said charlie. "what! besides a president?" inquired sid, a slight sneer noticeable in his tones. "don't they have a governor in massachusetts?" inquired charlie, triumphantly. "well, ye--ye--yes." that settled it, for massachusetts custom was plainly authority in this matter. rick grimes was made governor. "treasurer now!" called out sid. "charlie, would you like to be that?" he whispered. charlie was about to say "yes," when the fruit hanging before his thirsty lips was suddenly snatched away. "i'd like that," piped a voice. it was pip peckham. "ahem!" said the president, "i think the office ought to be given to experience," and here he looked in the direction of charlie. "who's he?" inquired billy. "who's sperience?" "silence!" ordered the president. "little boys must speak only when they are spoken to." billy pouted. "why couldn't we have two treasuries?" inquired gov. grimes, putting the thing for its keeper. this happy solution of a difficult problem was at once accepted. charlie was named as the first official of this grade, and pip as the second. "we ought to have a keeper of the great seal," said the president. "what is that?" asked the inquisitive billy. the president was puzzled to say just what it did mean, "but," he affirmed, "i think we ought to have it. it is something, i know, and they put it on things." "i know what it is," said gov. grimes, eagerly. "my uncle has two down on the wharf, in a tank, a great one and a little one, and i guess we could have the great one up here, and some one be keeper of it." the contempt of the president was undisguised. "that isn't it! if i could only think, but there is so much noise! order, gentlemen!" whatever noise had been made, the president was the author of the most of it, though he did not seem to know it. "perhaps we'd better 'journ that," said gov. grimes. "that's what they do to things in meetings, when they want to put them off, my father says." "well, we can do that, only i think we'd better have a--" "i will!" shouted wort, fearful that he might lose his chance for an office, and eagerly assenting beforehand to any thing that was coming. "you be janitor, and take care of the--the--hall?" said sid, looking round on the barn-chamber. "that's what i meant." "yes, yes!" "there ought to be a sentinel," said sid; "one, you know, to look after the door and not let any down-townies up. will you, juggie?" "yes," replied that man of war, jugurtha bonaparte jones. "billy's got nothing," said juggie. "so he hasn't," said gov. grimes. "we ought to have a secretary, to put up notices and soon." "billy shall be that," declared the president. as billy was backward in his studies and could not write, his office promised to be one of great honor and no duties. every body had been pat into office except one, shy, silent, little olive-face, tony. he was contented to be an unnoticed flower in the field. charlie was the first to detect it, and whispered to sid, "tony hasn't got nothing." it was felt to be a very small kind of a club that had not an office for every member, and tony was made assistant-sentinel. the club was in raptures, every body in office! "what shall be the name of the club?" asked the president. this was followed by a long discussion. earth and sky were searched for a name. "call it star club," said billy. "no, that aint bright enough," replied the governor. the titles "sun," "moon," and "comet" were successively rejected. "let's ask teacher," chirped little pip. the idea took, and it was resolved to visit "teacher" as soon as the club had been manufactured. "i think we ought to pay something," suggested charlie. the club resolved that each member should pay a cent a month. "and what do with the money?" asked the governor. "buy swords," replied the martial jugurtha. the idea spread like wild-fire, and, not stopping to count how long at the above rate it would take to accumulate money sufficient to buy a sword for every one, the club voted juggie's proposition a wise and patriotic one. "i think," said the self-forgetful sid, "that the president ought to have the first sword." "and the governor next," said rick. "and the treasury next," said charlie. "i'm that, charlie, too, and i want one," clamored pip. "a sentinel ought to have one fust, 'cause he's at de door, and might hab to dribe away down-townies," said juggie. "no, me first," said the governor. "no, me," said the president. "no, me," said the secretary. it was "me!" "me!" "me!" all over the barn chamber, and the members of that swordless club were almost at swords' points. "sposin' we 'journ this," said charlie the peace-maker, remembering the rule for "doing things" in meetings. "yes," exclaimed sid, "and until we get a real sword each one can chalk a sword on his pants." "hurrah!" sang out gov. grimes, and each one, happy in the thought that he could have a sword as speedily as his neighbor, cheered lustily. "now, boys, let's go and see 'teacher' about our name," suggested the president. the barn was vacated at once, and the members of the club went down stairs as if a fire were after them, and then rushed along the lane, all heading for a cozy story-and-a-half house where "teacher" lived. "the sunday-school teacher" was miss bertha barry, brown-haired, brown-eyed, vivacious bertha barry. all the boys were in her class, save tony. "o, she won't do for a teacher," said old mrs. jones, when the pastor invited bertha to enter the sunday-school as a worker. "too flighty!" "she wont stick," growled timothy scriggins, a venerable male gossip, who scolded every body and every thing, satisfied only with timothy scriggins. however, she _did do_ and she did _stick_. the boys took a very positive fancy to this young, sprightly, energetic teacher, and their liking lasted. she compelled their respect and she won their hearts. they looked upon her as an older sister, and promptly confided to her their troubles and solicited her advice. in a troop, running, panting, they came into her yard and presented themselves at her door. "come into the sitting-room, boys. glad to see you. well!" her air said: "i wonder what brought my class in a body to me," something was evidently on the minds of all. the president quickly dissipated the mystery. "we--we--" said sid, trying to catch his breath, "have--formed a--club--and--want--you--to name it." "yes! yes! yes!" was the chorus coming from the eager faces turned up to miss bertha. "name a club? dear me! what shall i tell you? where is your club?" "here!" said sid, looking round in pride. "no; i mean, where do you hold your meetings?" "in my barn," said charlie. "you go in from the street and go up some stairs. it's up stairs." "you might go up higher," added the governor. "there's a ladder there, so you can get up--up in the cupelo, but you wont want to go up there." "why, that suggests a name. it's a little odd, but you'll think of it every time you go up stairs and see the ladder. call it 'up-the-ladder club,' and then it will have a meaning that you are boys who mean to do your best, climbing up always, up, up, up!" miss bertha here reached as high as she could, and her admirers, with sparkling eyes, stretched upward their small arms, also, shouting, "up-the-ladder club! up-the-ladder club!" "i'll put it to vote, teacher," said the president, with dignity. "those in favor of it, say 'aye.'" a ringing "aye" was now given, and after it, came a sharp-featured, wrinkled face at the door. "land's sake, bertha, what's the matter?" "o it's only my class, grandmother." "it scat me dreadfully. i thought it was fire," and, saying this, the old lady, with a sigh of relief, withdrew. "and now, teacher, we want a badge; something to wear, you know," exclaimed sid. "what's that you have on?" miss bertha asked of juggie. "a sword," replied that warrior, displaying his right leg, on which he had already chalked a sword. "that's for the down-townies," said the governor, in a martial tone. "i'm--afraid--the 'down-townies' will laugh at that; are not you?" the club had only thought of what they might do to the "down-townies," not at all of what the latter would do to them. they certainly had not given a thought to any ridicule these old enemies might heap upon them. a sadden chill now struck the sword-plan and it went down in the boys' estimation like the mercury in the glass on a cold day. "now, i don't want my class to be sword-boys. i can't say i fancy the idea. i will tell you something that i think will be nice, and i will make the badge." here the mercury began to climb the glass again, and that chilled look in the boys' faces began to thaw out. "i will make you--each one of you--a pretty white shield, to be worn on the left arm, make it of pasteboard, so it will be stiff, and then cover it nicely with white silk." the boys began to hurrah. the mercury was away up the glass now. "a white shield, that will mean something. that means purity, honesty, every thing good and fair, and that your beautiful white shield will be your defense against harm. you are my knights of the white shield." the applause following this was almost tumultuous. "you are the up-the-ladder club, that is, boys who are always going ahead in every thing good; climbing up, not lazy or bad, but boys, with an ambition--a true up-the-ladder club--" "or," suggested sid, impressively, "the knights of the white shield." how charlie did admire the ready wit of the president! the enthusiasm of the club increased. as in that reputed story of maria theresa, where her nobles are said to have surrounded her, and, waving their swords enthusiastically, pledged her their support, so the up-the-ladder club waved their caps around this their young queen. the excitement became so intense it was necessary to open the door to give it suitable vent, and out into the open air went these newly-dubbed knights. "there go bertha barry's boys, i know," growled timothy scriggins, who chanced to meet this band of knights issuing from the yard of their queen. "i never saw sich a teacher." well, the boys loved her. there was now a rush for the barn. when they had all safely arrived in the chamber, charlie suddenly and soberly exclaimed, "there!" "what's the matter?" inquired sid. "you look pale. has any one put his sword--i mean his shield into--i mean on you?" charlie did not feel like joking. a dark thought had overshadowed him and changed a peaceful to a threatening sky. "what is it?" asked gov. grimes. "i did not," replied charlie, "ask aunt stanshy if we might have the barn!" that was an omission indeed, and the club appreciated it, as "aunt stanshy" was well known by the boys. all the sunshine seemed to disappear suddenly and a cloud was on every thing. aunt stanshy's name in full was constantia, but, like the crown-jewels of england, it was only used on very important occasions. the house and barn both belonged to aunt stanshy, property that had been willed her by her father, solomon macomber, whose body slept under the wings of a blue-stone cherub in the cemetery. her nephew, charles, on the death of his wife, came to live with aunt stanshy, bringing his infant heir. when the father died, little charlie was left in aunt stanshy's care. she was a tall, resolute woman, so tall that simes badger told charlie that when he wanted to put colors on a flag-staff, he needn't go out of the house. that made charlie mad. aunt stanshy had sharp, black eyes, and spectacles made them look all the sharper. as charlie said, "aunt stanshy's eyes sometimes look as if they had snappin' crackers in 'em." aunt stanshy was really kind at heart and really loved charlie, and he had all the comforts of home; but she would sometimes speak quick, and she was always sure to "speak her mind," be the rate of speech slow or quick. simes badger was a retired old salt and kept the light-house; not that scanty funds compelled him, but mostly because he must do something about the sea to keep him at all contented. simes once remarked, "i'll allow that stanshy is a leetle tart at times, and i've knowed her since she was a gal. but then if you take a good sour apple and stew it and sugar it, it makes a first-class apple-pie. howsomever, it must be well stewed and well sugared." the boys now trembled lest this vigorous, resolute soul might not favor their plans, and denying it a place of meeting might end the days of the infant club. "there," said sid, mournfully, "we've made a club, but we've got no place to stick it in! how would it do to make aunt stanshy an honorary member of the club?" the faces of all brightened at this happy thought. "and not athk her to pay a thent a month, but ektheuth her," suggested pip, who had a lisping style of speech. this was another happy thought and acceptable to the club. "i'll go and ask her," said charlie. as he went down stairs, the members of the club gathered around the open window, anxiously looking out and awaiting the return of their embassador to her majesty in the kitchen, constantia the first. aunt stanshy was washing clothes when charlie entered. with a drooping head and faltering tongue he told about the club and asked for the barn, having announced her honorary membership, and also the remission of the monthly due. aunt stanshy had a streak of fun in her nature and a big one. when she looked out into the yard, and glancing up saw the seven sober, anxious faces at the barn window, she laughed and said, "well, charlie, have i got to lug a big, heavy white shield around?" "o it's a beautiful one of pasteboard and silk." "well, well, say yes." when he had gone, aunt stanshy took her hands out of the suds, sat down in a flag-bottomed chair by the store, and laughed till her sides ached. she was washing again when the granny of the "sentinel" came in to help her. granny took the flag-bottomed chair and asked, "what's de news, stanshy?" aunt stanshy burst out laughing, and the big ribbon-ends of her cap fluttered like a pennant at the mast-head. "why, i'm an honorary member and sha'n't have to pay a cent; ha, ha, ha!" "a what?" but aunt stanshy made no explanation. she only pounded her clothes and roared, so tickled was she. subsiding, she soon broke out again. "why, chile, what's de matter?" asked granny. "you done gone crazy and sure for't." "i'm an honorary member, and have got to wear a silk shield, i tell you." granny went home, shaking her head and saying, "i do b'lieve she's losin' her mind sure, and dat am mournfu' in one so young an' lubly." chapter ii. the grand march. "please, aunty, lend me your wash-stick." as he spoke charlie was all excitement, running eagerly from the barn into the house. obtaining the coveted treasure, he as eagerly ran back. two minutes passed. "may i have the curtain-stick up in your chamber that you don't want?" "how do you know i don't want it?" "'cause it's doing nothing, standing up in the corner." "o what eyes! yes, you may have it." three minutes went. "aunty, couldn't i have the broom-handle out in the entry? some of the boys knew you wouldn't let me, but i said you would. i knew you would let a feller take it," said the ingenious charlie. "for pity's sake, charles pitt macomber, what next?" this was charlie's real name and used for greater impressiveness. "that broom-handle is what i fasten the back window with, and if any bugglars get in tonight, i must blame you." however, charlie carried his point. in a few minutes he appeared again, and pointed at his shoulder. "aunty, see here!" "why, charles pitt, what have you done to your shoulder?" charlie grinned. there, on the left shoulder, was a chalk shield. "teacher, of course, must have time to make our silk shields, and so we got up these." aunt stanshy's eyes let out some funny, bright sparks. "o, no, it's only the grand march." "the grand march!" "yes, and see here, aunty. i have only this chalk shield, and you don't want your boy to go that way. please let me take that old sword above the sitting-room mantel-piece," pleaded charlie, with beseeching eyes. "grandsir's sword? o that wont do. why, that sword was at the battles of quebec and banker hill and waterloo and--" constantia! in her loyalty to grandsir's memory, she was unconsciously mentioning places he had never been in! all this array of names only fired charlie's ardor. at last aunt stanshy said, "there, take it! the next thing, i spose, you'll want me." "we may; but you'd have to dress up in man's clothes, you know." "never!" said aunt stanshy, firmly. "don't go out of the lane with grandsir's sword!" "we'll be along soon." "how will i know it? i may be up stairs." "we will give three cheers under the window." there was an increasing commotion in the barn chamber. "now, fellers!" exclaimed sid waters. "you won't be ready for the grand march." "yes, yes, yes," they shouted back. "is the chariot ready for the president?" inquired sid. "yes," said charlie, who purposed to furnish his go-cart for the occasion. "it's down in the yard." "i have the first ride, you know." "and i the second," said the governor. "yes, but the governor must go behind while the president rides." rick's heart sank within him, but all had promised to obey orders and there was no appeal. "every feller's--i mean knight's--uniform ready?" asked the president. charlie's certainly was. every moment he could spare out of school that day, he had been sewing in his snug little bedroom. such stitches! they looked like pairs of bars trying to straddle a brush fence. for epaulets he arranged pieces of black cloth, the center of each being brightened with a strip of red. his belt was made of white flannel dotted with a flaming row of red stars, and with these were interspersed various sizes of mild chocolate suns. each of the other warriors sported a chalk shield, as did charlie. this was the only thing in common. other insignia varied in character, color, and size, as much as would those of chinese, anglo-saxon and zulu troops. pip peckham, in his anxiety for distinction, had chalked a shield on each shoulder! the cheapness of the material used would readily permit this, but pip's appearance was insignificant beside charlie's, who strode forward to the march, flourishing grandsir's sword. not even alexander, julius cã¦sar, napoleon, or general grant, ever had a sword to be compared with charlie's that day. the warriors moved out from their "armory" into the yard. aunt stanshy was up stairs making a bed. suddenly under her window, arose a wild, semi-civilized, semi-barbarous shout. "what is to pay?" she screamed. "o those little boobies!" and she sprang to the window. the "grand march" had been inaugurated with full pomp. sid waters, as president, was sitting in the go-cart, his head ornamented with a huge smothering three-cornered hat, made out of a new york daily. rick grimes, as governor, was walking behind the go-cart, now and then giving the "chariot" an obsequious push, but impatiently awaiting his turn for a ride. billy grimes and pip peckham were serving as horses, and soldiers also, pulling along the president and sharing the broom-handle between them. whether that handle might be a "musket" or a "spear," no one could say. charlie served as a body-guard, now looking at aunt stanshy's window and then glancing in pride at grandsir's sword. juggie was a color-bearer, and at the same time a color-guard of one appeared in the shape of tony, flourishing aunt stanshy's clothes-stick. the colors were a very small american flag on a very long bean-pole. twenty feet ahead of the whole procession, in solitary glory, walked wort. he was a kind of "chief marshal," sid had said, but wort could not forget that he had also been made "keeper of the great seal" that very day, and in token of it he took along the borrowed curtain-stick. "halt!" this summons came not from the chief marshal but the president, and was promptly obeyed by all. wort retreated from his advanced position and assumed command. "the grand review will now begin," he shouted. "the whole of you may get into line. now forward! for--_ward_!" "say wheel, first!" called out sid, not intending aunt stanshy or any other spectator should hear the advice be thought it necessary to give the chief marshal. "wheel first!" shouted wort, but the only "wheel" that started was one on the go-cart, which concluded to leave its axle, much to the disgust of the president and the confusion of the company. sid sprang from the cart. "here, let me do it, wort." "form in line!" wort shouted majestically. "form in line!" sid was whispering to several old veterans. "where's juggie?" "here, cap'n." "keep your bugle handy and sound it when wort says, 'charge!'" juggie proudly brandished a fish-horn which he had borrowed of simes badger. "shoulder arms!" screamed wort. "ground arms!" "ow, my teeth!" squeaked pip, whose foot had been vigorously rammed by billy grimes. "order arms! present arms! march! charge!" these directions followed one another so rapidly that only the oldest veterans, and they wildly, could attempt obedience. "blow your bugle!" shouted sid to juggie. "charge! cavalry, forward!" wort was shrieking. it was a wild melee. the cavalry (go-cart) was shoved forward by gov. grimes, running it against pip and billy, while the "infantry" rushed ahead, each on his own hook, the color-bearer and the color-guard trying to get into place somewhere. wort vainly endeavored to keep at the head of something or somebody. all this time juggie was swelling his cheeks and sounding his horn, and this was the only thing that was successfully done. fortunately the ground to be charged across was not a long stretch, and in a moment they were all shoving against the fence. "wort, you didn't do that right," claimed the president. "yes, i did." "no, you're wrong," asserted sid. "let me try?" asked rick. "no, this will do," said sid. "you may march us, rick." this compromise was accepted. away they all went, rick strutting forward with great dignity, but juggie waved his flag cautiously, for the flourishing of such a long pole might lead to his capsizing. tony followed juggie. billy and pip still tugged at the go-cart that the president continued to monopolize. charlie solemnly guarded the precious freight in the "chariot." wort, who had been at the head of the column, had now wandered to the rear, and his face wore a puzzled look, as if he did not know where to put the chief marshal. "you ought to have two policemen in front," squeaked a little voice from the sidewalk. it was tommy keys, a small boy, who had seen a procession in boston, and thought he knew how such things ought to be managed. "shet up," shouted the governor, indignant at even the faintest suggestion of weakness, and he rushed upon tommy with a drawn clothes-stick. away went the terrified tommy. "so may all our foes be routed!" said the president, and to this sentiment there was a response of three cheers. alas, how soon all that pride was to be humiliated! the column was now nearing the head of the lane which ran into water street, the leading business avenue of the town. sid, who always had an eye out to the course that was prudent, was exclaiming, in low tones, "don't--don't go too near water street! look out for down-townies, fellers!" it is often the case in a village of any size that there will be among the boys two parties representing two different sections and supposed to represent two different ideas and civilizations. seamont had its boy-clans, those at the lower end of the village being the down-townies, and those at the upper end were designated as up-townies. the club belonged to the up-townies, "the only fit class for gentlemen," sid had declared the down-townies delighted to hurl all kinds of epithets at the other boys, and these "gentlemen" up-townies could sling titles almost as successfully, and both sides would sometimes give additional flavor to their epithets by means of missiles, even as mothers sometimes season their injunctions to boys with a twig from the old apple-tree in the yard. the club had had no hand in these intestine feuds, but sympathized with the warriors in their neighborhood, the up-townies. there had been war recently between the two hostile sections, so that the boys did not venture far from their homes, and what did our valiant column now run into but a band of six belligerent down-townies! the club, at sid's suggestion, had already passed a vote to give no quarter to down-townies, and that in case of trouble it should be "war to the last drop!" they prudently did not say what that drop might be, blood or only perspiration. here was a grand test-hour close at hand. one of the down-townies raised a provoking cry, "ho, fellers; see those little ragamuffins!" he pointed toward the column, whose advance juggie was enthusiastically stimulating by loud and prolonged blasts on the fish-horn. "boys, let's go for 'em," said one of the down-townies. raising the war-whoop of the down-townies, which was a savage, senseless yell, and lacking the fine martial tones of the up-townies' battle-cry, the enemy made their charge. sid waters stepped, or leaped rather, from the "chariot" and ran toward the barn. away went the "colors" in the hands of juggie, almost capsizing him, as the tall standard swayed violently. away went wort, and away went tony. away rattled the go-cart, billy and pip making excellent time as they dragged it along. an engine rushing to a fire could not have gone much faster. "don't run!" shouted gov. grimes. "stand your ground, my men! rally!" "no, sir," said charlie, replying to the first appeal, and then, in response to the second, said, quickly, "yes, sir." charlie was the only one among "my men" willing to "rally." but the governor was not discouraged. he was resolute, even at times to stubbornness. he waved his clothes-stick and shrieked, "come on! i defy you!" charlie also looked defiant; but he was so intent on facing the enemy that he did not pay proper attention to his armor, and the sword that had been so loyal to grandsir now turned into a rebel to charlie. it did what swords will sometimes do; it insisted on mixing up with his chubby legs as he changed his position, and over he went! rick had grappled the enemy, but it was a hopeless struggle, and things looked ominous for that fragment of the club now in the battle. suddenly a sharp, penetrating, commanding voice was heard. "don't you touch 'em, you rascals," and a tall, resolute figure rose above the prostrate charlie, flourishing a broom. it was aunt stanshy, who, from her window, had watched the boys, and, seeing the approach of that down-town thunder-cloud, rushed out to meet the storm. her prowess was witnessed by simes badger, who, as a leading village gossip, was loafing away an hour of leisure in a flag-bottomed chair before silas trefethen's grocery. he told the story to all the village gossips of the masculine sex who gathered at the grocery as soon as they had swallowed their tea and had done as few chores at home as possible. "well!" said simes, laughing. he was a gaunt, long-drawn-out man, owning a straggling, gray beard, a pair of brown, twinkling eyes, and a nasal voice. "i saw something, to-day, that beat the dutch. it was aunt stanshy, and she did beat the dutch; yes, she did, yaw, yaw, yaw! you see a parcel of young ones went up the lane in fine feather, colors flying and drums beat-in'." (this, to mildly put it, was a misstatement, as not a drum was there to be beaten; but simes had a weakness for "misstatements.") "well, they neared water street, and just then the enemy appeared, a lot of down-townies, yaw, yawl my, didn't those sojers scatter, all but two! i expected them two would be cut up like meat in a sausage-machine, but, turnin' to look down the lane, i saw a sight! it was stanshy! she had left the house, broom in hand, and rushed up to the battle-ground, and there she stood among them down-townie chaps, and she fetched that broom backward an forward in grand style, as if sweepin' out of the way a lot of dirt!" here simes, who always fancied that he was gifted with dramatic powers unusually fine, pulled a broom out of the stock in a neighboring barrel, and began to sway it backward and forward. "my! didn't stanshy sweep the battle-field? the enemy went down like leaves before a november gale!" simes, who was bound to act out the narrative, gave an unlucky sweep with his broom above the heads of his grinning and gaping auditors, and whacked silas trefethen, who was behind the counter putting up codfish. "mind, simes, there! what are you up to, man?" shouted silas, tartly, trying to make a stand against the staggering blow dealt amid the laughter of simes's auditors. "o, o! 'scuse me, silas! i was only 'lustratin'." "'lustrate next time on that post behind you. if stanshy macomber had such rigor in her arm as that, i pity those down-townies!" was not aunt stanshy indignant when she heard how simes badger had taken her off at the store! "i'll try my broom on him next time," she told juggie's granny. aunt stanshy was very popular with the club, who passed a vote of thanks to their honorary member. the down-townies, though, christened her "the dragon of the lane," and did not venture near her. knowing that this fear existed, sid waters and other members of the club, especially the runaways, now ventured several times as far as water street, shouting defiance to imaginary enemies behind corners and trees. sid was exceedingly daring with his tongue. it was noticed that he never again _rode_ on such occasions. he evidently wished to have his legs handy, as he could rely on these better than the go-cart. chapter iii. for sunday-school scholars, an offer. charlie and aunt stanshy worshiped at st. john's. dear old st. john's! it was a brick edifice, homely in its style, but glorious in its associations. it had two tiers of arched windows, the upper row letting light into a long, lofty gallery, that generally had for its occupants perhaps a dozen very shy auditors. if a "coaster" were in port over sunday, then the heavy, shuffling tread of several men of the sea might be heard on the gallery stairs. this might happen when the service was a third through, and by the time it was two thirds through the shuffling tread might be heard on the stairs again, and this time echoing toward the door. the gallery was plain and old-fashioned in its finish, but it was supported by twisted wooden pillars considered to be marvels of architectural ingenuity in their day. the pews were old-fashioned in their form and decoration; but then they were surrounded by so many dear associations of the past, that when aunt stanshy entered one of those box pews she seemed to have stepped aboard a ship and it drifted her at once far, far away among old friends. on a rainy day, especially, did aunt stanshy enjoy the old church. true, not many would come out, and their heads above the backs of the pews looked like scattered turtle heads lifted above the surface of a pond in the woods. aunt stanshy was sure to be there, and, while she heard the rain beating upon the windows, there was the minister's voice reverently echoing in prayer, and aunt stanshy had such a sense of protection from this world's many storms. on fair-weather sundays there would be quite a rush for the old church. the browns, pauls, randalls, jamesons, tapieys, would turn up, smiling, radiant and self-assured as if they had never been absent from church a single service. their manner almost seemed to declare that they had been there day and night. o, young people, do dare to be rainy-weather christians! aunt stanshy and charlie were walking away from the church the noon of the sunday after the grand march. at st. john's, the sunday-school followed the morning service. "aunty," said charlie, nudging his companion, "here comes somebody." that somebody was mr. walton, to whom were intrusted the spiritual interests of the congregation. he was tall, stalwart, owned a fair complexion, and wore his hair rather long; hair, too, that would curl, no matter how patiently the brush and comb coaxed it to be straight and dignified. his blue eyes had a rather sharp look at first when turned toward you, but you soon felt that they were kindly, sympathetic, and magnetic. mr. walton was very friendly toward the boys, and for that reason he had a strong hold on the affections of many little fellows. "well, miss macomber, i am glad to see you out, and as for my boy here, i should miss him ever so much if he were not in my school." "i should miss _you_, if you wasn't there," replied charlie, anxious to return the compliment. "don't you know of some boy you could get into the school, charlie?" asked mr. walton. "i know of one who belongs to my club." "you belong to a club! what is the name of it?" "the u. t. l. club." "u. t. l.! what does that mean?" "it is miss bertha barry's notion, sir," explained aunt stanshy, with an air that was somewhat critical. then she had noticed, or fancied that she had detected, that mr. walton, who was single, rather liked miss bertha and her ideas. he did not seem to notice aunt stanshy's tone, but remarked, "u. t. l.! that means 'up too late!'" "ha, ha, guess again," replied the delighted charlie. "useful to learn!" "no sir." "up with the lark!" "you have got one word too many in there. 'up the' is right." "up the--lane!" "that's where i live," said aunt stanshy, proudly. "up the--" "it's 'up the ladder,' sir," said charlie. "well, up-the-ladder boys ought to be making advances and going ahead all the time." "that is what teacher says." "what do you do in the club?" "we had a grand march yesterday, and we have a pammerrammer next saturday." "all the boys in your club go to sunday-school?" "all except tony." "who is tony?" "he's an italian boy, and his father is away off." "couldn't you get him into your class?" "i might try." "i will make the club an offer. if they will get five boys into school and keep them there two months, i will give them a banner." charlie was delighted and promised to tell the boys in the club. mr. walton here left charlie and aunt stanshy, and went to his home. aunt stanshy greatly reverenced any one who led the worship of the congregation in the old church and encompassed such with a dignity-fence that was about as high as the famous steeple of old st. john's, and that was a landmark for souls at sea. then there was a family mystery about mr. walton that fascinated aunt stanshy. he lived with his old white-haired mother, and there were hints and whispers that the two mourned over a once wayward and now absent member of the family. it leaked out that this was a son younger than mr. walton, and he had married a beautiful foreign lady whom the clergyman loved also, but had relinquished to the younger brother. this younger son was off somewhere on the sea, it was whispered; but he had a child ashore. on stormy days, it was noticed that the white-haired mother would watch the steeple, which consisted of a series of diminutive houses rising one above the other, as if ambitious to fly, but finally relinquishing the task into the hands or wings rather of a gilded weather-cock. the mother would watch the pigeons flying into their hiding-places in the steeple, seeking a refuge from the wild storm, and then her eyes would be lifted higher to the weather-vane, as if seeking for news about the sea-wind. still higher went her thoughts--to god. "she's thinking of _him_, that son," said the observant neighbors, who never knowingly gave up a chance to see something. to aunt stanshy this bit of mystery only made mr. walton all the more interesting. mr. walton thought the next day he would fish for scholars in the grimes neighborhood, where tony lived. billy and rick, or "the governor," as the club boys more generally called him now, lived in a long, low-roofed building that had two green doors. one door led into the home where lived simes badger when off duty at the light house. his wife took care of tony. in the other part of the house lived billy and the "governor" with jotham and ann grimes. billy was the child of jotham and ann. the "governor's" parents lived in dakota, but kept him at the east for the sake of an education in its better schools. it was after dark when mr. walton chanced to reach the long, low-roofed house, and "rap-rap" went his vigorous knuckles against green door number one. "who's there?" sang out a boyish voice within. "tush, tush, tony! wait till i come," said simes from his little bedroom at one side of the kitchen. he was off duty, jotham grimes having gone to the light-house. "it may be some sailor who wants me," added simes. mr. walton, having heard a boy's voice, concluded its owner must still be at the door, and he announced his errand. "it's rather late to call, but i wanted to know if you wouldn't like to come into our sunday-school?" "no, your old sunday-school may go to the bottom of the sea," was the gruff reply of the disappointed simes, who did not know his caller. mr. walton felt that it might be prudent at that hour to withdraw, but he did not relinquish his intention to secure tony; and tony finally came to school. the boy exceedingly interested the minister. "where have i seen that face?" asked mr. walton, and with bowed head he sat in his study brooding over the problem, looking intently down as if trying to make out a pearl at the bottom of the sea. chapter iv. the pammerrammer. "auntie, what do you think a couple of standing up collars would cost?" "a standing up collar, charles pitt! what do you want that for?" "why, we have a pammerrammer to-morrow, and i am the one to 'splain it; that is, me or the governor." "he is gettin' to be a man!" thought aunt stanshy in sorrow. "a pammerrammer!" she inquired. "i most get into that. do you have spectators?" "o, yes. it is only a cent a ticket, and that will get you a reserved seat." "then i must take a reserved seat." aunt stanshy told the boys she would come whenever they notified her that the pammerrammer was ready. a lively shout of announcement soon came from half a dozen heralds up in the barn window, and aunt stanshy dropped her sewing. "all ready, aunty! come now," shouted charlie. aunt stanshy quickened her steps into a run. "there goes stanshy," said simes badger, watching her from silas trefethen's grocery. "runnin' t' a fire, i guess. she only needs an engine behind her t' make the thing complete." flying through the yard, aunt stanshy rushed up the barn chamber stairs. passing the "sentinel" with the powerful aid of a cent, she looked around upon the chamber. in its center there was a stout wooden post, and between this post and a closet, at one end of the chamber, there had been suspended a dirty, ragged sheet, which the governor's aunt had taken from the attic and given to the club. across this sheet stretched a panoramic strip of paper which aunt stanshy at once recognized as charlie's handiwork. it took two boys, sid and wort, to stand at the two ends of the curtain and manage the "pammerrammer." as sid unrolled the glorious succession of artistic beauties that charlie had sketched, wort at the other end pulled them along and rolled them up. in front of the curtain was ranged a plank. a carpenter's bench that bordered a wall of the barn supported one end of the plank, and a barrel the other end. this elevated roost was denominated "reserved seats," and all cent admissions secured "one of the most eligible chances in the hall," so sid declared. there was a string of sweet little beauties on the bench, girls from the neighborhood, and among them was little may waters, her face one of wonderful vivacity, a kind of panorama in itself, where the most varied emotions chased one another in rapid succession. aunt stanshy found a sled to sit on, and the performance began. gov. grimes wished to try his hand first at explaining the pictures. he began, grandiloquently, "this--this--is a building, no, faneuil hall. the next is a picture of a ship. that is a--" "don't roll her so tight, wort," whispered a voice behind the curtain. "monkey!" said the governor, finishing his sentence, but unfortunately chancing to look toward that sensitive soul, pip peckham. "i aint," said pip. "who said you was?" inquired wort. "you!" charged pip, turning to the governor. "i didn't." "you looked at me." "silence in the audience!" shrieked sid to the now jolly spectators. "you've got your end all twisted up, wort," said the governor. "o dear!" groaned the president. the straightening out of the last difficulty was effected after a while, and gov. grimes began again: "here are some big, black dogs in a melon-patch." "bears, bears!" eagerly whispered charlie, alarmed for the reputation of a club that could not tell the difference between dogs and bears. "well, bears, then," said the governor petulantly, "and i aint going to be it any more." the discomfited lecturer insisted on resigning, and charlie took the floor. he knew his old and beloved "pammerrammer" by heart, and he began promptly where the governor left off. "here are some bears in a melon-patch. there's a picture of westminster abbey, and here's a boy lifting a girl over a fence, and here's a flag from europe, and here's one from some part of asia or some other place." in the midst of charlie's glib description there was a crash. the plank, _alias_ the reserved seats, did not have a firm support. its weakness had been noticed, but not remedied. "who's the one to fix the bench?" inquired sid. "the governor," replied wort. but the governor was not one who believed in aunt stanshy's motto, "do to-day's things to-day." she was trying to impress it on charlie, but she could not be expected to stamp every mind in the club with the necessity of the injunction. "one boy is enough for me," she would say. the plank had remained firm as long as it could, but several wriggling children were too much even for the patience of a plank, and--down it went! little may waters dropped at the feet of charlie as he was busily "'splaining." he gallantly picked her up and tried to comfort her, and various members of the club rushed to the rescue of other ladies. it was concluded now to adjourn the "pammerrammer." "man down in the yard!" called out wort, who was "sentinel" when he had nothing else to do. wort looked over the edge of the window-sill. about all he could see was an old hat, and a very bad hat at that. "let's sprinkle him! we can say we only saw a hat," and immediately scraping up with his foot a quantity of hay-seed, he liberally sprinkled the seedy hat. it was like unto like. "now look here," said sid, "that was mean. if your father wore an old hat, how would you like to have a feller sprinkle hay-seed on it?" sid had a good deal of the gentleman about him. "there he comes! there he comes! put!" said wort. a foot-step could be plainly heard on the stairs, and wort started for the closet, again saying, "put!" "i am not going to run," said the governor, with his usual resoluteness. "nor i," said sid. "nor i," said charlie. "nor i," said billy. others declared the same. they all stood their ground, or floor, rather. the noise on the stairs was continued, and soon a seed-strewn hat appeared in sight, and then a big head of hair, and then a man's body. the boys clustered closely together, and when the man turned toward them, they saw that the roughly-dressed man had a roughly featured face, but its expression was kindly. "he will eat uth up," whispered pip, trying to get behind billy grimes. the stranger was not a cannibal though. he took off his hat, shook it, and said, "if that was an accident, it's all right. if any one did it, meaning to do it, was it just the thing?" the boys felt the appeal and shook their heads. "we don't justify it, and i'm the president," said sid, with a look of importance, "and no one of us that you see did it." "i hope not. sometimes folks are not lucky, and if any of your fathers went trampin' round and couldn't get work, you wouldn't like to have any body throw hay-seed on him." "no, that's so," said charlie. "it's too bad!" the man turned to go down stairs. "i--i guess my aunt could give you a job. she wanted somebody this morning to saw her wood." "did she? where is she?" "i'll show you," and charlie's obliging drumsticks followed the man down stairs. then he went into the kitchen and made an appeal for the stranger. "well, i'll give him the job," replied aunt stanshy. in a minute more the man was at the wood-pile driving aunt stanshy's saw rapidly through a stick of pine. the club had been looking out of the window while charlie interceded for the man. when he joined his clubmates some one exclaimed, "what's that?" it was a noise from the closet into which wort had plunged, or, rather, a noise that started there, for it was continued down into the story below, even as the noise of a rushing snow-slide along a roof begins at the ridgepole, but ends on the ground beneath the eaves. "it's wort!" said charlie, excitedly. "o dear! he's gone." "gone where?" inquired sid. "into the bowels of the earth?" charlie's answer was to rush down stairs, followed by the club in a very hasty and undignified way. there, at the end of a long spout that terminated eight inches from the floor, was a couple of good-sized legs squirming to get out. then wort's voice was heard, coming from the interior of the box, "let me out! let me out!" "can't you _get_ out?" asked the governor. "no, no! let me out! let me out--quick!" it was even so. wort must be _let_ out. "o, aunt stanshy, wort--wort--is in the fodder-box, and can't get out!" shrieked charlie at the open kitchen window. "what under the sun--" and, without a word more, aunt stanshy left the clothes she was washing and rushed into the yard. "come here, mister, and bring your saw," she said to the man at the wood-pile, "and, charlie, bring a hammer from the nail-box on the entry-shelf!" the man at the wood-pile rushed after aunt stanshy, saw in hand, while charlie hurriedly brought the hammer. "now saw into that box and knock away with the hammer, mister. you see, silas trefethen wanted to hire my barn last winter, and thought he would put in what he called a fodder-box running down from the closet above to this floor, and then intended to knock the closet away when he had carried the box down here, thinking he might save some steps that way, but he was taken sick and the closet was left there; and that closet floor, i suppose, wasn't left just right." aunt stanshy was talking while the man was sawing and hammering away. he plied his tools vigorously, and soon let wort out into the full light of day once more. the boys shouted and laughed also as wort wriggled forward into liberty. he looked up, but seeing that his liberator was the man he had seeded, he dropped his head, and, refusing to look again, slunk away with an air that indicated a strong desire to find another box where he could shut himself up for the present. the man concluded who his enemy was, and he said, "i guess we are even now." chapter v. the nation's birthday. "the great thing on the fourth is to have a good time," said the president. "no, the great thing," said the practical governor, "is to be sure and wake up in season." "that's so," chimed several voices in chorus. "how shall we fix it?" asked pip. "tie your toe to the bed-post," said some one. "put a lot of stones in your bed," said sid, "and then you can't sleep easy." "two sleep together and tie their toes to one another," said the governor. objections were found against all these plans, as they had been ineffectually tried by various members of the club. "go and holler under every boy's window," said billy grimes, with the air of one who had made an important discovery. "i will holler under your's, pip," was his magnificent offer. "but who will be the feller to go to your window?" asked sid. "why--why--_you_." "well, who will holler under my window?" said sid. "i," said wort. "and under yours?" continued the president. "i," said juggie. "and who under juggle's?" "i," said tony. "and who under tony's?" "i," said charlie. "and who under charlie's?" that was a problem. "aunt thanthy," suggested pip. "aunt stanshy is going out visiting," remarked charlie. there was a very sad pause. despair was on the faces of the club. a happy thought came to charlie. "some one has got to sit up and wake the next one, and i will. i can take a nap the next forenoon, you know." "three cheers for charlie!" called out wort, and they were cordially given. it was arranged on the spot that charlie should sit up. if aunt stanshy had been at home she would have vetoed the plan, but, purposing to be absent the night before the fourth she had engaged silas junkins to stay with charlie and guard the premises. charlie had no difficulty in obtaining silas's consent to the plan, and not only his consent, but also his co-operation. in the main entry of aunt stanshy's house was a tall, old-fashioned clock. it was an aged household servant, and had done duty in the entry many years. it always stood in one place, one particular corner in the rear of the entry. it is a wonder its voice did not show any sign of collapse, as it had called off the hours so many years. it would not have been strange if it had lost its patience. but uncomplainingly, even cheerily and without any sign of weakness, it told you what time it was. charlie sometimes heard it in the night, and then it sounded like, "cheer up! cheer up!" its pleasant voice halting on the "cheer," and then emphasizing the "up." it divided all its peals into two such notes, and when charlie heard it strike one o'clock the effect was quite enlivening as be lay there in his dark little chamber. at an hour earlier, when it sounded twelve "cheer ups," what a joyous procession of notes that was! it was like a watchman's voice ringing out "all's well!" twelve times. it occurred to charlie that he might occupy a chair in the entry, and, if at all inclined to go to sleep, the striking of the clock would keep him awake. silas junking moved a table into the entry for charlie, and set a lamp on it. at nine silas, who enjoyed very much a large quantity of sleep, went to his rest in a little bedroom on the same floor with the entry. "you can step into my room and wake me, charlie, if any thing happens." "o, i sha'n't need to," was the watchboy's very emphatic reply. "well, good-night!" "good-night!" "now all i've got to do," soliloquized charlie, "is just to keep awake, and it is a great deal better than to go to sleep with a string tying your big toe to the bed-post. hark, there is some one firing off a gun! wont i wake 'em with a blow on my horn!" here he saw himself, as he visited house after house, arousing boy after boy. it would be like the falling of a row of bricks, where the only need is to push over the first one and the whole set will follow. every thing, though, depended on the fall of the first brick. would charlie do his part? "i'll take this story-book about indians, giants, and fairies," he said, "into the entry, and that will keep me awake splendid." it was a book startling enough, and the trouble was that it was too startling. after looking at the book a while, charlie's mind was so peopled with ferocious giants, indians on the war-path, fire-breathing dragons, and ghostly genii, that he transferred them to all the corners of the room, and especially to that receptacle of shadows, the space under the table, the very place where his legs were--ugh! charlie did not like to look at the book, and, dared not, at the forms under the table! he shut the book and he shut his eyes. hark, the clock was saying "cheer up!" and somebody in the lane fired a pistol that seemed to say, "wake up!" yes, yes, that was all right, charlie thought, but--but--he guessed he would close his eyes just this once--and close them just this once--and close them just this once--and in a few minutes the champion watchman was fast asleep! in an hour the clock struck again, and its voice seemed harsh, as if saying, "young man, young man, wake up!" the notes had no startling effect on charlie. indeed, he heard them only as a very sweet, musical voice. the pistols and cannons going off in water street reached his ear as mild little pops. things went on in this way till morning. about five charlie dropped on the floor the book of indians and dragons, that patiently had been resting in his lap all night. it roused him. he partially opened his eyes. before him was an opened door that led into the parlor, and, sitting in his chair, he could see the parlor windows, whose curtains were up and whose panes were brightened by the light in the eastern sky. what did he see at those windows? had some of the indians, imagined to be under charlie's table, gone to the outside of the windows, there to look in, grinning at him and shaking their head-feathers at a boy stupidly sitting near a table on which was a lighted lamp? charlie rubbed his eyes for a better look, then rubbed again and again, and--and--were those indians shouting, "charlie, how are you?" he now sprang to his feet, fully awake, and there were several members of the club, their faces streaked with red chalk, their caps ornamented with all kinds of feathers, their--charlie did not take another look at their decorations! he only glanced at the clock, exclaimed, "five o'clock! whew!" seized his cap, and rushed out-doors. "wake up, charlie! wake up, charlie!" was the greeting of his comrades. "whew, fellers, aint this cheeky?" inquired charlie. "i should think it was--in you. did your nap refresh you?" asked sid. "why didn't you come round and wake me up?" said the governor. "and me?" said billy. "and me?" said pip. "and me?" said tony. "you see--you see," replied charlie, "i overslept." "that is," said sid, "you slept _over_ the table. three cheers for charlie, our faithful watchman! i nominate charlie for _honorary_ sentinel." the cheers were delivered, and charlie was declared by the president to have been unanimously chosen honorary sentinel. "you see, boys," said sid, patronizingly, "i don't know what would have become of you if it hadn't been for _me_. my big brother nehemiah was out banging away all night, and he got tired and came home about three, and said to me, 'you in bed now? i thought you were going to get up several hours earlier than the lark.' well--after a while--i dressed quick, i tell you, and then i went and woke our governor, and billy, and so on." sid omitted to say how long that "after a while" might be, and that his brother aroused him several times, and finally he got into his clothes. nobody, however, was disposed to ask questions, as every one had slept later than he intended. "knights of the white shield!" suddenly shouted sid, "three good ringers on your bugles for our honorary member, miss stanshy macomber? here she comes!" aunt stanshy was now returning from her visit, having concluded to make an early start for home, feeling somewhat anxious for its safety on "the glorious fourth." the club separated into two ranks, and, as aunt stanshy passed along, each one of the "knights" touched his feathery head-gear, while every horn sent out as ringing a blast as possible. "massy!" cried aunt stanshy. "my ears!" then she retreated to her home as quickly as possible lest another salute be tendered her. what a day that was! what liberty! it seemed as if those patriots in the up-the-ladder club had been oppressed by a terrible yoke of bondage, domestic especially, but it was all lifted and thrown off that day. there was freedom--to blow horns, freedom to fire crackers, freedom to "holler," freedom to crack torpedoes, freedom to buy pea-nuts, buns, ancient figs and dates and abominable cheap candy, freedom to make one's self as dirty, tired--and cross the next day--as possible! o, blessed liberty to boys who had patiently borne the yoke three hundred and sixty-four days, ever since the last fourth! after a forenoon of miscellaneous and multiplied joys, the club planned to spend an afternoon in the woods. emptying their pockets, they found that, altogether, they could raise eleven cents, and this was laid out in the judicious expenditure of as many buns as possible. "it is proposed, white shields," said sid, "this afternoon that we spend a little time playing, a little time in bun-lunching, and then we will have a raft-race on the water near the railroad track." this programme was carried out in part successfully. the games concluded with success, there was a successful time in eating, as far as the number of buns would permit. then there was a little speech-making. "i understand," said the president, as he concluded his remarks, "that the rights of one of our number have been interfered with. he has been forbidden to fire off any more crackers, and must confine himself to caps." this announcement was followed by groans and hisses, even as thunder and lightning come after the black summer cloud. the person who had lost his freedom and been compelled to return to slavery was charlie. aunt stanshy had said to him at the dinner-table, "i don't want you to fire any more crackers to-day." charlie's chin went down. "why?" "because there is danger of setting fire to something. the wind is warm and dry." charlie's chin now went up. "it was warm and dry, but the wind has just changed, and it is coming in from the sea, and it is damp and misty." "but, that wont put out fires." charlie's chin now dropped again and dropped to stay. he went up stairs and, having a knack at rhyming, wrote a string of lines and put them in his pocket. sid had found out the contents of charlie's pocket when it had been emptied in behalf of the bun fund, and at the "collation" in the woods, he concluded his speech with these words: "i learn that the hon. charles pitt macomber, who has been forbidden to fire off crackers, has some poetry, and i will ask him to read it i would only add that freemen must stand for their rights." cheers were now given for "the poet of the day." charlie stood up and read these lines, which were subsequently found by aunt stanshy in the pocket of his pants, for these needed the help of her needle after the great and fatiguing duties of the fourth. the name and age of the author, charlie had been particular to place over the poetry. we give the lines exactly as they appear in the original now in our possession. the glorious fourth. by c.p. macomber, (nine years.) "hurrah for the glorious fourth of july, when sky-rockets mount to the sky, when fire-crackers are whizzing so fine, and all is majesty grandeur an' sublime. "if i could have the whole day to myself, i would fire off crackers all day like an elf, the giant torpedoes would fall to the ground, and all would come down with a terrible sound. "what good are little paper caps? i would not give two ginger snaps, they do not make a noise worth hearing, but fire-crackers, the ladies are fearing." if charlie should write this again, he would change the above, but it is too late to alter now, and we give it as preserved in our note-book. furious applause followed this ebullition of poetic genius. the collation was followed by the raft-race. the ditch that ran beside the railroad embankment widened in one place to forty feet. half a dozen logs were here floating. the keeper of the great seal had brought with him a hammer and a handful of nails, and seeing on his way several strips of board, he had picked them up and now nailed the six logs together in pairs, making three rafts. "there will now be a race between our first treasurer, our sentinel, and the keeper of the great seal," pompously announced sid. "this will be the first race. i expected tony and the governor would compete, but they have gone home. the fourth was too much for them." they both began to be sick after the collation. rick, with his usual pertinacity, wanted to "stick it out," but his feelings overcame him, and he adjourned. he and tony had eaten too much green-tinted candy. the participants in the raft-race were preparing for the contest, charlie having already boarded his craft and pushed off into position, when a cry from pip arrested the attention of all and made them think of something besides rafting. "down-townieth!" he shrieked, and pointed up the railroad embankment. there stood a stout boy whom charlie recognized immediately as one of the evil force that raided on the club the day of the grand march! it was tim tyler, one of the hardest boys in seamont, aged fifteen. back of him was a smaller boy, but a competitor in vice, bobby landers. how many others might soon show themselves, no one could say, but the down-townies were clannish and loved to turn out in crowds, and to the club the probability appeared to be, that others would speedily rise up and charge along the railroad track. sid waters, who had urged freemen to stand for their rights, was now turning on his heel. he headed for a fence that separated the railroad lot from the woods. it was evident that the first club race would be, not on the water, but the land, and that sid waters's legs would take an unexpected but active part in it. other legs followed his, and this race of freemen for their rights became a general one. at first, it was not positively certain who would reach the fence first and so beat in the race, but sid's alacrity in starting was so great that he gained the prize, or would have taken it, had any been offered. the others though made very good time, and showed what freemen could do when hard pushed by their oppressors. charlie, alas! was too far from shore to share in their good fortune, and, besides, tim tyler was on hand to object to any such movement. "don't be in too much of a hurry to leave," he said provokingly to charlie, and seizing a pole left by one of the retreating club, pushed off the raft that charlie had shoved near the shore. "leave me alone," growled charlie. "i have, haven't i? i don't see how any one could be much more aloner than you are off there." charlie looked like a jar of pickles, a keg of gunpowder, and a small thunder-cloud combined. he was so angry that he could now say nothing. when tim had repeatedly pushed charlie's vessel back from the shore, charlie as obstinately pushing toward it again, tim cried out, "say, i will make you an offer. do you see that?" he pulled out of his pocket a dirty bottle and held it up. "there, some of the best beer made anywhere is in that. if you will take a swaller, i'll let you come ashore." charlie could hardly contain himself now. he was scarcely able to sputter out this defiance, "when you catch me tasting that stuff, you'll know it!" "o jest hear him, bob!" said tim, mockingly. "i s'pose this young sailor, who don't know enough about sailin' to get his craft ashore, has jined a temperance society." "yes," said charlie, "i belong to mr. walton's at st. john's." "what saint is that?" the wrathful charlie gave tim a look of contempt and turned away. "o, so he wont turn his pretty face this way, wont he?" having said this, tim changed his tone and shouted fiercely, "you've got to look this way, sir. bob, you get on that other raft and i will take this one here, and we will catch that young saint." the two unoccupied rafts were immediately brought into service. never did an innocent merchantman fleeing from two pirates make a harder exertion than did charlie to get away from tim and bob. they gained on him, though, rapidly. "there they come," thought charlie, giving one look back at the dirty, saucy buccaneers. tim had now reached the middle of the little pond when a thing greatly in his favor proved to be a serious thing against him, and that was the strength of his push. the fastenings of the log-raft were not equal to any violent pressure upon them, and suddenly they gave way and the logs separated. tim's legs separated with them till they could part no farther, and then he tried to spring from one log to the other. alas for him, he put his foot in the wrong place, and that wrong place was the water! down he went into as thorough a bath as ever a young rascal got in this world. the water was not over his head, and he was soon on his feet, but the dip had been complete enough to satisfy the most vindictive members of the up-the-ladder club, and tim was spitting and sputtering, then spitting and sputtering again, trying to clear month, eyes, nose, ears, of the unwelcome, dirty ditch-water. "give--us--a--hand, bob," he gasped. charlie did not stay to see any further developments, but pushed for the shore, safely reaching it, and then made his way to the fence, climbing it and gaining the wood-lot. in the meantime, the other members of the club had halted and were consulting together. it was juggie who arrested their flight. "it is too bad," he said, "to leave charlie." that remark detained billy, and then sid, wort, and pip stopped. sid laughed and said, "my father has been in the army and he would call this the flying artillery. so you see it is all right." "i'm afraid it's all wrong," said billy, "to leave charlie behind." "yes," said wort, "to run away from a member of the club." there was now a general feeling of indignation toward any member of the club that had deserted charlie, if that member could be found, as each one's motive had not been to desert another, but the prudent impulse to save himself. sid was among the fiercest to shout and the most furious to propose. "charlie deserted!" he said. "who's deserted charlie? that wont do! back, fellers, to the rescue!" a brave, sympathetic shout arose. a few minutes ago sid would have been afraid of it as something that might attract the enemy's attention, but he calculated that they must now be at a safe distance from the down-townies. "let's make a flank movement on the enemy," said the president. "what ith that?" asked pip. "why, not so much to go _at_ them as to go about them and take them unawares in the rear." this mode of attack, which did not necessitate the actual facing of the enemy, was very popular and took wonderfully with the club. to sid, in particular, it was a very agreeable mode. he boldly headed this movement. he intended to go off in a direction where no enemy would ever be met, but in his ignorance of the woods, he took a course that would have led the club back to the pond, and it was an agreeable thing for charlie that he did, as that fugitive from the pirates soon was met. "hullo, there he is!" shouted wort. "who?" asked sid, trembling, and fearful that it might be tim taylor. "here i am, boys," shouted charlie. "ho, to the rescue!" cried sid, now taking long leaps forward. "charlie, i rescue thee!" "we are coming to fank de enemy," said juggie, anxious to have a hand in winning the laurels now coming so rapidly to the knights of the white shield. "going to surround the enemy," exclaimed the warlike sid, "and also rescue charlie, but--but--we might as well go back now. did you have a hard time, charlie?" "i did have a time, i tell you," and charlie eagerly told the story of his adventures. "how we will go back, boys," said the president, "and go round home through the woods." "no, sir," declared billy, who had somewhat of his cousin's resoluteness; "i'm going home the way we came, and if any body stops me, it is his lookout." the heroic sentiment was loudly applauded, and the club returning valiantly stormed the railroad fence and carried it--a remarkable feat considering that there was nobody on it to oppose them. billy grimes in his earnestness even brought down the top-rail with him. "stop, fellers!" warned sid. "the enemy!" lifting their eyes to the top of the high railroad embankment, they saw tim in the act of chastising bob. it was afterward ascertained that tim was rewarding bob for not helping him more efficiently at the time of the raft accident. tim completed the bestowal of this reward, and then noticing the club, he shook his fist at them. he did not linger, but followed sullenly by bob, passed down the other side of the embankment. the club did not find out whether this was an intended retreat, or simply the taking of a convenient route to reach home. they put their own construction on it, and the movement was judged to be "a shameful retreat by the enemy." billy led off in a brave, determined charge up the embankment--sid shouting, "hurrah! glory for us! those getting the battle-field are victors, you know!" nobody disputed this, and the valiant knights continued their triumphant advance to their very homes. the fourth was drawing to a close. the sun was breaking out through the clouds that had covered the heavens, and so brilliant was the outburst of colors, it seemed as if the folds of an immense star-spangled banner had been suddenly let loose in the western sky. it very soon paled though. the clouds thickened everywhere and the easterly wind that had been blowing all the afternoon, bringing occasional mist, now drove to land a blinding fog. finally it began to rain, and yet gently, as if reluctant to spoil any festivities of the fourth. gathering up all their pyrotechnic resources, it was found that the club boys could muster a few pin-wheels, five roman candles, and a "flower-pot." most of these had been stored in the barn, but were now moved out-doors and taken to the shelter of a stout leafy maple by the side of the lane. "the rain wont trouble us here," said the president. "where is charlie?" "he has gone to get his fire-works," replied billy grimes. "he left them in the house and it is locked, for his aunt stanshy has gone out, and he's waiting for her, i guess." "we had better begin, fellers, and he will come soon. the rain is coming," said sid, warned by a big drop that glancing through the branches smote him on the nose. pin-wheels, candles, and the other attraction were pronounced a success, though their discharge was hastened on account of the thickening rain. the boys separated, tired and sleepy, sorry to part with the fourth, and yet secretly glad that there was such a thing as "bed." "whar's charlie," asked juggie, as the boys separated. no one knew. "good-bye, charlie!" shouted one after the other, and all hastened to their homes. charlie was where he had been the last twenty minutes, occupying a seat out in the porch at the back door and waiting for aunt stanshy. he had fallen asleep, so thoroughly tired was this patriotic young american, and the day for him was ending as it began--in a chair. aunt stanshy came at last, feeling her way through the shadows in the porch and striving to reach the back door, whose key she carried. "what's this?" she said, running against the sleeper. "if it isn't that boy! and here the rain has been working round into the porch and it is coming on him! if you don't take cold, charles pitt macomber, then i am mistaken! wake up, wake up!" chapter vi. a sick patriot. the next morning, aunt stanshy was stirring at the usual hour, and her usual hour in summer was five. she did not generally expect to see charlie down stairs until half past six. this morning, aunt stanshy; looked up at the clock on the high mantel-piece and saw that it was seven, then half after seven, then eight, and half after eight; but all this time there was neither sound nor sight of charlie. "massy, where is that boy? i thought i would let him sleep, he was so tired, but he ought to be around now," reflected aunt stanshy. she opened the door that led up to his chamber and slowly mounted the steep, narrow, yellow stairs, turning to the right into charlie's sanctum. a turn to the left would have taken her to her own room. peeping into charlie's room, she saw the boy fast asleep on the bed. stealing softly across the bare floor and reaching the red and yellow home-braided rug before his bed, she looked down on the sleeping charlie. a smile parted his lips, and be murmured something unintelligible to aunt stanshy. then she laid her hand on his head, giving a little start. "that boy took cold last night, and is a bit feverish. i'll let him lie here a spell longer." saying this, she was about to turn away, when charlie's eyes opened. "that you--you, aunty?" "yes; why?" "i thought it was a dream. i had a dream, and thought we gave the down-townies an awful scare." "you did? was that what you were smiling at? i mean just now." "i guess so. and then i believe we were going to give three cheers." "well, do you feel like getting up?" "y-e-s." he rose on his elbows, but sank back again. "i guess, if you have no objection, aunty, i will lie a little longer." "i guess you had better, for you took cold last night out in the porch. would you like to take your breakfast in bed, and have my little table that i lend to people who are sick in bed?" "o, yes." "and would you like to have a piece of toast, a little tea, and an orange?" "o, yes. you are the best aunty in the world." "am i, dear?" aunt stanshy was not very demonstrative, so that this "dear" was exceedingly precious to the warm-hearted charlie, as was also a small hug that she gave him. while she was preparing his breakfast charlie lay quietly in bed, and heard the sound of the rain on the slanting roof. to a tired boy in bed, and longing to have some excuse for absence from school, what music is sweeter than the sound of rain on the roof? let it be a real north-easter sweeping in from the sea, pushing along a fleet of many clouds packed with a heavy cargo of rain, and, as it advances, let this wind sound many big, hoarse trumpets all about the houses and barns, up and down the streets! an organ in church played by prof. jump-up-and-down is nothing compared with such a north-easter; charlie heard the grand music of the wind. by and by he heard aunt stanshy's step on the stairs. she came slowly up, up, and then charlie saw her turning from the entry into his room, bringing the sick-table and charlie's breakfast she bolstered him up in bed, putting two or three fat pillows behind his back. then she put the little sick-table before him. one side had been hollowed in, so that an invalid could draw it close about his body. charlie was now the invalid to do that thing. what tea! what toast! what an orange! "now that you have some strength, do you want to dress and then come down and sit with me in the sitting-room and see me iron?" asked aunt stanshy, after breakfast. "o, yes, and not go to school?" "no school to-day, when that cold is on you." charlie crawled into his clothes and went down stairs to the sitting-room. aunt stanshy was ironing. she generally did her ironing in the sitting-room, as the kitchen was very small, and, on a hot day, it was so hot there that one felt like sizzling at the touch of water. "here are some picture-books for you." "o, thanks, thanks, aunty!" "one of those picture-books is about indian wars." "did you ever see an injun?" "not the raving, tearing, tomahawk kind." "i shouldn't want to see that one." "several years ago sort of tame ones used to come round and have baskets to sell. my great-great-grandmother had quite an adventure with the real kind once." "o, tell it to me!" opening his eyes to that peculiar width appropriate to the hearing of an indian story, charlie intently listened. "my great-great-grandmother was all alone one day in the house, for the men-folks had gone to market or somewhere. she happened to be looking out of the window, when she saw an indian looking over the fence. what a customer! he was an ugly-looking crittur, i don't doubt. what could she do, for he might be tomahawking her in less than no time? wimmin folks, in them days, were not like miss persnips, that keeps the little thread-and-needle store on the corner, without any snap to 'em. my great-great-grandmother just tore round that room at a lively rate. she slammed the shutters, she banged about the chairs. then she pretended that there were lots of men-folks in the house, and she kept calling to tom, bill, jerry, nehemiah. o, she had a string of 'em, all on her tongue's end! i don't know but she pointed a gun out of the winder, man-fashion. what did that crittur do but gather up his traps and walk off as harmless as a bumble-bee when his sting is gone. i've heard with my own eyes my grandmother tell that story about her grandmother." "heard her with your eyes?" "of course not! with my ears, ears. where are yours, for pity's sake? there is an old garrison-house on the other side of the river, and i will show it to you some time, or i will show you what is left. they have built over the garrison-house and back of it, making a farm-house of it, but there is something still to be seen." "what a blessed old aunty!" thought charlie. and the wind, what grand music it made! the chimney seemed to be a big bass-viol that this north-easter played on. at noon aunt stanshy said, "what will you have for dinner?" "may i order it, the way i did at a saloon in boston last summer? may i write what i want on paper, and put it on the table?" "yes, if orderin' will make it taste better, and it seems to affect some folks' vittles that way." so charlie and aunt stanshy "played saloon." he wrote his order on a slip of paper, and left it on the table for her inspection while he went up stairs. directing her spectacles toward it, she read, with some amazement, this request: "please bring me for dinner, a pickle aunt stanshy, would be what you know nice to toast." "toasted pickle!" exclaimed aunt stanshy, in alarm. charlie had now returned to the sitting-room. "you don't mean, charles pitt, a toasted pickle!" "why, no; ha! ha! there are two things on that paper. i said, 'please bring me for dinner, aunt stanshy, what you know to toast.' that is on one side, and on the other, 'a pickle would be nice,' and i see now that you could read the words straight across, and it would mean what you say; ha! ha! i don't expect a pickle, of course, for i am sick, you know." "o!" she did not laugh. she was rather mortified to think she had not read the order aright. the noblest natures have their infirmities. afterward, being ashamed of herself because she did not take pleasantly this unintended joke, she manifested her penitence by getting up an extra dinner for charlie. there was more toast, and even of a finer quality. there was another orange, and there was some jelly that aunt stanshy took the pains to buy at miss persnips's store. this was a sweet but thin-voiced little woman, who sold a variety of things in a store on the corner of the lane and water street. "it is nice to be sick, aunt stanshy." "do you think so?" "yes, just a grain sick." it was so pleasant to be in the warm, comfortable sitting-room and watch the dreary weather out in the lane. the back side of the house butted on the lane, no fence intervening. aunt stanshy had no objection to such a close contact, but rather liked it, declaring it to be "social." she did not favor, though, the sociability that drunken sailors manifested several times when going from the saloons on water street down to their vessels at the wharf in which the lane ended. they would stagger against the house, pushing one another and bombarding it. aunt stanshy was on hand, though. a pail of freshly-drawn water, arctic cold, and from an upper window, administered freely to the offenders, had been known to produce a healthy effect. aunt stanshy's remedies for various troubles might be vigorous, but they were generally effective. there was not much passing in the lane, that stormy day. a fisherman, in an oil-skin suit, went by, trundling a wheel-barrow of fish to a store in town. at noon, somebody else appeared. "there's mr. walton," said aunt stanshy. "and there's tony with him," said charlie. "where's his father?" "tony says he is in europe." "he the one that people say is an italian, and--and--nobody knows what he is up to?" "that's the one, aunty." the minister and tony, hand in hand, passed out of sight. "this is the kind of day when mr. walton's mother will be watching the weather, looking up at the vane. people say that she has a great deal to say about the sea, and takes a great interest in sailors." "what for?" "because they say she has a son somewhere at sea." "and don't any one know where he is really?" "no; and they have hinted and suspected and guessed and done every thing, except ask old miss walton right out, but they can't find out a thing. she's close as a clam in this matter." by and by there appeared in the lane a drunken man. as he staggered along he was exposed to all the pitiless pelting of the wild north east rain, and moved away like a dark, forlorn shadow. "poor fellow!" the sympathizing charlie exclaimed. "who's that, i wonder?" "where?" "a drunken man in the lane." "if people would only take the water inside and the rum outside, sort of turnin' things round, it would be much better, better," said aunt stanshy, going to the window. she gave one look and came back to her ironing. charlie thought he heard her sigh. he had already noticed that aunt stanshy never made fun of drunken people. "who is it?" he asked. she did not answer, but taking up her flat-iron again, pounded the clothes with it vigorously, as if trying to call attention from herself to her work. "is she crying?" thought charlie. as if wet with her tears, her spectacles gleamed sharply. the muscles of her arms swelled as she pounded the innocent sheet before her, and charlie was reluctant to ask again. for some time there was silence, the only interrupting sound being aunt stanshy's pound--pound--pound. charlie sat in his chair, looking steadily out upon the somber, dripping rain. "don't you want to play something?" it was aunt stanshy speaking. a troubled look on her face had passed away and she was ironing quietly again. "yes;" said charlie, "you--you sick?" aunt stanshy gave no answer to this, but asked again, "don't you want to play?" "play what?" "boat." "boat! how!" "o make believe, you know." charlie thought in silence. "you lend me a box, aunty?" "yes, certainly." "and that little broom you sweep with?" the amateur ship-carpenter went to work. "there is my mast," said charlie, securing the broom to the bottom of the box which he had turned over. "now i must have sails. it is going to be a monitor, too, like what i read about in a book the other day." after some effort, and more tribulation, there appeared a splendid piece of naval architecture, a monitor with a turret, the deck bordered with a twine-railing, two sails hanging down from aunt stanshy's small broom. "that broom makes me think of what i learned at school when i was a girl." "what was that?" "i am not much of a scholar, but i remember this. admiral tromp was a dutchman, and commanded a fleet that went against the english. tromp was so successful that he tied a broom to his mast-head and went sailing over the waters, and that meant he had swept his enemy from the sea, and if he hadn't, he would certainly do it and make clean work of it. over the blue waters he went skipping along, feeling dreadful big, with that broom at the mast-head. the english boys, though, came at him again and whipped him, and poor tromp was finally killed in a sea-fight. i don't know what became of his broom. you had better call that an english and not a dutch broom." when charlie went up stairs that night, the _neponset_ as he called the monitor, was still sailing in the sitting-room, its sails all set, its broom at the mast-head. he thought it was splendid to be sick. "how long do you think this sickness may go on?" was the last question he asked aunt stanshy that night. "o, if it is a slow fever, it might last several weeks, but i don't want to discourage you." "discourage!" it was magnificent. two or three weeks of toast and jelly and oranges and many soft words, and not a few hugs! that night he was dreaming of boxes of oranges he was emptying, and of glasses of jelly big as hogsheads, out of which he was taking jelly by the shovelful! the next morning he felt--though unwilling to confess it--much better. at noon keen old dr. pillipot happened to come along, and aunt stanshy referred charlie's case to him. old dr. pillipot bent his sharp, gray eyes down toward charlie and made up a horrid face as he growled, "let me see your tongue, young man. hem! looks quite well. let me feel your pulse. so! quite good. the weather has changed, and as it is mild and sunny, he might walk down to school this--afternoon. "o dear!" groaned charlie, when the doctor had left. "i wish i had scared his horse off when i saw him coming down the lane. you and i, aunty, did have such a nice time!" o, the trials of this life! charlie, though, had a dose of comfort from aunt stanshy. she told him he need not go to school until the next day, and when the morning came, she said: "i believe the _neponset_ took a cargo on board in the night." there in the shadow of the mast-head was a column of doughnuts! "you may take them all to school with you, charlie." now he was glad that he was not sick. he disposed of six doughnuts that forenoon, and as these, if tied together, would have made good chain-shot for the monitor, and yet did not affect him unfavorably, it was proof that charlie was restored to health. chapter vii. the nailed door and window. charlie made a discovery in the barn. in that side toward the river there was a door on the first floor, and there was also a window in the chamber above. not only was the door closed, and closed also was the wooden shutter of the window, but over each iron hook dropped in its staple and securing the door and window were two nails stoutly driven. all this charlie had noticed before. he now traced these half-obliterated words in chalk on the door: "this is not to be opened." he was standing before this prohibition, wondering who put it there, and for what purpose, thinking how nice it would be to have the door open that the club might have a chance to get down that way into the dock. then he thought how pleasant it would be, also, to have the window open that the club might have a lookout upon the river and off toward the sea, on whose blue rim, a mile away, could be seen the white tower of the light-house, where simes badger and his assistant served their country alternate days. suddenly, charlie heard a thick, hoarse voice behind him: "your aunt stanshy in, sonny?" charlie turned, somewhat startled, and there was simes badger himself. "she has gone out, i guess, sir." "what are you looking at that door for? i don't believe your aunt stanshy wants you to open it." "o, i was not going to open it." if, after the half-effaced chalk-marks, charlie had seen a written threat, "on pain of death," he could not have been more determined to let that window alone. "do you know, mr. badger, who shut and nailed that window?" "aunt stanshy herself. i saw her with my own eyes." "you did?" "yes. you see--there, i don't know but i'm telling a secret--but then you won't say any thing." having made this prudent remark, and not waiting for any promise from charlie, simes, who dearly loved to tell a thing, and especially any thing that might astonish a hearer, began his story. "you see, tim tyler is your aunt stanshy's second cousin." "tim's father?" said charlie, in astonishment. "you mean young tim tyler's father? ginerally old tim is young tim's father, sartin as the sea is father of our river. but this old tim is young tim's uncle. then you didn't know it? well, you are young, and i spose nobody told you. well, stanshy and old tim were brought up side by side in this neighborhood and were good as chickens to one another. some folks say they'd been better friends still, if their parents hadn't set their faces agin it, and so they were never married to one another. they were never married at all. did you ever see old tim?" "i don't know as ever i saw old tim, but then i've seen _that_ boy, and he is rough," said charlie, recalling the afternoon of the fourth. "tim tyler don't live in this part of the town, and it's no wonder you never saw him. he hardly ever comes down this way now, though he often did once. well, the wust lookin' old drunkard you ever see about town, spot him for tim." "then i guess i have seen him," remarked charlie, recalling the drunkard he had watched the afternoon of his severe sickness, and remembering, too, aunt stanshy's singular conduct. "tim looks poorly enough now, but it wasn't so once. straight and smart, and bright as the blades of a new jack-knife, was tim. his face was blushin' like a posy, and his beard was long and handsome, like moses the prophet's. he was nice as a pictur till rum got the better of him, and then he changed, i tell ye. for many years he had the privilege of fishin' from this barn. from the stairs on the 'tother side of that door, he would get down into his fishin' boat in the dock. he would bring his fish in here, split 'em and prepare 'em for market. sometimes stanshy kept a horse and cow below, and then tim would hist his fare into the upper window and clean his fish there. but one day aunt stanshy cleaned him out, and when stanshy starts on a cleanin' tour, she makes thorough work of it, and puts things through promptly. and she did clean out old tim! but i must go back and hitch the horse into the cart, and say what you know as well as i, that your aunt stanshy is a great teetotaler, a leetle too much i think." [simes liked his nip.] "but seein' how her minister's in favor of it, she is wuss than ever. now to go on. your father, boy, let me say, had a hand in this trouble, though not meaningly, and it was this way. tour father came to live with your aunt stanshy, and one day tim took him out a-fishin', and not only tipped a jug to his own lips, but sot it to your father's also. when they came back home, it was plain they had been up to suthin' besides fishin'. well, tim might as well have touched a lion's whip--what do you call it?" "whelp. i was reading about lions to-day." "yes, touched a lion's whelp as touched your father; for didn't aunt stanshy pitch into him! i heard it all. it was when he was a-splittin' fish, and aunt stanshy came out, and didn't she walk into tim! i never see an eel skinned more purtily than she dressed tim for temptin' a poor, motherless boy, as she called your father. 'don't!' your father would go, tryin' to pacify her; 'don't!' it had no more effect than tryin' to fan out of the way a tornader. indeed, jest because she and tim had been on good terms with one another and understood one another so well, i think for that reason she was all the hotter. you know when brothers do quarrel, they go it wuss than other folks. well, tim at fust would say nothing but he was orful mad. he was that kind of mad that you see in the sky when a thunder-storm is brewin', and yet no rain has fallen; only the flash is there, and the thunder is there a-rumblin', and the lightnin' is there a sawin' up and down, but nary a drop of rain! at last tim spoke, and he declared it was the last he'd ever have to do with her, and afore he'd ask a favor of her, he took a horrid oath, he'd see hisself a-drownin' in that dock fust. i hated to hear him swear that way, for, sez i, 'young man, you may get there yet, and you may be glad to have stanshy's help.' then he took a barrel of fish he was fillin', and he was so mad he rolled the whole mess into the water, sayin' he would have nothin' to do with any thing that had touched aunt stanshy's barn. i asked him why he didn't then throw himself over! that touched him up, and he grabbed his knives and pitched them into the dock. it was a queer sight to see them fish in that barrel floatin' away. but then the rum was in him and maddened him. when he had left, it was aunt stanshy's turn to do suthin'. i heard it all, for i was in the yard doin' a few chores for stanshy. fust, there was a slam in the barn chamber. i jest slipped up them stairs and peeked over the edge of the floor. stanshy had pulled the shutter in with a vengeance. then she hooked it and drove the nails over the hook as tight as bricks. o she is a woman of 'mazin' vigor, stanshy is, when she gets agoin'. she came down stairs and she fastened up this door, and then i seed her fumblin' in her pocket, and, pullin' out a piece of chalk, she began to write. when stanshy had finished, of course, i was at my chores agin very busily engaged. well, since that day, there has been silence between stanshy and tim like that round the old tombstones in the church-yard. i hope some day it will be different." with this benevolent wish, simes closed. "a bad scrape," remarked charlie. "yes, people ought not to drink so much," said the abstemious and ascetic simes. "they ought to stop this side of a drop too much." "they ought to stop this side of any drop at all," stoutly affirmed the young member of mr. walton's temperance society. "pre--pre--haps so," replied simes. chapter viii. the entertainment. aunt stanshy, as she looked down upon the sitting-room table, saw charlie's curly head bending over pen, ink, and card-board. he had cut the card-board into strips three inches long and two inches wide. "what have you there?" charlie was too much occupied to notice this remark. "what are you doing?" "making tickets." "tickets?" "yes, will you buy one?" "i want to see first what i am going to buy." "you may." aunt stanshy then read these lines on a slip of card-board: ------------------------------------------ | ticket to the up-the-ladder boys' | | entertainment. | | admission, 2 nails. seat, 10 nails. | | elders' admission, 1 cent. seat, 2 cents. | ------------------------------------------"o, that is it i could i go in for nails, or a cent?" "for a cent." "then i'm an 'elder.'" "yes, aunty." "well, i'll engage a seat." "goody! that will be two cents. we did think of breaking up the club, but this will cheer them up. wouldn't it be too bad to give up? our new silk badges that our teacher promised, we have this week." "the shields?" "yes, spick and span new." "i hope my two cents will encourage them to be good knights." "o it will. you will be on hand this afternoon, after school?" "certainly." after school, aunt stanshy was on hand promptly, and she judged by the noises issuing from the barn that all the others were on hand also. she climbed the, stairs and was about stepping into the chamber, when pip, the assistant sentinel, came forward. he looked very formidable. a scarlet cap was on his head, a white belt tied round his body, and red flannel epaulets decorated his shoulders. he bore a terrible broom, and aunt stanshy recalled the fact that it had served as mast for the _neponset_. "who goeth there?" cried the valorous pip. "aunt stanshy," said a feeble voice. "advanth and give the counterthign?" "i can't." pip leveled his broom at once. poor stanshy, how she wished she had made her will. "bang!" he shouted. could she survive this? "thay pertatoeth!" he whispered. "pertatoes," she fortunately shrieked. "all right," said pip, and she was spared a second shot. "i'm thankful to get through safe, and now i have not to pay, after all that risk?" "certainly, madam," politely replied charlie, the treasurer, who now met her. "i'll take your ticket and punch it." having punched her ticket, he retired. aunt stanshy looked about the chamber. she noticed that an old thin sheet served for curtain, as before, and another was strung across a corner and separated it from the rest of the chamber. this second curtain not being long enough to reach the desired distance, was pieced out by a strip of wire netting in one corner. looking over this corner curtain, aunt stanshy saw eight pieces of carpeting on the floor, each member of the club having furnished a piece. inside this sanctuary were a barrel and a saw-horse. "what is this for?" asked aunt stanshy. "o for meetings," said charlie. "only the four principals can go in there." "who are they?" "the president, the governor, the first treasury, and the keeper of the great seal. we stand on the barrel and saw-horse, and make laws to the other members of the club, who stand outside." aunt stanshy now turned to inspect the other parts of the chamber. "this is our whipping-post," said charlie, calling attention to a post against which leaned the ladder that sloped up to the cupola. "have you whipped any one?" "yes; pip deserted once." aunt stanshy read three notices nailed to the post: "first, no cross words; no swearing and vulgar words; nobody but the treasurer to climb this ladder to go up into the cupola, unless the club say so." this was in charlie's handwriting. "why not go?" asked aunt stanshy. "o we keep our funds up there in a dipper." "it looks unsafe to me, for somebody climbing up there might reach into the cup and steal the money." "o no, i guess not." sid waters now stepped forward. "ladies and gentlemen," he said, "two more individuals having arrived"--these were nail patrons--"we will begin our entertainment. first is the dialogue called 'the spy.'" the curtain rose and there stood the inheritor of the warlike name of jugurtha. he was rather sober and melancholy, and was dressed in a semi-military style that betrayed not in the least the fact to what flag he might possibly be attached. sid was crouching down, hiding behind a barrel. "what am i?" juggie now asked in low tones, "american or british?" "of course," sid was heard to say, "you are an american, or ought to be. hush up!" juggie now strode over the floor, an exiled broom-handle resting on his shoulder. suddenly a step was heard. from the rear of a box crept out the governor. he wore a farmer's dress, and was half smothered under his father's tall hat. "advance!" shouted juggie, "and gib de count--count--" "countersign!" whispered the prompter behind the barrel. "count-de-sign!" shouted juggie, pompously, at the same time presenting the broom-handle threateningly. "george washington!" answered the farmer. "all right. go 'long dar!" "no, no!" whispered sid. "let me see your papers, friend!" "let me see your papers, friend!" the farmer reads his pass. "is dat all?" "all." "knock off his hat," whispered sid. "what's de matter wid your hat?" and as juggie shouted this, he fetched the governor's hat a merciless rap, one that would have been serious had not the governors head luckily been in the first story of the hat. as the hat dropped, juggie seized a paper that fell out, and exclaimed, "a spy, a spy! a note to de british commander!" "seize him! that is the next thing," suggested sid, in smothered tones. but the british spy was too much for juggie, and the defender of the continental name was obliged to resort to severe measures. presenting the broom-handle, he shouted, "aim! fire! bang!" but the spy was not considerate enough to fall. "drop! drop, why don't you?" whispered juggie. "you've been shot." the spy, _alias_ the governor, showed his usual firmness, and continued to stand. "drop!" besought sid, in a suppressed voice. "shoot him again, juggie!" but the spy did not care to be riddled again and he prudently fell. "drag him out, juggie!" was the prompting of an unknown voice. juggie seized one of the spy's fat legs, but pulled in vain. it was an impossible _feet_. sid and charlie now appeared as continentals, supposed to be armed with guns, and were helping juggie, when the cry was raised, "the british army is coming!" at the head of the stairs appeared wort wentworth, his head decorated with a red paper helmet, and carrying on his body various insignia of war. he now made a fierce charge across the floor. "into the fort!" shouted sid, rushing toward the closet, and, as usual, striving after the first chance to retreat. "into the fort, my men!" after him scrambled charlie and juggie, the dead "spy" manifesting an unusual energy and scrambling after them, forgetting that his friends were in his rear and not in the closet. the next moment all heard an ominous descent from the second to the first story. "massy!" shouted aunt stanshy. "somebody has gone down that fodder-box agin!" she rushed down stairs, followed by the "british army," and all the members of the up-the ladder club that could move one leg before the other. "i know those legs! i guess they will stand it," said aunt stanshy, as she reached the lower floor and caught a glimpse of the fodder-box. it was the british spy, whose stout pedestals were sticking out, and he only needed to be once more seized and dragged forward by juggie and the other "continentals" to give proof of his vigorous, embalmed condition. "sakes, boy!" said aunt stanshy. "i thought you were shot, but you manifest an immense amount of vitality for a dead man." "i came down rather sudden," said the governor. "yes, and it's the last time," exclaimed aunt stanshy, "that thing is going to happen. i will go up myself and fix that floor, and do it thoroughly." in a few moments her hammer was heard vigorously pounding in the closet and securing the club against future harm. "we didn't do all we intended," said charlie. "we were going to have a reconciliation, aunty." "between whom?" "the british and americans. we were going to have the president of the united states and queen victoria walk arm in arm up and down the floor, and never have war any more." in the confusion attendant upon the fall of the "spy," the programme was not carried out as planned, and the shadows of those two eminent rulers never darkened the floor of the barn chamber. "may war never happen, just the same!" said aunt stanshy. amen! so say we all of us. chapter ix. the cupola. aunt stanshy was reading one day the list of prohibitions posted up against the post in the barn chamber. "charlie," she said "i like what is said here, that no cross words and no bad words must be spoken here; but what does it mean when it says _no one_ but the 'treasury' must climb the ladder and go up into the cupola? does that apply to honorary members? and did you think that i might want to go there?" charlie's mouth opened into a crack from ear to ear. "why--why, the money is up in the cupola!" "the money is up there in the cupola? yes, i knew that; you told me that before. what holds your money?" "a tin dipper." "well, now, if you don't look out, somebody will steal your money. you may be assured that honorary members won't trouble it." "ho!" shouted charlie. "there goes a man and a hand organ and a monkey." the dignity of the club was not sufficient to restrain charlie and several others from an almost headlong rush for the out-door attraction, and they quickly surrounded the organ-grinder. he owned a remarkable monkey, the boys thought, especially when he mounted by a spout to the window of aunt stanshy's chamber, and, entering it, soon re-appeared shaking in his hand aunt stanshy's spectacles! "put 'em on!" cried sid. "he can, he can!" said his master. "me taught him." the next moment the spectacles appeared on the monkey's nose! "he look like _her_," said the organ-grinder. but the monkey did not have time to continue his resemblance to the fair owner any longer, for the shadow of a broom fell over him, and if he had not made a very nimble spring for the spout, something besides a shadow would have fallen upon him, even the broom itself. this was now seen at the window, and aunt stanshy behind it. it was tony who gallantly ran forward and rescued aunt stanshy's spectacles as their wearer was about quitting the spout for the ground. "we think that monkey is very smart, aunt stanshy," said sid. "i expect you will make him an honorary member the next thing." "he's bright enough," said sid. "i wonder how bright one must be to be an honorary member if--if--a monkey is the standard?" thought aunt stanshy. this visit from the monkey was not the only unusual thing happening that day. the club heard with sorrow of the unexpected and total loss of their money! charlie, as "treasury," had gone up the ladder, but returning, he reported that the dipper, the safe of the club, was missing. "how much money was in it?" inquired aunt stanshy. "ten cents." "i said you might lose your money." this was entirely true, but it was poor consolation. indeed, it was quite aggravating. "did you have any mark on the dipper?" "yes; a shield on the bottom, though--though--'twas not a very good one." no, to that day it remained uncertain what the device really was, and its character had been hotly discussed in the club. charlie had discovered the theft on his return from school at noon. swallowing a potato and a few mouthfuls of steak, he then rushed from the house to report the loss to the club. in a short time all the white shields had heard the news, and quickly gathered. "well, boys, what is to be done?" asked the president. nobody knew. "let's climb the ladder and all take a look," suggested the secretary. exceedingly nimble were the legs that went wriggling up the ladder, and very curious eyes were directed toward the depths of the "cupelo," but the only result was a succession of "my!" and "that's so!" and "too bad!" "i've got it!" shouted sid. "he'th found it," said pip. every sad face brightened. "no, i haven't, pip!" exclaimed sid. "but you thaid tho." "no, i meant that i knew what had become of it." "o! o!" said pip. "but what hath become of it?" sid here looked about him, to make sure that no one outside of the club was listening. "well, boys, i think tim tyler took it" "what makes-you think so?" inquired the governor. "it has just come to me that i saw tim tyler go down the lane after school, and a tin dipper stuck out of his pocket." "you did?" asked several. all eyes opened wide in wonder and indignation. "with my eyes i saw him. that's where the dipper has gone." it did not occur to the club that there were more dippers than one in the world, and then they did not care to think of it. they had not forgotten the fourth, and they wanted to believe something bad of tim. another point for discussion came up at once, and charlie suggested it. "how shall we get the dipper away from tim?" he asked. "i move the president go," said wort. "i thecond the mothion," cried pip. "aint you good," was sid's scornful notice of the intended honor. "presidents don't do that, but the police of the club. i preside." "the sentinel is the police, and that is juggie, but he is not here now; he went home a moment ago. then, of course, his assistant must do it;" and he here turned toward pip. "yes, pip," said boy after boy. poor, trembling pip! didn't he wish he had been born in the previous century! no amount of coaxing could prevail upon, him to approach the dreadful dragon that had carried off the tin dipper, and every body else declined the same honor. finally wort made this offer: "i'll go down to-old tim's boat, and tim may be hanging round, and i'll see what i can see." this was a relief to the club, and entirely safe for wort. "i'll go at once," he said, and away he went. charlie went up to a store on "water street at the same time, and chanced to meet miss bertha barry. "we've met with a loss," said charlie, with a sober face. "any one dead?" "o no; but the club has lost its tin dipper." "tin dipper?" "yes, teacher, where we kept our money." "o!" "all our money has gone." "how much!" "ten cents." "hem, hem; sorry." "we think we know who did it." "you know certainly." "no, but we think we do, and the feller is just bad enough to do it." "it's pretty hard to have people think you are bad; and then, if you are thought to have done something you were never guilty of, that is worse still. i don't think it fair to charge a wrong thing on any body unless we know pretty certainly. it is not just." charlie had not thought of it _that_ way before. "i guess you are right, teacher." bidding her good-bye, he was moving off, when she said: "stop one moment. whoever that boy is, i wish you'd get him out to sunday-school." "what an idea!" thought charlie. "tim tyler's going to sunday-school!" in the meantime wort had been prosecuting his bold investigations. he strolled down the lane, passing several cottages, and then a fish-house, where several men were splitting and salting fish. all these were on the left side of the lane. on the right was a long dock, and in it were several boats. "there is tim tyler," exclaimed wort, "and there is his boat. there is young tim, the thief!" it was an old boat that wort looked into as he stood upon the stairs leading down into the dock. it was a boat badly battered, like its owner. "if the red paint could be got off tim's nose and put on his boat, it would be better for both," thought wort. old tim was fixing a net in the stem of his boat. young tim was in another part of the dock, hunting amid the muddy flats for relics. "there she is!" said wort to himself. he had detected a dipper in the bottom of the boat. "now is my chance," thought wort. he reached down to the coveted dipper. it was a venerable piece of tinware. "that's too old to be ours," reflected the daring wort. "let me turn it over and see if there is a mark on the bottom. bah, an old worm! that is not our dipper." "here, you thief! what are you meddlin' with that property for?" roared a voice. it was old tim. his face was red as a boiled lobster, and as he crooked his bare arms and rested them on his hips, they looked like the claws of a mammoth lobster ready to crawl out and seize any offender. "guess i'll go," thought wort, and off he hurried to tell the club his ill-success, and that their detective in search of a thief had been called one. a few minutes later juggie exclaimed to the disconsolate circle, "dar's de organ-grinder." it was indeed he hurrying along the lane and turning a troubled face toward the barn, for no monkey came with him. had he lost his friend from the far south? "he gone!" said the grinder, as he reached the boys. "you sheen him?" "seen your monkey?" asked sid. "yes, yes! you sheen my leetle mun-kee?" "why, no." "you--you--you," and the grinder swept the circle to find out if any one had seen the lost favorite. no one had seen him. "o, o dear!" lamented the grinder excitedly. poor organ-grinder! his face was wrinkled as badly as that of his missing assistant when attempting to pick a very bad nut. "you go--find--my--mun-kee?" "o, yes," said the president, "we will hunt. come on." they scattered, tumbling over fences, climbing shed roofs, diving into corners, shouting, yelling, and stirring up the neighborhood thoroughly. it did no good. "my munkee" refused to be found. the boys went to school and returned, meeting in the barn chamber once more. "there's some business to be done, mr. president," said the "securtary," in a very formal way. but where was the president? he was no more to be found than the monkey. a little later, wort wentworth was looking out of the window. "here comes sid," he shouted. sid was running through the yard, when, seeing the boys at the window, he stopped, and shouted excitedly: "o, fellers, i have made a discovery! it's all out now. come!" what was out he did not say, but turned and speedily was out himself in the lane. "come on, boys," called the governor, and down the stairs they went, rushing, shoving, tumbling, just in time to see the last of sid's legs disappearing round the corner of the house. they hurried after him, down the lane, then up a little passage-way between two buildings on the left. then they turned aside to the rear of a barn, and there the panting, confused group halted. "there!" said sid, solemnly, pointing as he spoke. "the mystery is over. poor feller!" dangling from the roof by a cord that was twisted round his neck, swung the dead monkey! in the grasp of his rigid paw was the missing dipper. "i see the shield!" sang out wort. yes, there was the mark identifying the stolen property. poor little child of the tropics, swinging in his leafy, native haunts from bough to bough, gripping the branches with paw and tail, he little anticipated that his last swing would be by the neck, like that of a murderer from the black, unsightly gallows! he had strayed away, carrying with him the cord binding him to his master's wrist. in his peregrinations over various roofs, he had examined the cupola, and reaching a paw through an opening where a slat chanced to have been removed, he had abstracted the property of the club. whatever money was in the dipper had been spilled hopelessly as marbles in the sea. attempting to come down by a spout from the last barn-roof visited, he was entangled in the cord that had caught about a nail in the roof. finally, the cord was twisted about his neck and twisted the life out of him. the thief was holding out the dipper as if asking for more, and showing that the ruling passion was strong in death. there were many sighs from the tender-hearted, sympathetic boys. all were ready to pity and forgive, but pity and forgiveness could not bring the little creature back to life. "let's bury him!" said a tearful voice. it was tony, who said little generally, but he was now moved to speak in his secret sympathy for this wandering child of the sun. the organ-grinder was notified, and then a grave was dug for his dead property under the leafiest apple-tree. charlie furnished a box, and wort brought fresh straw from his stable. the box with its occupant was laid in the grave, and the pitiful face of the monkey was then covered up forever. chapter x. aunt stanshy's boarder. aunt stanshy had often said she would never have boarders, and she would "go to the almshouse first," yes, she "would." one day, though, there came to the house a frank, lively, irrepressible young man of nineteen. "i am a stranger here," he said, "but my name is somers, will somers, and i have come here to be a clerk in tilton's apothecary-store; been in boston, you know, with tompkins & thomas, tilton, when he was up the other day at our store, said that he wanted a clerk and offered me the chance, which i concluded to accept. i want a boarding-place, marm; but what a town this is? do i look like a tramp, and if i don't, what is the matter that i cant get a boarding-house? do i look like one?" here he looked at aunt stanshy, making such an appeal with his frank, blue eyes, that aunt stanshy could not well do otherwise than say, "why, no!" "then wont you take me?" "o--i--i--said i never would take boarders,--and--and--i am unprepared,--and--and--" "o this room will do first-rate. i shouldn't want one any better, really. i know"--here he gave a very approving glance about the room. "now come, do! it would please mother very much." "have you a mother living?" "o yes, and she is one of the best mothers, too, and i think you look like her. there are four of us brothers. how much your little boy looks like my little brother willie at home! come here," he said to charlie, who had opened the door to ask aunt stanshy a question, "come here and see what apothecaries carry in their pockets. some folks think they only carry drugs and such things, but you see if it is so?" here he put into charlie's fat hand a long and toothsome piece of checkerberry pipe stem! "he is not my little boy really," explained aunt stanshy, and then she went on to say who charlie was, and also told about other things, finally saying so much concerning the macomber family that he ceased to be a stranger and seemed to become a relative, a species of long-absent son, and consistently what could aunt stanshy do but let will somers--an arrival in seamont only a few hours old--have that sacred apartment--her front room? "what a fool i am!" soliloquized aunt stanshy. she watched will somers go down the street after the interview, and heard him whistling "the girl i left behind me." did he mean aunt stanshy? "i'm a nat'ral-born fool, i do believe," she exclaimed, "letting a perfect stranger have that room; but there, it will be sort of nice having him round. i s'pose he will want to stick a lot of things into that room." and didn't he stick up "things" and make changes? down came the two yellow crockery crow-biddies that had roosted on the mantelpiece the last twenty years, never having paid for the privilege with a single crow. down came two vases of dried grasses. down came a flaming red, yellow, orange, and green print of an american farm-yard. up went various things. over the mantel-piece was suspended a picture of abraham lincoln, garnished with american flags, and along the mantel-piece was ranged a row of photographs, principally of young ladies, several fans coming at intervals, while about the room, on various brackets, stood more photographs, mostly feminine, and more flags, all american. it ought to be said in fairness that, while several of the young ladies did not have at all a family look, others did, and were introduced to aunt stanshy as will's sisters. he had a flag over his mother's picture. then there was a red-hot chromo of a fire-engine, and a cool one of two white bears on a cake of ice. "o dear, what a boarder!" said aunt stanshy, going into the room twenty-four hours after it had been very orderly arranged by her. "things are stirred up now. it looks like a tornader." that was the way it generally appeared, and yet will somers, impulsive, careless, thoughtless, but frank, enthusiastic, generous, dashing, and honorable always, was very popular with aunt stanshy and charlie. in charlie's eyes he was a marvelous being. such wonderful fires in the city as he told charlie about! and then, what did aunt stanshy's boarder do but join the "cataract" engine company in seamont! he made a stir generally in the old place, starting a gymnasium and organizing a "reading circle," and putting things generally in a whirl. he had a "voice," and he had a guitar, so that his "serenades" were famous; and he set aunt stanshy's heart all in a flutter one night when, awaking about twelve, she heard his well-known voice leading off in a serenade, while he twanged his guitar to the tune, "o dearest love, do you remember?" will somers was popular in a very short time with every body. in the club-circle he was the object of an open, undisguised admiration. they quickly made him an honorary member, and he quickly set them up a "pair of bars," put in proper position the ladder, and suspended swings, that they might practice gymnastics every day. every mother who had a boy in that club expected almost any day that her idol might be brought home stretched on a shutter or bundled up in a wheelbarrow. no limb though was broken, and there were some wonderful developments of "muscle" (so the club thought). one day the new honorary member made an offer. "boys, i can have the next saturday afternoon that comes along, and aunt stanshy says there is a garrison-house on the other side of the river. come, i'll hire a boat and take you over." "o good!" "yes, we'll go!" "three cheers!" "hurrah for will somers!" were some of the outcries greeting the proposition. "i think, boys, all the honorary members ought to be invited." "certainly," said sid, and aunt stanshy was invited. "see me going! the idea!" she exclaimed. "what if the minister should see me going off with a parcel of boys!" "he would say you were a very sensible woman," said charlie, and aunt stanshy went. the club admired the rowing of will somers as he performed with bare arms and showed a "fearful muscle." the boat was a very large one accommodating all-the party, but the oars-man refused to have any help, and progress was slow. at last the other side of the river was reached in safety. they walked through a ship-yard, and then, turned into a country road, sweet with wild flowers, nodding on either side. beyond this they came to a piece of road, bordered with stiff, stout pines. "there it is!" said aunt stanshy. "it is that block-house." "what! the garrison-house?" inquired sid. "big as that? i thought they were smaller." "the real garrison-house is in the corner, this way, and makes one room on the first floor. people that came to live in the garrison-house built above it and built beyond it, turning the garrison-house into a single room in a big, old-fashioned building. mr. parlin, may we take a look at the garrison-house?" "sartin, sartin. step in. i guess amanda is there, washin' the baby; but she's used to children, and wont mind you more than flies," said a stout, broad-shouldered farmer, passing through the yard, a hoe resting on his shoulder. "let me go with you." amanda, who was washing the baby, and at the same time trying to keep in decent order six other children, gave them a hearty welcome, and showed that she did not mind them more than "flies." "aunt stanshy, how d'ye do? are these all your children?" asked amanda, laughing. "yes," said sid; "she is our mother to-day, and we are proud of her." the white shields all smiled their approbation of sid's ready gallantry. "and this is the garrison-house?" inquired will somers. "yes," replied mr. parlin; "we are between its walls, and solid walls, too, they are. see that feller overhead stickin' out from the ceilin'. there is a beam for you, all of oak, too, and it measures eleven inches by thirteen. now step outside. there, boys, in that corner, the clapboards are broken, and you can see what was the original style of the walls. they were laid in this way: big, square sticks of oak were laid one upon the other, the ends dovetailed and secured by pins, the cracks being filled with mortar. you see, no injun bullet could go through that wall, and there would be little satisfaction in building a fire against it, unless an immense one." will somers was here striding over the ground, pacing the length of the garrison wall. "about twenty feet," he said. "yes, twenty feet hits the mark," replied mr. parlin. "the sticks are a foot wide, and measure six inches through. it makes a pretty good wall. step in and i'll show you where they went in and out. there, it was that narrow door over in that side, and that openin' up there, about two feet square, they say, was the winder, and they used to fire out of it. at night they fitted a block into it and fastened up the door-way with logs." "did they have any indians about here, any real ones?" asked charlie. "there is only one kind, sonny, when you talk about full-blooded injuns, and i guess our fathers found it out. injuns! thick as pizen any day. why, down in that place just beyond here a woman was goin' along one day, and she was carryin' an earthen pot. the injuns just whooped out on her, and it was the last time the poor thing was seen alive. the pot was found afterward, and is kept by one of our families in town to-day. injuns! i guess so. of course, when they were about here the alarm was given, and the people came flockin' to the garrison-house, and they were safe enough here." how the eyes of the club projected! the governor informed pip that his orbs stuck out far enough to hang a mug on. the party slowly made its way back to the boat. "how foggy it is!" said aunt stanshy. "it has all come up while we were gone." "don't worry," said will. "i'll row you across." "i hope you wont row us anywhere else, i'm sure." "don't worry," again remarked the young apothecary, and in a very confident tone. "let me pint you first right for peleg wherren's fish-house, for there's a good landin' place at his wharf," said aunt stanshy. standing on the pebbly shore, she bowed to the level of the boat's rail, and then aimed her as if an enemy directing a columbiad at peleg's fish-flakes, eel-pots, and other articles, promising to let a cold shot drop in their midst. "there, i've pinted her; now go right across." "all right," sang out will, cheerfully. like a great, gray, woolly blanket, the fog rested on the river, and seamont was as effectually hid as if fifty miles away. "look--out!" screamed aunt stanshy. something big was now looming up directly before the bow of the boys' boat. "don't run that ship down," said the president. "i wont," replied the apothecary, "if they'll get out of the way." "ship ahoy!" he shouted. "aye, aye!" came from the vessel. "what ship is that, and how many days out?" "the dolphin, and one day out from--" the remaining words were lost. "this is the 'magnificent,' ten minutes out from t'other side of the river!" shouted will. the coaster disappeared as if smothered under the gray woolly blanket that had settled down on every thing. "why don't we come to the wharf?" inquired pip. "because we haven't got there." will's reason was received with laughter, but pip persisted in his questioning. "what if we thouldn't get there at all?" "o we will." gov. grimes and wort had been very anxious to pull an oar, and will gratified them. but the governor could not row. will had urged him to stop. the governor's resoluteness sometimes ran into obstinacy, and it did now. "just see me row--away," cried the governor, refusing to stop, but as he was about to say "away," his oar slipped out of the rowlock, and he finished the sentence, his feet going up into the air and his head going down into the bottom of the boat! "caught a crab, governor?" shouted the president. the boat stopped in the midst of the commotion that followed the governor's tumble, and when will started his craft again, he did not appreciate the fact that its bow had shifted its aim. "where _are_ we goin'?" inquired aunt stanshy. "home," answered will. "i'm all right. a few more strokes must fetch us all right to the wharf," and he pulled lustily on his oars. "it is my fear that we are all wrong," said aunt stanshy. "i know something about this river, and about fogs, and about people rowing round like fools and getting nowhere." the members of the club now looked serious, and will was provoked at aunt stanshy's remark. "halloo there!" this was an unexpected shout from the heart of the fog, and after the shout came a black boat, and in it was a man dressed like a fisherman. he wore a "sou'wester" and a striped woolen shirt, also big cow-hide boots that came above the knees of his pants. "where are we?" asked will. "anywhere near wherren's wharf?" "where are you? wal, it is safe to say in a gin'ral way that you are in the river." "i know that, friend," said will, "but are we headed for the shore?" "that depends on the shore you want to find. it's my opinion that if you young folks keep on just as your boat is headed, you'll strike europe if you have good luck." "pshaw!" exclaimed the apothecary, "we can't be that much out of the way." "try it and see." "well, just where are we and which way ought we to go to reach wherren's wharf?" "we are now down near forbes's island, and--" "forbes's island!" screamed aunt stanshy. "did you ever!" "and my compass says if one wants to get up river, he must go in a direction directly opposite to that which you are now taking!" the apothecary's face fell several inches, charlie thought. "when you are out on the river, you are always safer to have a compass, for fogs may come up and you don't know where you are. i'm goin' up the river and i should be happy to show you where wherren's wharf is, for you might as well hunt for a clam inside of an iceberg as to hunt for the wharf down here." "thank you," said aunt stanshy. "haven't i seen you before, marm?" "i dare say." "i was at your place and you gave me a job, sawing wood, this summer." "o, is it you, mister? i see now." "the same one. one good turn deserves another; so let's go along together." all in the club were glad to see the man, excepting wort. up the river they slowly but safely went, the fisherman guiding his party through the fog to the place of landing. a part of the way he had towed them along, throwing them the painter of his boat. "whenever john fisher can do you a favor, marm, let me know it," said the man. "three cheers for john fisher!" shouted the club. wort joined in this, and he also said to himself, "i wish i had told him not to mind my seeding him. i will, the next time; see if i don't." peleg wherren's fish-house was a neighbor of the lane, and from the boat the party passed to aunt stanshy's. as charlie went along, he noticed a woman in the lane. she wore a rusty black hood, a faded red shawl, and an old calico dress. her general look was that of poverty. she turned as she heard the sound of steps, and, turning, chanced to face aunt stanshy. thereupon the two women both swung round and looked away, like neighboring vanes struck by opposite currents of wind. aunt stanshy started and went ahead rapidly. in a moment charlie heard some one crying. looking back he saw it was pip, who had fallen and hurt himself. the woman in faded clothes was quite nigh, and immediately running to pip, helped him up, saying, in a pitying, motherly way, "you poor little fellow!" "she has a pleasant face," thought charlie. "who is it?" he asked simes badger, who came down the lane. "that? that is jane." "who is jane?" "tim tyler's sister." "old tim's?" "yes, and young tim's mother." "where does she live?" "o the tylers all live in the same nest." "jane and aunt stanshy, then, do not speak to one another," reflected charlie. chapter xi. the club in splinters. there is such a thing as a club breaking, going to splinters even. this sad end of a club was experienced by the up-the-ladder club. it was not a strange thing, as all human organizations have their ups and downs, and many have their downs especially. it happened in this way. "boys," said the president one day, "let's play school. i'll be teacher. no; let's have a public declamation--pieces, you know, and so on. then we can charge something and perhaps get a little money--nails, i mean." the real cash was scarce, and nails became a necessity. "and not play school?" asked the literary governor. "a school is real interestin', you know." "yes, we might play that afterward as a sort of rest." "agreed," was the general sentiment. the old sheet that had done service so many times was once more brought out and strung across one corner of the barn chamber. an audience of three was secured, the governor's youngest brother, pip's little sister, and sid waters's young cousin from the country. the members of the club gathered behind the sheet for action, but the auditors, all of them plump children, were ranged in a row upon a window-blind supported by blocks of wood. the first piece was a song by sid. he strutted out pompously and began, "how beau--" he stopped. he had forgotten his bow. executing this, he started once more, "how beautiful the cow--" he was halting again. "how beautiful the cow--" he hesitated once more. "o beautiful cow," sang out the roguish wort behind the sheet. "shut up!" shrieked the infuriated vocalist, rushing to the bed-sheet. "don't interrupt me!" he resumed his recitation: "how beautiful the cow-slip upon the verdant mead, how diligent the sower who drops the tiny seed." he continued and finished the piece amid great enthusiasm on the part of the boys behind the sheet, who applauded tumultuously. there was little movement on the part of the butter-tubs. they opened their eyes and stared wonderingly. then they opened their mouths and grinned. charlie now appeared, announcing as his selection "independence bell," a subject which he commenced to treat vigorously. the reference was to the bell at philadelphia, rung at the declaration of independence, and somebody behind the sheet now began to shake a cowbell, a device which it was thought would heighten the effect of the performance. "'taint time!" called out charlie, turning in despair to the curtain. here wort's round, beaming face appeared at a rent which was growing larger every few minutes. "tell me when," he whispered. charlie resumed his recitation. soon he whispered, "go it!" didn't wort do his duty! no bell-ringer in philadelphia could have been more enthusiastic, and no cow astray seeking after home ever wagged her bell so continuously. it was afterward found out that every boy behind the curtain had a chance to swing that bell, a fact accounting for the popularity of the piece and for the tumultuous applause following it. the applause came from brother-performers, but was none the less gratifying to the speaker. the final piece was by wort, "the last rose of summer." if given, no one can say how successful it might have been, but while the subject implied a compliment to wort and those preceding him, the adjective "last" was ominous. there were several boys struggling to look through the curtain, one through the old rent wort had used, and the others through new rents that they had ingeniously made with their fingers. but what curtain could hold up against the continued pressure of three stout boys? there was nothing that such a curtain could do but come down; and this it did, the three boys sprawling at the base of the stem of the last rose of summer--in other words, at wort's feet! wort, in turn, was ignominiously night-capped by the sheet, for it completely covered him. the butter-tubs now gave way to their sense of the ludicrous, and clapped and laughed merrily. this did not please the four boys in or on the floor, who angrily rubbed their shins. sid declared that it was too bad to act as disgracefully. all this was poor preparation for the serious duties of school-keeping, to which the president now directed his attention. with how much pomp and dignity he took up the duties of school-teacher, confronting a row of uneasy boys occupying seats on a green blind, each one wearing his cap! "hats off!" shouted sid. "where are my books?" asked charlie. "they are probably where they ought to be, young man, in your desk." each boy then proceeded to take an imaginary reader out of an imaginary desk. wort, though, had a book. "all properly supplied with readers? open them. read, 'merry gentlemen,' read. wort may begin." there was no response. "read, i say." there was silence still. "do you mean to disobey me?" "you haven't told us what to read," replied wort. "yes, i have." "you haven't," stoutly reaffirmed wort. "you said, 'merry gentlemen, read.'" "i mean the piece called 'merry gentlemen,' on page--well, you know. we have read it in school enough times to know it, and then scholars ought to know their readers well enough to be able to turn to any place and read without a book even. who is that speaking? tell me. haven't i told you a thousand times that there must be no speaking in this school? i see the guilty scholar. richard grimes, come this way!" "i didn't." "no trifling, young man. come this way," and collaring the refractory rick, sid led him into the closet. the governor was not to be wholly suppressed, and kept protruding a red pug-nose into very plain sight. "teacher," called out wort, "i see a red sugar-plum sticking out." "richard, come this way. you're looking out." "no, sir; it was my nose." "hold out your hand. if you flinch, sir, you will receive another." the punishment was moodily received, and the governor went back to the closet. charlie and wort were soon consigned to the same spot for disobedience. pip was noisily moving about. "say," whispered sid, "be good, and take your seat properly." "take your seat properly!" he then roared. "pip, you may read about the 'caravan,' on the fifth page. take wort's book." "jutht thee--" began pip. "juggie and tony, you may both go into the closet for giggling," sharply interposed the teacher. "go now!" there were now five boys inside the closet, five restless immortals with ten restless legs and ten restless arms. "read, pip, about the caravan." "jutht thee, the wild beathth--" in harmony with this thought came a loud roar from the closet. "now you've got to be better," said sid, turning to the wild beasts, "or i will resign and i won't teach." "let me be teacher," squeaked pip. the principal, though, did not resign; but, advancing to the closet or cage door, was about to make an appeal to his infuriated caravan. they anticipated him. "teacher, charlie is pinching me." "ow! somebody's on my foot." "there isn't room! i can't breathe!" declared a third. "it is disgraceful, boys, how you act," said their aged teacher. "you can't play school worth a cent. pip, come here!" the only scholar now on duty had disgraced himself by making up faces behind his teacher's back, and as sid suddenly turned, the culprit was detected. "pip, hold out your hand. there, take that!" "ow! you hit too hard." "he will cry. don't hit too hard!" shouted a warning voice from the closet. "booh-ooh-ooh!" went pip. "i didn't hit you hard," explained the "principal of the academy," as he had several times called himself. "you mustn't be a-foolin' in school. if you were in a real school you would get worse whippings than that." pip's only answer was, "booh-ooh-ooh!" "wort, come here. you are not presenting a respectful face to your teacher. i caught you, sir. hold out your hand." "i don't want to." "do you rebel?" and the principal swelled as if ambitious to puff himself into a giant. it is not pleasant to put it on record that wort did rebel. he refused to hold out his hand, and when sid seized him he resisted. then a tussle set in, and it was doubtful whether the teacher would floor the scholar, or the scholar floor the teacher. but they drew off and scowled at one another like two thunder clouds. "there," said the principal of the academy finally, "i am not going to be teacher any more. who wants my chance may have it." "and i won't belong to this old club any more," said wort, smarting under the castigation he had received. "who wants my chance may have it." "'tith an old club," sobbed pip, "and who wantth my chanth may have it." "o, fellers, let's not get mad," said the president. "pooh!" exclaimed the governor. "you can say so, who gave all the lickin's." "and not had one yourself," said charlie. "o, fellers, don't get mad," besought sid once more. "you know it was for your good." this last remark was greeted with sneers, showing that sid's labors for the welfare of youth were not appreciated. there was not only a determination to get mad, but to stay mad. besides, the offended ones were moving toward the door, and this in a quarrel always looks bad. "let it go," said sid. "i did not mean to hurt you. come, let's march down stairs. i was going to have you march down stairs properly, just as we do at school. come, let's form a line." "yes, and you be cap'n," sulked wort. "you may be, then," said sid. "i aint goin' to march," sobbed pip. that feather was too much for the camel's back, especially as the camel in this case was a two-legged one, and a boy like sid, and he made no further attempts at reconciliation. "go it as you please, then," he said, angrily, and it was, indeed, a go-it-as-you-please column that rushed down stairs. "i'm going home," said wort. "o, don't!" pleaded charlie. "let him go!" shouted sid. "and me, too," squeaked pip, and a second sullen knight passed out of the yard. "it's of no us staying here, and i guess i'll go off and find billy," observed the governor, and he left to hunt up his absent cousin. "my mother wants me, and i might as well go, for the club is broken up," said sid. he sauntered out of the yard with a reckless air, his hands in his pockets. charlie, juggie, and tony were now the only ones left, and they looked at one another sorrowfully. "charlie! come!" it was aunt stanshy calling. tony and juggie now moved off, and charlie went into the house with a heavy heart. "what _is_ the matter, charles pitt macomber?" "club has broken up," and charlie's lips quivered. "mad?" charlie did not speak, but moved his head up and down like a saw. "who? sid, rick, wort, pip?" each time the saw went up and down. "are you mad?" "i was, but i am not now." "i'm sorry. i guess it's a pretty bad case, and the club has all gone to splinters." the club in splinters! all that day the chamber was deserted. it was forsaken the next bright summer day. a mouse came out of his hole, and, looking timidly about, gave a faint, surprised squeak. the flies buzzed in the sunshine, and had all the time they wished to hum through their tunes. the only other noise was the wind that murmured about the door and the window that aunt stanshy had closed up so resolutely. nobody came to climb the ladder, and it did have such a forsaken look. nobody troubled the sheet, or the closet, or the various relics strewn about. alas! alas! the club was in splinters! chapter xii. the club mended. "then the club is all broken up?" "yes," said charlie, mournfully. "how did it happen?" "you see, will"--every body called the apothecary's clerk will--"we had a school and sid kept it, and he licked the fellers, and they couldn't stand it." "i see." "but i think sid wanted to make up." "and it was easier for him to make up than for the boys who had got the lickings, was it?" "i guess it was," said charlie, laughing. "too bad to be broken up!" "yes," and charlie's laugh was turning to a cry. "you didn't think of the notice stuck up on the post, 'no cross words?'" "why, no! i know i forgot all about it." "i don't believe your teacher, miss barry, will be pleased to know of the quarrel, as she is a kind, good-natured lady, and makes folks kind to one another." "i 'spose she wont like it." "wouldn't you like to have your broken club mended?" "yes, yes," replied charlie, excitedly. "how?" "there is one way to do it and fix all things right again." as will spoke he also attended to his breakfast, interjecting his words amid sips of coffee and mouthfuls of aunt stanshy's flaky biscuit. he was hungry, as he had been out before breakfast in answer to a furious alarm of fire. "you see, when a club is in pieces, that it may be mended again, each piece must resolve to do what it can toward a coming together again. will you?" "yes, i will." "there's one. who is the next one to bring round, the next piece of club to make willing to be joined to the rest?" "i guess wort feels about as stuffy as any one. there he is out in the lane now." "is he? go, get him." the "stuffy" splinter of the club was brought in. will had disappeared, but soon came back to the table, bringing from his room a neat, white package of--charlie's curious eyes could not guess what. "art you wort wentworth?" asked will. "yes." "i have some candy for you." here the apothecary displayed various long, dainty sticks of candy, exceedingly toothsome in their looks. there were checkerberry-pipe and licorice-pipe and sassafras-pipe, and--how wort's eyes did glisten and his mouth water as he imagined the different kinds there! will did not forget, to charlie's joy, that another boy present had also several sweet teeth. having sweetened up wort's disposition, will said, "you and charlie will now do me a favor, won't you?" "i will," said charlie, eagerly, who had great admiration for the apothecary, but might possibly have been moved also by great love for his candy. "and i will," said wort, determined not to be outdone by charlie. "well, now, the club that has been broken is going to be mended, and you two will forgive and forget, wont you?" "i will," declared charlie, promptly. wort hesitated. "take this while you are thinking," said will, pressing into wort's hands an extra large piece of rose-pipe. as he took it, wort growled, "sid began it." "but will you end it if sid is willing to make up? you wont hold out?" "n--n--o." "there is sid!" said charlie. "where?" "going along the lane, that boy with a blue cap on." "you two stay here, and tell aunt stanshy, charlie, that i'll be back soon to finish my breakfast," and away went will, without a hat, a cake of bread in one hand and a piece of cheese in the other. "if that fellow isn't the greatest! he would leave a funeral in just that way if the impulse took him," declared aunt stanshy, watching him from the window, and secretly admiring him. "what a boy! he makes lots of trouble for me, o dear!" "aint he funny?" asked wort. "funny?" replied aunt stanshy, who did not intend that any one else should depreciate her idol. "funny? of course not." all this time will was chasing sid, who was heading up the lane and was about entering water street. sid was in a hurry, and unaware that he was wanted by any one in the lane, had broken into a run; but will had run to so many fires that he was equal to this emergency and overtook sid, laying a hand on his shoulder. "what do you want?" asked sid. "i want to catch that man ahead there and borrow his clam-digger." "come back to the house with me a little while." any of the club boys would do any thing for will, and sid turned. "good-morning, mr. somers." will turned his head, so covered with wilfully curly hair. in his hand were the bread and cheese still. he blushed as he said, "good-morning, miss barry." "whew," he said to himself, "the teacher has caught me now!" several people indeed "caught" will somers, in that way, that morning, and wondered what he was doing, running bare-headed. he carried his point, though, captured sid, and led him back to the house. "now, sid," exclaimed will, on his way to aunt stanshy's "there has been trouble in the up-the-ladder club, i learn, and i want to fix it up, and you will help me, will you not?" "o yes," replied sid, whose nature was not a hard and implacable one. "wort is at the house, and you are willing to say you are sorry you hurt him, and you want to make up and be good friends?" "o yes." when will entered the house with his prize, the two met wort face to face. "i want these two knights to make up and be good friends again, because it is all foolish and wrong, you know, holding out against one another," said will. the two boys eyed one another, sid grinning, wort looking sulky and foolish. "wort," said the late principal of the academy, "i am sorry i hurt you. i didn't mean to do it, but i suppose i was too anxious to keep up the discipline of the school, and i got agoing, you know. let's shake hands and be friends." wort hesitated. "you ought to do that," said will. "shake hands, wort," and as he spoke he carelessly but effectively waved a stick of sassafras-pipe in wort's sight. it is one of the most potent sticks that can be used for a boy's "_licking_." "well, i will," said wort, "and i didn't mean to hurt you;" unwilling that sid should be the only one thought able to inflict an injury. "i now announce," said will, "that soon as possible, i shall take every boy down to sandy beach for an afternoon's fun; that is, every knight who makes up." this had a magical effect. all the disaffected knights followed the example of sid and wort, "making up" and joining the beach-party. the excursionists had a capital time on that occasion, and returned in such a frame of mind that it could be considered as settled that the club, once in splinters, was now mended. the boys, on the subsequent sunday, told miss barry that there had been a quarrel, but, added sid, "it is all fixed now." "i am very glad there has been a reconciliation," replied miss barry. "if there had been none, i should have felt that you were going down and not up the ladder. in our play we can be moving up, and reconciliation is a round in the ladder." chapter xiii. a knight goes to sea. "and do you want to come to my launching?" "you going to be launched?" asked charlie. "not exactly," said skipper wentworth, wort's father, "but my schooner is, and if you come to raynes's ship-yard next saturday, you will see her. you can tell any of the other boys to come if they like. wort will be there." charlie went down to the yard the day before the launching. the schooner seemed to be an ant-heap where all the ants were stirring, and all were on the outside, so many men were at work. the club boys were quite numerously represented through their friends. sid's father was flourishing a paint-brush high up on a staging. pip's father and also juggie's cousin were swinging their hammers about the cook's quarters pip's grandfather, a blacksmith, was inspecting some of the iron-work of the vessel. a tall cousin of the governor was driving oxen. the clanking chains of the oxen hauling timber for the building of another vessel, the pounding of hammers, the shouts of the bosses ordering the workmen, made a lively compound of sound. the next saturday, every thing was ready for the launching. with eager eyes charlie noticed all the movements of the workmen. he saw them drive the wedges under the schooner, and heard blow on blow as the wedges went in farther and farther. he saw them knock away the props holding the schooner in place, and along the ways, or planed timbers, well greased for the schooner's ride, he watched the vessel slowly then swiftly moving. down, down she went, lower and lower, so deep into the waiting arms of the blue river, that the waters threatened to go over her, and then up she came gracefully, bringing a bridal-veil of snowy foam with her, and exciting the admiration of all the spectators, who vented their feelings in an uproarious "hurrah!" one of the fortunate party that had permission to be in the vessel at its launching was wort wentworth, the skipper's boy. "i must see every thing that there is," thought the inquisitive boy, and he turned, finally, into the state-room which the skipper himself expected to occupy as his quarters in the cabin. "nice place," he said, climbing into his father's berth, and there curling up into one corner. the day had been an exciting one, and yet tiresome, and wort's next movement was to gape. "sort of sleepy," he said. the wind murmuring at the open window of the state-room had a drowsy sound, and--and wort's head gave a sudden fall. he opened his eyes, and said, "this won't do; i mustn't go to sleep," but the wind continued to hum its drowsy tune as if saying, "go to sleep, go to sleep, tired boy, tired boy; there, there!" wort's head rose and fell several times, and each time he made a remonstrance. but the remonstrances were feebler one after the other, his eyes refused to open, and there in the captain's state-room was a boy fast asleep! it was the latter part of the afternoon, and one of the men at work on the new vessel came to wort's father, and said, "cap'n, shall we let the schooner lie off in the stream to-night, or do you take her to her wharf?" "no chance for her at the wharf, and she must stay here till monday, and i don't think any one need stay with her and watch. she is so heavily anchored she can't very well run away. we will all leave. but where is my boy?" "i think, cap'n, i see a boy like him going off with your brother." "all right. my brother nathan was here, and he will look after wort. now we will go." when skipper wentworth reached home his wife told him that "nathan" had said something about taking wort home with him to spend a day or two at his farm, three miles away. "then wort has gone with nathan, wife?" "i think he must have, as he has not come home." "he is with nathan. all right." the good folks went to bed, and nobody told them where wort was. the little waves rippling about the schooner may have known, and a bright, inquisitive star looking in at the cabin window may have known, but neither wave nor star told the secret. toward morning wort woke up. where was he? he put out his hands expecting to feel the soft feather pillow that mother wentworth daily laid upon his bed. it was only a hard board that he felt above him and back of him. where was he? he rubbed his eyes wide open, and little by little it came to him that he was in the cabin of the schooner. what if the vessel should break away from her moorings and drift off to sea? what if it had gone already, and this craft with a crew of one were actually on her voyage? his heart thumped hard in his fright. he crawled out of the cabin, making his way along as well as he could over pieces of board, running into a carpenter's saw-horse provokingly left in the door-way, and stroking his legs, he stepped outside. the wind from the water swept cool across the vessel. where was he? adrift? he turned toward the sea. the light at simes badger's lighthouse was still blazing, but far away above the dark, angry sea, there was a faint glow in the heavens. "good!" thought wort. "father's vessel hasn't broke loose, for there is the light-house where it was yesterday, and that's morning over there. she's coming!" he turned toward the town. he saw one light shining from a house window, and thought it must signify a sick person or an early riser. then he heard a cock crowing. "never knew a rooster had such a pleasant voice before," he said. all that he could do was to wait until simes badger's light went out, and day filled the eastern sky, and not only roosters but human beings were stirring in seamont. "then some one will come and get me, i hope," thought wort. he patiently waited, watching the dark gurgling river and the brightening sky. about six o'clock simes badger pushed off his boat from the light-house dock, leaving his assistant in charge. "i must get my breakfast," he said. he leisurely rowed up the river. "ah," thought simes, "there is skipper wentworth's new craft. she sets easy in the water. she will make as trim a fore and aft as ever left this harbor." he was now opposite the newly-painted black and green hull. "massy!" he exclaimed, resting on his oars, "what's that on deck? a hen there? somebody is wavin' suthin'. something must be wrong there. let me take a nearer look." he rowed close up to the vessel's side, and there detained his boat in the still, sparkling stream, raised his weather-tanned face, and saw a very fresh, boyish face looking down. "o, mr. badger, come and get me!" "wort wentworth, is that _you?_" simes knew that wort had a reputation for scrapes, but was not prepared for this appearance under the present circumstances. "what are you doin' there? you all alone?" "i got asleep in the cabin, and they left me here." "and you been here all night? it is a wonder the sharks didn't eat you," said simes, who had a very vivid imagination. "the sharks?" "well, no matter about them things. i s'pose now you want to go home?" "yes, if i can get down into your boat." "i'm willin' to take you if you can get down." "couldn't i shin down the chain-cable?" "o no! look round and find a piece of rope and make it fast to something up there, and then drop your rope down here and come that way." "what, drop myself down like the rope?" said wort, grinning. "tut, tut, boy! come down the rope! didn't i say so plain as day? and if i didn't, i will now." wort found a rope, made one end fast to the rail, and then, throwing the other end down to simes, safely lowered himself into the stern of the light-keeper's boat. in fifteen minutes more wort was at home, to the surprise and joy of his parents. the club boys heard about wort's experience, and had a word to say concerning it. "i say, wort," asked charlie, "how do you like going to sea?" "did you catch any waleths?" inquired pip. "what did the mermaids say to you?" asked the governor. "it is the last of your going to sea, wort. you will have to be a land-lubber," said sid. this last remark touched wort. "no, sir! see if i don't go to sea." and go he did. skipper wentworth thought it would be pleasant to have wort's company the first voyage, which would terminate the latter part of the year. mrs. wentworth had every thing in readiness for her boy's comfort by the time the vessel sailed. "what is her name?" he asked his father. he only replied, "i want to surprise the club you belong to." one day, to the delight of the boys, he showed them the name painted in conspicuous letters on the stern, "white shield." it was a mild autumn day when the "white shield" went to sea. the club boys gathered on a wharf at the foot of the lane, and watched the vessel drifting down the river. they waved their handkerchiefs to wort, who waved his in return. then they stood and followed with their eyes the vessel in its flight. she passed forbes' island, passed the light-house, passed rocky reef, passed--out of sight. that day, at twilight, charlie went to mr. walton's house. the clergyman's mother received a message which charlie brought from aunt stanshy, and asked him to come in. "sit down here," she said, and placed a chair before the open fire kindled on the edge of the autumn evening. "sit down, and rest." "'the 'white shield' has gone to sea," he remarked, anxious to give the latest news. "the 'white shield'?" "haven't you heard about her?" "no." "why, i thought every body knew about the 'white shield.'" and did she know that wort wentworth had gone to sea in the "white shield?" no; she was ignorant of that important fact. how narrow the circle of her knowledge was! "i know one thing, though, little boy," said the old lady, "that the sea, which fascinates so many young people, may prove to be a very hard master. o, i don't like to hear it roar on stormy nights!" then the old lady went to a picture of a ship at sea hanging on the wall. there she stood and sighed. charlie wondered what it all meant. "but there is one thing we can do on stormy nights," she added. "we can pray. and i sometimes think, nights when the winds are roaring, how many souls all along the coast must be kneeling while the sailors at sea are up in the rigging, climbing, or furling the sails." chapter xiv. setting a trap. ring, ring, ring! the bell of st. john's was busily swinging, flinging notes of gold and silver down upon the town, and in response, how many people came out into the streets as if to pick up the gold and silver shower. the bell was ringing for a temperance meeting. many were immediately interested in the subject of temperance; but whether all would go, was a question. it was a serious doubt whether those that the meeting wanted would feel that they needed the meeting. there were several very important cases. case one--who? tim tyler? he needed the meeting, but that is not the case here intended, but dr. tilton, the apothecary. dr. tilton? yes. for some time it had been known he was in the habit of indulging in a glass, "only a glass." as a result, he had been helped home drunk from his store. he did not feel desirous to attend the temperance meeting. case number two, tim tyler? not yet, but--will somers! ah, that was sad. if you could have seen aunt stanshy, you would have thought it was the saddest thing in the world. "o, miss barry," said aunt stanshy, bursting into tears, "i'm awful afraid i made an idol of that young man--so nice, you know. i've seen my idols break one after the other. i shouldn't have said a word about it, but he was seen on the street, and it became town talk, and it's all out and round. dreadful, dreadful!" "it is, and i'm afraid my uncle is responsible. it is bad every way. there is need of a temperance work here. we are all asleep," replied miss barry, who was calling at aunt stanshy's, the two women opening their hearts to one another during the call. dr. tilton was responsible for will somers's fall. one day, when will was complaining of an ill feeling, the apothecary had proffered wine as a remedy, and had offered it several times when he was tired, and will had fallen under the influence of a seemingly innocent ally. people began to talk about dr. tilton and his clerk. then they began to shun the store. not all, though, for a line of red noses and trembling hands and unsteady knees filed into the store, and not the sick people sent orders, but old topers frequented the place more and more. dr. tilton noticed the change, and was alarmed. still he did not change that habit of taking "only a glass." will somers was unhappy. he saw his mistake, and knew that the community frowned upon him. he rarely whistled now. as for the musical instrument he once loved to perform upon, it was a silent piece of furniture. he had some fine qualities of character, and his vulnerable side was his susceptibility to outside influence. the enemy had found a weak wall on that side of his character, and there successfully assaulted him. will knew that his misconduct grieved aunt stanshy. the club felt it, for by degrees the bad news reached them. it seemed as if each one was burdened by a load of guilt--as if having served in dr. tilton's store, charlie, sid, tony, and the rest had there sinned, and, in consequence, each had been seen tipsy on the street, and each carried a load that bowed him. it was charlie who happened to be at home when his teacher was calling on aunt stanshy, and he accidentally overheard a fragment of the conversation. when miss barry was fairly out of the house, and aunt stanshy was returning through the entry to her kitchen-work, sighing by the way, charlie ran to her and excitedly said, "we--we--will get up a meeting!" "a meeting about what?" "why, why, temperance." "who get it up?" "we--we boys--our club." aunt stanshy guessed at once the occasion and object of charlie's remarks, that he had heard the conversation between her and her caller, and that this proposition for a temperance meeting was to meet the grave necessities of the hour. "yes, yes," he said, "let's go and see teacher about it" "what, go now?" "yes, you and she can talk it over." in a few minutes charlie and aunt stanshy were hurrying down the street as if suddenly summoned by the pressing sickness of a friend. "o, let's get sid," suggested charlie, as they neared sid waters's house. "well," replied aunt stanshy. sid, whose appetite never failed him, was eating a lunch, but he responded at once to charlie's invitation to "come out." "what's up, charlie? i am the man for you," replied the president, who had an abundance of resources at his command, and was prepared--in his own opinion--for any emergency. "what is up? down-townies round?" "we want to have a temperance meeting. come down to teacher's." "all right. temperance meeting? the club get it up?" "i don't just know, but we can talk it over." "if they want a meeting, we can give 'em one," said sid, confidently. thus re-enforced, aunt stanshy and charlie presented themselves at miss barry's door. "come in, come," said the teacher. "i have just got home myself." "we--we have come," exclaimed aunt stanshy, "to see if we couldn't have a temperance meeting! you know we need it." "o, i see; and the boys?" "the boys," said sid, proudly, "think you could rely on them to--to--pull an oar." he felt it might be prudent not to propose to do the whole of the rowing, and offer the town a meeting managed wholly by the "up-the-ladder club," but modestly--to--pull an oar. "splendid!" said the teacher, her enthusiasm charming the boys. "among us all, i guess we can manage it." "i don't know as i can do any thing except to get people out," said aunt stanshy, fearful that she might be called upon to speak in the meeting. "let us go and see mr. walton," suggested miss barry. "it would be the very thing," declared aunt stanshy. very soon aunt stanshy, miss barry, sid, and charlie started for the minister's. on the way, juggie and tony were secured as new members of the column, and thus augmented, this eager temperance band appeared at mr. walton's door. ushered into the study, miss barry told her errand. "we need a temperance meeting very much, and we will have it at st. john's, and i want you boys--the club, miss barry--to do the most of the singing," said mr. walton. "we will," said sid. "i know i can speak for them." "and miss barry will teach them what to sing, perhaps?" asked mr. walton. "yes sir," replied miss barry. "i'll have my choir to help, but i expect the 'up-the-ladder club' to do the most." the boys were eager in their interest. to encourage them, miss barry said, "i'll make a little blue cross to go inside each white shield. a little blue cross--that is a temperance sign--will look pretty on the white silk." "there, there, won't they be proud of it?" said aunt stanshy. "of course we will," declared sid. "knights, we must give three cheers for teacher when we get to her door." during this conversation they were passing down the street, and when miss barry's door was reached, be assured that three hearty cheers were given for her. "now three for temperance!" cried sid. then they cheered for temperance. "i feel that my boys are, indeed, mounting the ladder of the true and noble," was miss barry's thought, as from her window she saw the ardent young knights pass away. the next day aunt stanshy met miss barry. "miss--miss--barry," said aunt stanshy, nervously clutching her companion's shawl, "we must--pray for our meeting." "o, we will, we will!" there were earnest prayers going to god in behalf of that meeting. as step after step might be proposed, prayer went up from the altar of those two women's hearts especially, beseeching god to recognize and bless each step that might be taken. o in what a cloud of prayer that enterprise was enveloped! aunt stanshy and miss barry were talking about the meeting one day. "i wish, miss barry, we could make sure that every body would go to the meeting. will dr. tilton go?" "that's what i am wondering about, and will somers?" aunt stanshy shook her head sadly: "he says, no." "they must be there," said miss barry, "and--and--we must set a trap for them." "a trap?" "i'll ask my uncle to help the choir sing, and--of course, he wont refuse. i don't suppose he cares to come to the meeting because he needs it, but if others go he won't want to be left out, and if he can sing, that will give him a chance to attend. he is my uncle, you know." the "trap" for dr. tilton worked successfully. he scorned the idea that he might need the meeting. this he said to himself. however, he would help the choir sing, he said, to his niece. but a trap for will somers! who could make that? "won't you come to the meeting to hear us sing?" asked charlie, with a sad face. "o, you don't want me, charlie," replied will. "o, i can't go." aunt stanshy made no remark. she sat silently, busily thinking, while charlie and will talked about the meeting. aunt stanshy was making a "trap." the day before that appointed for the temperance meeting, she went to her pastor. "mr. walton, the meeting will begin at half past seven. if--if--say about quarter after seven--you should let charlie and the other boys go down to the church door and sing one or two of their pieces, it might draw folks in." "why, that's a good idea, and i wish you would ask them." at a quarter after seven the next night the white shields, each carrying a neat cross of blue on his badge, appeared at the church door and began to sing. it was the night when dr. tilton was accustomed to close his store earlier than usual, if customers did not appear; and at a quarter after seven will somers was accustomed that night to pass the church door on his way home. would he fall into the trap that aunt stanshy had ingeniously set for him? the club began to sing their hymns. there was the touching plea containing the lines: "o what are you going to do, brother? say, what are you going to do? you have thought of some useful labor, but what is the end in view?" tony sang this. it seemed that night as if some of italy's sweet singers must have lent him their notes. the people began to gather about the club. aunt stanshy was there on the watch, eager to see if will somers might be coming down the street. tony's voice warbled away. now it was an exultant note that he touched, and then his voice sank to a plaintive appeal: "is your heart in the saviour's keeping? remember, he died for you; then what are you going to do, brother? say, what are you going to do?" as tony sang, there was a young man leaning against the fence adjoining the church door. it was somebody listlessly leaning, lifting to the light of the street lamp a face on which rested the shadow of a great sadness. "it's he!" said aunt stanshy, excitedly. charlie heard her. he guessed that it was some one out on the sidewalk whom she had discovered, and he stretched his small head beyond the ring of singers, anxiously looking out into the shadows. his sharp eye saw that form leaning against the fence. he could not wait until the song was finished. he ran out upon the sidewalk, and aunt stanshy followed. "do come, do come," pleaded charlie, as he seized will's hand and gently drew him toward the church. "yes, yes," said aunt stanshy, "we all want you." and will somers irresolutely yielded to the gentle hands that were drawing him, and entered the church. what a meeting that was! "never seed the beat of it in my life," said simes badger, who was off duty at the lighthouse that night, and having attended the meeting, reported it soon after to a band of his old cronies. "why, when the pledge was offered that meetin', it seemed as if every man, woman, and child would go for it at once. no matter if they was as innocent of liquor as a baby a day old; they jest walked up and took that pledge. and dr. tilton, he couldn't stand it, and he hopped down and he jined the pledge. and his clerk, that will somers, he did write his name handsome. o, it was a meetin', i tell ye!" yes, it was a memorable evening. dr. tilton and will somers kept their word faithfully, and society recognized the fact and liberally patronized the doctor's store, afterward. "got a new 'pothecary in our town," said simes badger. "at any rate, he's good as new, and new things draw. a 'pothecary can do amazin' sight of harm if he aint jest the right sort of man in his business." society, outside the store, recognized the new life that dr. tilton and will had begun. they were received cordially by their old friends. the club gathered about will, treating him after the fashion of the old enthusiastic friendship. "he's singin' once more and a playin'," aunt stanshy said to a neighbor, "jest as nice as can be. it does me good to see him." and tim tyler--where was he? his sister ann did hope he would be reached, but she folded her old shawl about her shoulders and went away from the meeting, saying sorrowfully to herself, "tim didn't come." no, he was not at the meeting. he did not show any interest in the movement. "but--but we can't give him up," some of his praying friends whispered. and when our prayers refuse to let the angel of blessing go, was that angel ever known to forsake us? chapter xv. the fair. poor charlie! his life did not seem to him to be altogether agreeable. being fat and good-natured, the boys were rather disposed to pick on him. then a standing vexation at school was his arithmetic. in addition to these things, he had a special trouble one day to grieve him. his class was reading a selection called the "miller." the teacher, mr. armstrong, permitted the members of the class to remain in their desks and there read. charlie abused this privilege by clapping his head below his desk, and while the boys in another part of the room were reading, he was doing his best to pack away a corn-ball. "time enough," he had concluded, "before it is my time to read, to have something good to pay for my old arithmetic." his mouth was full of corn-ball and preparing itself to take in more, when his teacher, watching the long detention of charlie's head in such a humble posture, and suspicious of the real reason, stole softly up behind charlie and, looking over his shoulder, was puzzled to decide whether the corn-ball was going into charlie or he into the corn-ball. he quietly stole back to his desk and there abruptly shouted, "macomber, you may read about the 'miller' at once." the shot struck. charlie bounded up in great confusion, his month full of corn-ball! "hold, macomber!" said the master, in a very sarcastic way. "it must be evident to you that a man cannot successfully read about the grinding of corn, and yet be grinding corn in his mouth at the same time." then he broke out into a roar, "stand out in the floor! you may do any further grinding there. stop after school, also!" unfortunate charlie! when he went home at a late hour aunt stanshy was disposed to rebuke him for his tardiness. this was too much for charlie. he broke out into a whimper: "i think i have a sad life, only scoldings at home and scoldings and arithmetic at school." "o, no!" said aunt stanshy, soothingly, guessing that the little fellow had had some trouble that day, and had been sufficiently punished for any fault; "o, no! not so bad as that! haven't you a pleasant home?" "yes--you--you are kind, i know, real kind." "well, don't think any thing more about it. here is a big piece of mince pie." he had not eaten more than one half of his lunch when he felt very much comforted, and the outside world brightened very perceptibly. to comfort him still further aunt stanshy allowed him to go after several boys and bring them to the barn, and it was in connection with this gathering that a new and important enterprise was suggested by one of the boys. "it's something that will pay," said sid. every body wanted to believe it and was willing to help it along. soon charlie came running from the barn into the kitchen. "aunt stanshy, will you please lend me your scales?" "my what?" "your scales for weighing, please." "what on earth is it now?" exclaimed aunt stanshy. it was a--so the placard on the barn door stated--it was a fair! charlie did not have much to say about it, but through the remainder of the day often hummed, or smiled and chuckled complacently. when aunt stanshy had lighted the kerosene lamp that had a big lion's claw for a base and boasted a yellow shade covered with green shepherdesses and blue sheep, then charlie sat down at the center-table and for an hour was exceedingly busy. about eight he held up an object to aunt stanshy. "what is that, aunt stanshy?" he asked. "a rag-man," she replied, promptly. the artisan's face dropped and a pout came out. a smile though quickly smoothed down the pout, and he exclaimed, in triumph, "santa claus! he's a friend of our club! we thought we would be in season for christmas, and people could buy their presents of us, and--and--will you buy?" "i will--buy--that." "you will? i'll give you a kiss for that," and aunt stanshy's young lover came up to her and in his delight gave her a kiss. of a tuft of cotton charlie had made a head. another tuft furnished a body; two more supplied arms to work with, and two more supplied legs to stand on. charlie put a three-cornered hat on santa's head and tied together the parts of his body with a girdle of pink worsted. a card on santa announced the fact that he could be bought for two cents. charlie trembled when aunt stanshy's eyes were directed toward the price lest she might not think it worth the money. "what's that?" "two cents," replied charlie, in fear. "o! well, i'll give that." "you will?" said charlie, in delight. "i'll give you another kiss." "charlie," said the blushing constantia, "you'll make a fool of an old woman like me." in the night the lips of the sleeping charlie parted as he said, with a smile, "two cents!" when this good news of the first sale was announced to the club in the morning, it threw the members into a feverish excitement. "first-rate opening, fellers," declared the president, "even before we have opened any thing." "we don't open," said the governor, "till school is out to-night." "let's open now," said billy grimes, in the excitement of his enthusiasm over the news; "what a booby!" said the governor, in plain language. "we have got no things here yet, and there are no buyers, and we must all clear out to school in ten minutes." the governor's massive logic crushed the foolish billy at once. "let's open in good style," said the president, "and do it to-night." by fifteen minutes after four, just as soon as a lot of scampering, shouting boys could get to the barn, bringing pockets stuffed with "articles," the fair was declared "opened." "but how dark it is!" said the president. so it was. the boys had forgotten how early the sun was setting in the november days. "let's postpone it till to-morrow afternoon, when there's no school," said charlie. "who's agreed?" asked the president. "me!" responded the club, vociferously. they all had prudently concluded to wait for the advent of more daylight, and, withdrawing from the barn, went down the yard talking as busily as if they were a lot of hens cackling after a successful venture at egg-laying. it had been left to charlie to put above the notice, "fair," the word "postponed." "that will prevent any rush till morning, and save folks from being disappointed," sid had declared. in the afternoon every thing was under way, and aunt stanshy went out to see the fair. "i should never know the place, i must say," remarked aunt stanshy, as her eyes swept the spot. there were several so-called "tables," such as an old window-blind and a disused shelf propped up by various supports like boxes and barrels. these tables were covered with pieces of the old curtain, now doing service for the last time. "here is the confectionery table," shouted juggie. there were now on the table three pieces of molasses candy made by his grandmother. he had had twelve to start with, and, as he had sold none, the disposition of the missing nine pieces was a matter of grave suspicion. "here's the toy table!" called out charlie. he had a few paper dolls and a few "hand-painted" shells, the decorator being sid, and prominent on the table was the cotton image of that friend of the club, santa claus. "buy a corner-copier stuffed wid candy!" shouted juggie, holding up a brown paper tunnel into which he was about dropping a solitary piece of candy. the governor had the "harvest table," which was groaning under the weight of three pears and two papers of seed. "what's this?" asked aunt stanshy, stopping before a discarded mantel-piece resting on a rabbit-box and a coal-hod. on this "table" were autumn leaves, sprigs of hemlock, a few ferns, and one chrysanthemum blossom. "thith?" replied pip, who, like all the others, had put on a "sunday smile" to attract customers. "thith ith a flower table. will you buy a flower?" "if i can see one," said aunt stanshy, laughing. "there," said pip, triumphantly holding up the lonely chrysanthemum. "one thent only! thomething rare!" "i'll buy it, and here is the cent." "cath!" sang out pip, in tones of command, addressed to a supposed cash-boy. no one responded. "cath!" "why, you are the cash-boy," said the president, "and you bring the money to me, for i am the cashier." "i tend a counter," squeaked pip. a serious misunderstanding as to positions in the fair here threatened to arise, but it was all averted by the obliging tony, who undertook to transport all bullion from the tables to the cashier's office. there now appeared the president's little sister, "callie doodles," as she was familiarly called. "o, boys, she's got a cent, for mother promised it to her! she isn't a nail-one!" shouted her brother. nail-ones belonged to an inferior caste. this class included those who had been about the streets and yards, back of barns and in old corner-lots, picking up nails or cast-away bits of iron. their currency was the more common. a hard-cash customer was about as common as bobolinks in december. "callie, come here and buy some fruit!" "don't you want some candy, callie?" "buy a toy, callie!" "flowerth! flowerth!" were the various shouts greeting the cash customer. she was saluted eagerly, as hack-men hail the arrivals in the trains at a city station. callie made no reply, but stubbed in a demure, dignified way, from table to table, finally halting where children's strongest passion is sure to take them, at the candy table. here she traded away her cash. "and wont you try a piece?" said juggie to aunt stanshy, displaying his stock of two pieces of candy. "try dese goods." she graciously took the sample. "how do you sell candy?" "cent a stick." "well, i'll take it." "two cents," said juggie, prudently charging for the piece given on trial also. as aunt stanshy left this enterprising trader, she heard a vigorous summons: "cash! cash!" at the supper-table that night charlie asked, "aunty, what do you suppose we are going to have now in our club? something at our fair, i mean?" "a tornado." "no, a refreshment saloon; and the boys said they knew you would be in every day to buy something." "o dear!" groaned aunt stanshy, inwardly. "we are going to have ice-cream, too, may be. we couldn't afford it in summer." "not in summer? why, that's the time when people want it most." "but we make ours out of snow, you know, and could only have it in cold weather." "then i hope, for your sake, we may have some snow, and i see that the clouds look like it. but the weather is getting colder nowadays, and if you have your snow, and so can make your ice-cream, it may be so cold that you will have no customers." "we will risk _that_. ice-cream always pays. ours does, at any rate." "snow is coming, i guess, for it looks like a change in the weather." a change, indeed, was setting in. the river indicated it. it was as smooth and glassy as if aunt stanshy's flat iron had been over it and pressed every wrinkle and ripple down. the air was light. the smoke from the houses and the steam from the only tug that the commerce of the town could afford to support fell, and fluttered downward in thin veils. overhead there was a mass of gray cloud halting directly above the town, and looking too lazy ever to stir again. "storm comin'!" declared simes badger to all his cronies at silas trefethen's store. "wind is sou' already." it did not stay "sou'," but swung around to the east, then worked into the north-east, and then all through the night the wind was sifting cotton-wool down on all the streets as if carpeting them, on all the roofs as if blanketing them, into all the cracks in the walls of houses and barns as if it would chink them up and make them tight for winter. chancing to look out of the window as soon as he was awake the morning after the storm, charlie shouted, "ice-cream!" "yes, all you want," said aunt stanshy, who, leaving her coffee-pot, her pan of fried potatoes, and batch of biscuit on the kitchen stove, had mounted the stairs to wake the sleepy charlie. "boys will soon be here to make it." "i warrant you! they will make their ice-cream before shoveling the folks' paths at home." it looked so, for half a dozen boys were out in the yard by eight o'clock, shouting "ice-cream" to charlie, who had not finished his breakfast. with the help of aunt stanshy's "essences" enough snow was flavored to meet the demands of customers, who, quickly notified, quickly appeared, bringing the contents of all the nail-boxes at their homes. even aunt stanshy was prevailed upon to buy a dish, and she consistently paid cash for it. her boarder, will somers, was induced to promise more extensive patronage. "will, we all think you a first-rate feller," said the artful president; "and just to help us out at the fair, couldn't you take your meals at our restaurant? our mothers say they will cook us things--steak, you know, and so on." "y--e--s, i will try it for--the present." for some reason the "things" said to have been promised--"steak, you know, and so on," did not arrive. will gave out soon after noon the first day. "aunt stanshy, i shall starve if i stay there," said will, appearing at her pantry door; "and if i didn't starve, they would kill me with their abominable 'cream' that they make me buy, though they say it is at a reduced price." the restaurant was given up very soon. the president said that people had left the sea-side for the city, and they could hardly expect enough home trade to make it pay. pip thought he could make his table pay if he had some flowers to set it off. but that was not all; he was envious of others' success. the fair had been characterized by the usual amount of "human nature" displayed on such occasions, and pip now exhibited his peculiarities. for ten cents he bought a few white flowers at a hot-house, and then thought he would get ahead of the boys and be at the barn at an early hour, making sure for himself any possible customers. "to give all an equal chance," declared the president, "to make it the same for those who get up early and those who lie abed, the barn will be open at nine o'clock, except on holidays, when we will accommodate the public at an earlier hour." pip thought he would be on hand by eight one morning. he would then be sure to catch any "nail custom," as that was a class apt to be astir early, hunting up currency before other people had a chance at it. but the weather had stiffened since the storm. it was too cold to be agreeable, and even the nail-customers, usually so early at the barn, were now at home hugging the kitchen stove. pip stood alone at the grand flower table. his blossoms lay unsought upon the table. "pip! pip!" it was the governor down in the yard. "we are going to see them skate on the pond back of the mill. come, go!" pip could hardly be coming and going at the same time, but he left his table and left his flowers. that day, the cold increased steadily. "it is nippin' cold," said aunt stanshy to a neighbor, and what did jack frost do but take out his nippers and clap them on pip's flowers! the next morning, pip found a little heap of frozen petals on the "flower-table." he could no more make them into flowers than if they had been petals of snow! that day, "owing to the weather," the "fair" was closed. the boys divided the little heap of cash and the large heap of nails, and each knight took his share. the club now ceased to have an active existence. it became like any other stick that is laid aside and set up in the corner. it seemed as if the knights had forgotten that they belonged to a club whose expressive title suggested energetic movement. chapter xvi. the fire. will somers belonged to the "cataract," which was not a "steamer," but a hand-engine. to belong to the "cataract" it was necessary to own a red flannel shirt, a good pair of lungs, and a nimble pair of legs. the shirt--did that mean fire? the lungs enabled one to do all the "hollering" that might be necessary. the legs were still more essential, that the engine might move with proper speed to a fire, and this was at a neck-breaking pace. as the engine company had many alarms to answer, some of them purposely raised to enable the company to "show off"--so simes badger said--the legs of a cataract-boy were not the least valuable of his fire-apparatus. and then it did seem as if the company all took a fiendish delight in going "like mad" by the homes of old women and all single ladies like miss persnips, tossing their red helmets--i omitted this essential piece of property--directing at the windows defiant glances, and all the while their sharp, cracked engine-bell went up and down, over and over, as if it were an insane acrobat. "fire! fire!" screamed a female voice, one afternoon. the screamer was miss persnips. "where, where?" shouted simes badger. "o, there, there! i know it must be," was the answer. that was all simes wanted, and especially as mr. walton was holding a service at st. john's. if simes could excite a neighborhood, and also create a sensation in church, he was happy. he now rushed into the church-vestibule, and then into the bell-tower, and seizing the rope pulled it as if the small-pox had broken out and attacked every other person in the community. simes being the one to make the bell boom, "danger!" he gave evidence that this one person certainly was not afflicted with the malady. in just two minutes from the first rap on the bell, will somers, leaving behind him a caldron of boiling herbs, was at the door of the engine-house, and unlocking it, had seized the long rope attached to the engine. there were enough who joined him to rush out into the street the clumsy machine. there they received large re-enforcements. "where is the fire?" bawled the foreman. nobody knew. "where is the fire, simes?" the bell-ringer was asked as the engine rattled toward the church-door. "miss persnips!" simes meant not the place of the fire, but the source of the information. "miss persnips's house is afire!" shouted the engine-men. it was enough. they rushed for that lady's place, and seeing a column of smoke above her roof, concluded that its source was directly below, and stopping at a pump this side of her house, ran their hose down into the well. they were working the brakes at a lively rate and preparing for a thorough bombardment of the building, when fortunately she appeared, screaming, "fire is over there, beyond the woods!" the smoke had now shifted its coarse, and rolling away from miss persnips's, hung in a dark, sullen cloud above the forest but a little way off. away went the engine and its allies, sweeping along men and boys, and also every able-bodied member of the up-the-ladder club whose legs could carry him. down past shops and houses and farms rushed the crowd, pulling along several fat men who had grasped the rope. by and by they came to a farmer in a red shirt who pointed his spectacles at them across the top-rail of the fence at the right of the road. "where's the' fire, squire?" excitedly asked the foreman. "fire? i don't know of fire," replied the farmer, coolly, "at leastways, any fire that is worth puttin' out. i have got a bonfire in back here, and it was purty big, and its smoke you may have seen in the village. if you want to stretch your muscle and soak your hose--and that is about all you engine-people do--you may come and play on my bonfire." "come and play on _you_" shouted an angry voice. "put out _him_" screamed another. "play away, one," bawled a third, giving the number of the engine as known at fires. there was now a half-joking, half-angry comment on the "squire," and there were enough there desirous of wetting down, not his bonfire, but its builder. the foreman quieted the strife and the "cataract" started for home. a willingness was expressed to moisten "miss persnips's place" because she had misled them, though it was unintentional on her part. some one sang out, "she can't tell about smoke. she has only one good eye, and t'other one is a glass eye." this put them all in a good-natured mood, and the "cataract" went home. soon there was a fire serious enough to satisfy the most ardent of the company. a milder style of weather had been prevailing after the late snow-storm. the sun had put extra coal on its fires and melted all the snow. then came a wind that blew continuously two days, drying the grounds and the buildings. "i notice, somers," said dr. tilton, "that you did not have good luck in finding a fire that last alarm, but if one is sounded now, i guess it will amount to something. fearful dry, it is getting to be." the doctor was a true prophet. the next alarm did amount to something. one morning about half past seven, there echoed in the narrow streets of seamont a cry that plain meant bad news. will somers heard, and might be said to have _seen_, that cry. he had taken down the shutters of his employer's store, and was hanging in the windows two very gaudily lettered placards, "a balm for all, jenkins's soporific," "the need of an aching world, muggins's liniment." will heard that magic cry, "fire--re--re!" he turned and saw a man coming down the street. he was not only coming, but running, his hat off, and his mouth open wide enough to take in a ten-cent loaf of brown bread, will thought. "woolen mill on fire!" "woolen mill!" gasped will, and his first thought was, "glory enough for one day." the woolen mill was in a pretty little hollow, a nest whose walls were spreading elm-trees. the mill was a relic of the old industries of the place and represented a vain effort to make seamont a "manufacturing center." "then the fire is down in the hollow," thought will. he saw somebody approaching who he thought might be a customer, but he quickly decided the question whether he owed a greater duty to one person or to many--the public--by turning the key in the lock of the door. then he hurried away. as he rushed to the house of the "cataract," he stopped at the door of dr. tilton's home. "there," he said to biddy flannigan, who answered, "tell the doctor there's a tremendous alarm in town, and i thought he might want me to go, as he is an owner, and here is the key." "what?" said biddy. "woolen mill's afire, tell him." "woolen mill sophia! who is she?" wondered biddy, and she went to report to the doctor. "faith, sir, yer clerk says there is a tremenjus 'larm in town and it's about woolen mill sophia, and here is the key, sir." "woolen-mill what?" asked the doctor. "i am an owner up there." "indade! it must be that sophia works up there." "sophia?" the doctor asked, and then stared at her and exclaimed, "it is 'woolen mill's afire!' my! where are my boots? quick! bertha, bring down my boots, please." this last request was shouted up stairs to his niece, bertha barry, who was making a brief visit at the doctor's. bertha quickly appeared, boots in hand, her blue eyes looking bright and fresh as the spring violets just gathered from the fields. "bertha, it's the old mill that is afire. will somers has left the key of the store here and gone to the fire. i can forgive him this morning, though i did think his duties as a fireman began to interfere with his duties as an apothecary. let me see! i'm all ready, i believe--guess i must go up to the fire. tell your aunt i have gone to the fire and i'll be back--when i arrive." off went the doctor. bertha delivered the message to her aunt and went down stairs. then she looked out of the window and watched the people on their way to the fire. "guess i'll go to the fire, too," said bertha, "if aunt is willing." "och," said biddy, as she watched the departing bertha, "we'll all be fur goin' up to see sophia. the saints defind us!" the fire had started in the waste room of the old mill. somebody had once insisted on isolating this quarter as much as possible, and brick partitions had been put up that happily interfered with the spread of the fire and allowed all the operatives a chance to escape. the fire finally reached an elevator. it then darted with startling rapidity to the top of the building, shooting up like an arrow sent by a destructive hand below. the flames were now spreading every-where in the highest story. people gathered from the town, and the engines soon were working. "get every body out of the building!" said a commanding voice, owned by a man who had just arrived. "of course! that's what we have just been doing," said a second. the cry now arose, "two boys in the mill!" some one said that the boys had made their escape with the other operatives, but had gone back into one of the lower stories after their overcoats. "boys in the mill!" rang out the fearful cry. the owner of the commanding voice rushed forward into the lower entry of the mill, swinging an ax. will somers found him at the door trying to cut round the latch. "what's that for?" asked will. "want to get 'em out, you fool!" "have you tried the door?" "n--n--o." will seized it, pulled it, and open it came! will was brave, and, in such an emergency as the present, generally took his wits with him. the room was full of smoke. he stepped in and shouted, but there was no response. while at the door of the first room, he heard some one behind saying, "boys in the next story, they say." will turned and sprang up stairs. just ahead was the person who had recently spoken. the proprietor of the commanding voice was now retreating, his ax over his shoulder, stepping proudly out in the consciousness that he had done a memorable thing. up the stairs went will and his companion, the smoke thickening about them. reaching the second floor and pushing open the door of the adjoining room, they saw--was it a boy on the floor? he had evidently striven to gain the door, but when he had almost reached it, had succumbed to the suffocating smoke, falling with arms stretched out toward the goal he desired to secure. and who was it running toward them, boy or man, the smoke parting about him as he advanced, then closing up again? it was a boy rushing for the door, trying to make his way through the smoke which, light as it was, proved too heavy a burden for him, for down he dropped, felling flat upon his face. it was the work of a moment apparently to seize the boys and carry them out into the entry. "thank god for strong arms!" said will somers, lifting one boy and starting off with him. "yes, thank him for every thing good," answered his companion, shouldering the other prize. they descended the stairs. how the smoke had increased! they had been absent longer than they thought, and in that time the fire was rapidly advancing toward them. they heard a loud noise without, a shout rising above the crackle and roar of the flames. then voices were heard at the foot of the stairs: "come this way! quick! hurry!" as will passed through the lower entry, he chanced to glance into the room whose door had been left open by the knight of the ax. a draft had been created, and will could see that the flames were springing toward the outer air. "this way! hurry!" people were shouting, and through the almost blinding, bewildering, suffocating smoke, will and his companion bore the trophies they had snatched from the flames. "hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!" went up heartily from the dense, black crowd below. the rescued boys were laid upon the grass at a safe distance from the burning mill. the people began to gather about them. "ah, poor tim, poor tim!" said a woman, bending over one of the boys. "that's ann there with tim tyler," said charlie to sid waters, these two enterprising knights having made good use of their legs and quickly reached the spot. "who's ann?" "it is tim's mother." "i recognize the other boy. it's bob landers." "will somers, this you?" asked charlie. "it will be when my face is washed. dirty work at fires." "why, mr. walton, is this you? what a 'ero! did you save one of them boys?" squeaked miss persnips to will's companion. the minister's face was not very clean after his fight with the sooty enemy, but as will thought, "love sees through all disguises." "yes, here i am, and if some of you good people will carry these boys home, the rest of us will soak down those tenement houses opposite the mill and see if we can't save them." "the dear man! so disinterested, and before he had got his face washed," said miss persnips, pressing nearer to gain a better look at the object of her admiration. "miss persnips, excuse me," said the foreman of the "torrent," the great rival of the "cataract," "but unless you withdraw, we shall be obliged to wash you out of the way with the hose. play away, three!" he roared. "o, massy!" screamed the shop-keeper, retiring to a safe place. will somers went back to his place at the brakes of the "cataract." as he passed the door of the mill he looked into the entry, "what a blaze!" he said. it was not surprising that the flames had swept forward with such rapidity. up those old wooden stairs drying for years, greasy with the oil drippings of the mill, the fire leaped and flew even rather than leaped. the flames were reaching out like long, forked arms, vainly clutching after the two boys that had been snatched away. the building was now the plaything of the flames. through it and over it, now climbing to the highest point of the old-fashioned roof, then searching down into the cellar, scorching, raging, roaring every-where, went the fire. in places unexpected the flames would show themselves, looking out like the faces of firefiends. then they would retire a moment, only to come again and burst out with a fury that nothing could resist, a fury that raged and rioted till beams, rafters, flooring, and stair-ways were a black, ashy heap, sputtering and hissing toward the sky--a snake heap full of hot fangs. "i wonder how that fire started," was a frequent exclamation. "don't know," said every body save one poor, old tobacco-ridden man who confessed that he had been smoking in the waste room, the place where the fire started. "when you see a man shoving a lighted pipe into sich a place." said simes badger to the gossippy circle at silas trefethen's store that night, "send in a bucket of water after him." "what for? to put out the fire, or to wash him?" asked a hearer. "both," said simes, "one to protect the place and the other to purify him." the wise men all laughed, and there was some sense in the laugh that applauded the oracle. tim tyler and bob landers had both been carried to their homes. bob escaped serious injury, but it was found that tim was badly burned. "i felt it a good deal at the very first," he told mr. walton one day, "when, in going after my coat, i happened to open a door where the fire was, and it darted at me. you see the pain stopped, but now it has started up." "yes, i understand that while the first contact with the fire is painful, then what you might call a paralyzing of the nerves takes place, and feeling is benumbed. when the action of the fire ceases, and the attempt at healing sets in, the nerves try to do their duty and the pain starts up once more. i have thought that the old martyrs who were burned at the stake, while they smarted terribly at first, had an easier time after that. bad enough to step upon the hot round of such a ladder to heaven, but it was easier climbing after that. you got confused, tim, didn't you, in the mill, when trying to find your way back?" "o yes; and as i said, i opened a door where the fire rushed at me. it was so smoky i wonder i ever got out at all. it seems i had some good friends." "yes, and god was your best friend, and he helped you, and if you are not a martyr, you can try to bear your pain as patiently as you can, and some people in bearing pain stand more than the martyrs even." tim looked up. "could you--could you--say a small prayer for me? i don't want to knuckle under, but grin and bear it best i can." when mr. walton came out into the kitchen where ann was she said: "i heard tim ask you to pray. that was a good deal for him to do. afore, you did it without the asking, but i was glad to have him just speak up for himself. o, he has been a softenin' since the fire, a comin' round a good deal." "where is your brother?" "mine? tim, you mean?" "yes." she only shook her head, and looked sad. as mr. walton was walking home he met tony, one of his favorites. "well, tony, how is the club? have they all got the shields miss barry gave them?" "i think so, and you were very kind to promise what you did; but we don't have any meetings now." "don't you?" "no, sir." "won't you come in and see me?" tony followed his friend into the clergyman's study. then mr. walton found his mother and brought her into the study. "this little fellow is one of my sunday-school boys, and his name is tony." "why," said the old mother, looking into his face, "i have seen him before." and tony lifted his eyes--large, lustrous, black--to the old lady's face rimmed with silver hair, and said, ingenuously, "i don't think you ever did. i have never been here." "but i have seen you, and i want to see you again; and you will come when you can, won't you? where do you live?" "at mr. badger's, and i came from new york with a mr. blanco." "where is your father?" "he is in italy." "and that is over the sea, over the sea!" she murmured, as she returned to her sitting-room. there she stood looking at the picture of a ship, and, glancing up at the church vane, which could be seen from her window, she wondered if the weather would be easterly and rainy that day. when they were alone, tony said to mr. walton, "do you see tim tyler often?" "pretty often." "and they are real poor?" "o yes." on his way home tony met charlie. "mr. walton says they are real poor at tim tyler's, charlie. i wish i had some money to give him." charlie thought a minute, and then he spoke up, eagerly, "i say, tony, let's get up a fair for him." "that's the very thing i wanted to ask you about. now it's strange we should both think of it." "that's so." "let's shake hands on it, charlie." tony and charlie, standing on the sidewalk, shook hands cordially. "what next? the shaking of hands would not bring a fair. "let's go and see miss barry," suggested charlie. this was in accordance with the boys' custom to refer all their troubles to this sympathetic teacher. "we want to get up a fair for tim tyler," said charlie, enthusiastically. "yes, yes!" cried tony. miss barry looked down into the boys' eager faces. "tim tyler, that boy burned at the fire?" "yes," said charlie. "that would be splendid." "but--but," said tony, "we want you to help us. could--could you?" "yes, i'll help." the boys were in raptures. "have you asked the other boys?" asked the teacher. "no," replied charlie; "but there go sid waters and rick grimes down street now. we might ask them." "you tell them, please, i want to see them." when sid and rick arrived, their assent, at first, was readily given to the teacher's proposition for a fair by the boys in behalf of tim tyler. "only," said rick, "won't it go to old tim, his uncle, for rum? i don't believe in that." "o, tim's mother wouldn't allow that." "but, you see, tim had a fuss with charlie macomber, and imposed on him," exclaimed sid. "charlie is willing, for he has said so," replied miss barry. "you are not going to hold on to an old grudge. your name is 'up-the-ladder club,' and not _down_ the ladder. you go down when you hold on to a grudge, boys." "we won't go down!" cried charlie. "no, no!" said the boys. the different members of the club signified their willingness. will somers said he would assist. one other person must be consulted, the older "honorary member" of the club, aunt stanshy. knowing her very just and positive opposition to drinking habits, miss barry thought she might refer to old tim's, and throw out a sharp opinion that the uncle ought to help the boy, as he lived in the family of the boy's mother. charlie, too, thought his aunt might object, but she did not. she only put on that look of sadness charlie had noticed when old tim was in the neighborhood that rainy day, and to will's remark that old tim ought to do more, she said, with a sigh, "i suppose the boy is not responsible for other people's failings, and they say his face is very white, and his hands are real thin, and he behaves better than he did. yes, i'll--help." it was easy to decide when to hold this fair, but "where" was a difficult problem. "take the barn chamber," said sid. "it's too cold," replied will, "and this is to be quite a grand affair." it was like aunt stanshy to offer her front room and sitting-room for tim's benefit, provided will could spare his quarters, and spare he did. "we will scatter some posters," said will. "i will see that they are printed." "we can do it ourselves with pen and ink, and then people will think more of it, you know. besides, as we scatter them, we may have a chance to solicit donations, as they call it," said sid. "splendid!" replied will. "and we will call on the apothecary," shouted charlie. "yes, but if it be candy, i must put an extra string round the package to make sure that it all gets to the right place and is not troubled on the way." the members of the club who had met to "consult" were in excellent spirits, especially when will said, in reply to the governor's proposition to ask friends to contribute refreshments, "i see you know how to do it. your experience at your fair fitted you to go right along with this thing in splendid style." tony thought he could bring some pictures that had been forwarded from italy, and charlie said, "i guess i can get up a maginary." "a maginary?" asked will. charlie only chuckled over his proposition, and made no explanations. "i propose," said will, "i propose, mr. president"--here he bowed to sid, which caused that dignitary to stick his thumb into the lowest button hole of his jacket and swell out with pride--"i propose that we call our affair a 'helping-hand sale.' you know there is a good deal in a name, and it sets people to thinking, and sets them to helping, too, and i think miss barry will like the name." this was agreeable to the club, whose members now separated to their homes. "aunt stanshy," said charlie, that night, "do you know where my rabbit is?" "i don't know. now i told you, when miss persnips came down here, that thing in her arms, and she smilin' and blinkin', as if she had an armful of gold, that she was givin' you an elephant rather than a rabbit. nobody knows where the critter is or what it is up to." charlie found the white pet, and asked will what he thought the rabbit looked like. "looks more like a rabbit than any thing else, charlie." "aunt stanshy called it an elephant." "well, you might say elephant, the white elephant of siam--sort of a distant cousin. why, what do you ask the question for?" charlie grinned, but made no reply. every thing was made ready for the sale. aunt stanshy's two rooms were the scene of much bustle, and while the boys were at their tables, miss barry in a tastily-draped corner was ready for a reasonable sum to serve out refreshments to every applicant. the helping-hand sale had various attractions. among them was charlie's "maginary." it was a box covered with white cloth, a piece of workmanship at which charlie had been secretly tinkering for two days. it was labeled "a distant cousin of the white elephant of siam. price to see, three cents, and don't tell when you've seen it." this attracted great attention. "miss persnips," said charlie to the shopkeeper, who came to patronize the sale, "do you want to see my maginary? only three cents, and don't tell." "your menagerie? yes. what have you got there? some dreadful animal! i'm afraid to." charlie lifted the cover of the box, and there, fat and sleepy, was--miss persnips told the rest. "did you ever! that darling, sweet pet i gave you. quite an idea, really, and here's another cent." the white elephant's relative was a conspicuous character--after the lifting of the cover--that evening. the next morning charlie appeared before will, hanging out a long, dismal face, and speaking with difficulty. "she's gone!" "who, aunt stanshy?" "no, bunny!" "your rabbit? how?" "i don't know. i left her all right in the maginary, last night." "let me go out and look round. but where did you put your box?" "well, aunt stanshy thought it would do just as well if i put the box out into the wood-shed--and--" "was the door left open?" "i saw it open this morning." "i will look about." will went into the wood-shed, and there before the door he saw two cats licking their chops, and their guilty eyes seemed to him to say, "rabbit stew for breakfast! keep dark!" "charlie," said will, entering the house again, "i think two cats out there took your rabbit, and we will catch them and box them and exhibit them." "as my maginary?" "yes, and i'll tell you how to label them." the cats were caught and boxed, and this was the label their cage bore on the second and last evening of the "helping hand sale:" "destroyers of the distant cousin of the white elephant of siam." this device took, and many pennies were put by the neighbors into charlie's hands. when the boys summed up the profits of the sale, they had for tim tyler's benefit the sum of thirty dollars, which mr. walton promised should be judiciously expended. "it all shows," remarked miss barry to the club, "what we can do when we work in earnest, and also how much small sums amount to." simes badger's comment on the affair was that aunt stanshy had shown herself a christian, "knowin' as i do," said simes, "the story of the tyler affair way back." mr. walton and his old mother had something also to say about the sale, and it was in connection with one of tony's italian pictures that mr. walton bought. "a house, mother, in naples, not far from the water, you see." the old lady was silent awhile. then she murmured, "i have seen it, haven't you, somewhere?" "why, yes--no. what is it?" but the old lady herself was confused about it. she looked at the fair home by the sea, and then looked again, but she could not seem to positively identify it. "and still i have seen it before," she affirmed. to identify the spot was like trying to get hold of the exact form of a ship that partially breaks through the fog and then recedes, ever coming yet ever vanishing. chapter xvii. two mud-turtles. "there goes a man drunk, aunt stanshy." aunt stanshy said nothing, but continued to thump away on her ironing-board. "he is going down the lane, aunty." aunt stanshy heard charlie, but she said nothing, only ironing away steadily as ever. charlie heard her sigh once, or thought he did. "did you speak, aunty?" "me, child? why, no!" charlie continued to look out of the window that fronted the narrow lane. the drunken man was not a very attractive object. then it was a dark, lowery, and rainy day in the latter part of november. the streets were muddy, fences damp and clammy to the touch. over the river hung a gray, cheerless fog. to such a day a staggering drunkard could not be said to contribute a cheering feature, and it was no wonder that aunt stanshy cared little to see him. soon after this, charlie went out into the barn. it had a deserted look, especially up in the chamber. "no white shields here now," he said, mournfully. that fastened window, too, the nail driven securely above the hook and staple, had a mournful look to charlie's soul. he remembered the story that simes badger had told him about this window and the closed door below. "i wonder if they will ever be open," thought charlie. he remembered the river view that was possible from the "cupelo" above, and he said, "guess i'll climb up and see what the weather is." charlie was not a very experienced weather-observer, but he thought he would like to obtain a wider outlook than the lane window had afforded him. he planted an eye between the slats of his watch-tower and then looked off. the view was neither extensive nor varied, mostly one of mud-flats. a thick fog had come from the sea and stretched like a curtain across the mouth of the dock in the rear of aunt stanshy's premises. the low tide had left in the dock a stretch of ugly flats, out of which stuck various family relics like pots and kettles, then pots and kettles again, and finally a dead cat. charlie saw several tall chimneys in the neighborhood, but the buildings they decorated had been covered by the fog, and the chimneys looked like a vessel's masts from which the hull had drifted away, leaving them standing in depths of river-mud. toward the sea it was only mist, mist that looked extensive enough to reach as far as london, whose fog-lovers would have welcomed it. did the dock, the tall chimneys, the mist, notice that curious eye up in the "cupelo" looking through the slats and watching them? "guess i'll go down," said their owner. the mist continued to wrap seamont all that day and far into the night. will somers was preparing to leave dr. tilton's store that evening. he had sent off medicine to quiet the last earache in town that had been heard from. he had also given powders to make poor miss persnips sleep quietly. she was sick with a nervous fever. will now closed the store, turned the key in the lock, and went up the street, whistling "the star-spangled banner." it was half after ten. one by one the house-lamps had been extinguished, and it was "dark as a pocket" in the lane. still whistling, will neared aunt stanshy's. he ceased his tune suddenly for he caught an outcry. "where does that come from!" asked will. "back of the barn, i guess. there it is again! it is from the dock, i know, sure as i'm born." he sprang across aunt stanshy's garden and then leaped a fence which separated her estate from an open piece of ground bordering the dock and used for various purposes. fishermen dried their fish here on long flakes. around three sides of the dock went a stone wall, against which the tide washed and rippled, mildly grumbling because the wall was stubborn and would not budge an inch. on the stone wall bordering the upper end of the dock rested that side of aunt stanshy's barn in which were the fastened door below and the fastened window above. will, having leaped the fence, ran past the fish-flakes to the edge of the stone dock-wall. it was so dark that his running was neither rapid nor straight. "somebody is down in the dock," thought will. "don't worry!" he shouted, "i am here." he now heard a series of noises, some of them distinct and quite human. others were confused outcries. "it's time for low tide," thought will, and, without further reflection, down he dropped into the dark, dismal dock, landing in a bed of mud soft as ever a flounder slept on. he was conscious at once that this bed was a very yielding one, but he could not stop to calculate how far down he might sink, shouting at once, "where are you? sing out there!" "m--m--moo--moo," replied the person, as if a cow in distress. "i'm hic--here--hic!" "drank as a fool," thought will. "where?" "hic--here--hic!" "hie--haec--hoc, more likely," said will, recalling his latin. "stay right where you are." "i'll stay--hic." "let me feel for you. o, here you are." will now felt of some one crouching against the stone-wall of the dock, "how did you come here?" "dunno--hic--but i spect i did." "you must have walked off the wall, and the great question now is how to get back again." "yes--hic--that--is the question--hic--afore the house." "afore the dock, i should say. whew, i believe i'm up to my thighs in mud, and if that isn't water i'm splashing in! the tide is coming in, certain. come, friend, we must get out of this!" "yes, we must all--hic." "must all hic? we must all get out, you mean." "yes, all get-hic." "let me think. there are stairs out of this old bog somewhere, and where are they? i declare! down at the other end, and the water is three or four feet deep there when it is dry up here. then put on top of it or under it two or three feet of mud and you have five to six feet in all, and that is an interesting state of things to wade through. we must stay at this end of the dock; and back of aunt stanshy's barn, i believe, are steps. i must work him up there, and do it myself somehow, for my shouting don't bring any one." will had called several times for help, but there was no response. he now addressed his boozy companion: "i must get you up out of this somehow, and work you along where the steps are. the wall is too high to boost you up here. if this isn't interesting, nigh eleven o'clock, pitch dark, down in this old dock blundering with you, drank as a fool! i feel like laughing." "yes--hic--you're drunk--as a--fool--and i want--to--hic--laugh--he--he--he!" will did really laugh now. it seemed so funny there at that hour in that place. "but it's no laughing matter, friend, i'll tell you. o whew! here's the water half a foot deep all around us! come now, lift up your feet and come with me. make an effort now." the man rallied his strength so effectively to make this effort that he lost his balance, and stumbling against will, pitched him over. "look--look out--friend!" roared will, as he floundered in mud and water. "can't you do better than that?" "besht--hic--i can do for you. might try it again--hic." "o, thanks--thanks. be contented with that trial. there is my boot, stuck fast in the mud, and let her go. come, friend, make an effort to get along. stick close to the wall and work your way on, and lean on me. there, you did splendidly then. try again! there, there! easy now. o scissors, there goes my other boot! the next thing will be that i shall get my legs in for good, and by to-morrow morning early the water will be over us all. come, friend, you don't want to get drowned. pull away! steady there! move on! we are making progress, you see. again, there! on she goes! hem--now, once more! all together! there we are!" there came a series of such trials, and finally will shouted, "must be almost there--and--" bump they went against the stone wall at the upper end of the dock. "three cheers, friend!" "hip--hip--hip--" "no matter about giving them. now we will work along to some steps back of a barn. careful!" when the steps had been reached will exclaimed, "so far, so good, friend." "yes--hic--i'm glad--i've--hic--got you--hic--so far safe--hic." "got me? you have my thanks. well, now, you stay here by these steps until i come for you. i will fetch a light. stay here, now." "i will--hic." will felt his way along the base of the wall until he came to the lane. the stones in the wall were smooth with the slime accumulating there for years, and it was hard work to get his feet out of the mud, and very hard then to get them up and over the wall. he succeeded though, and grasping a rail-fence and mounting it, dropped down into the lane. "glad to touch solid ground," thought will, "though i be in my stocking-feet." he hurried to aunt stanshy's door, which had been left unlocked for his admittance, and opening it, stepped upon the entry oil-cloth. "tick--tick! who comes here?" the old clock now seemed to say, loudly, solemnly ticking. "how i shall muddy this sacred floor! can't help it, though! aunt stanshy," he now began to call; at the same time he rapped on the baluster. "aunt stanshy!" he looked up and saw the light from the lamp that she kept burning at night. soon there was the sound of a stirring, and a tall figure in white bent over the railing. a second and smaller statue of snow was there in a moment, leaning over the railing by the side of aunt stanshy. "what is it?" she asked. "i'm sorry to trouble you, but i've just come from the dock, and--" "why, you look like a mud-turtle," said aunt stanshy, bending over still farther and holding out the lamp, whose light fell on will. "mud-turtle? i don't wonder you say so, and there's another and worse-looking one out in the dock." "two mud-turtles? what do you mean? where _have_ you been?" "i mean this; i was coming home and heard some one calling for help, and ran to the dock and saw--no, i couldn't _see_ a barley-corn before my nose--but i knew somebody was down there, and without thinking--" "just like you!" said aunt stanshy to herself. "and in i went, and i succeeded in getting my man, who is drunk, round to the upper aide of the dock." "you did splendidly," said aunt stanshy, aloud. "but i had to work for it! and now i want a light, which you may wonder i didn't get before; but i was so anxious to help that fellow, i put and run as soon as i heard him cry, and when i was in the dock i thought i might as well stick to him and work him into a safe place. but haven't you a door in the dock-side of your barn?" "y--e--s," said aunt stanshy, reluctantly, remembering an old decision about the door. "i will be out, and you take the lantern that you will see in the back entry. don't mind my floor. i will be out in two minutes." "let me go down and show will about the lantern," said charlie. "are you dressed?" "o yes. i thought i might help, you know," was the complacent remark of charlie, who had improved his time, and, while keeping his "ears out," had been putting his legs into his pants as rapidly as possible. "you have been smarter than your aunt, but she will be there soon." charlie showed will where the lantern hung in the back entry, and together they went into the barn. "here is the door," said charlie, "that lets folks into the dock." "but how do you get the thing open?" asked will, flashing the light of his lantern upon the door. "i will open it," said aunt stanshy, who now appeared, and already decided that the door might be consistently opened for a good deed's sake. she carried a hammer in her hand, which she energetically swung about the driven nails, soon removing them. then she threw back the door, and out into the black night peered anxiously. how long it had been since the last time that she had looked out from that door! she could see nothing at first, but in a moment made out a man's form below. as the rays of aunt stanshy's lamp shone out, they made a bridge of light that stretched off into the mist, as if anxious to reach the river and bridge it for some poor, helpless soul in the water. "say, friend, you down there?" called out will. a voice below answered, "yesh--hic--i'll help you--up--" "you will? better let me help you first." "shuit yourself--hic." will descended the steps, and found the man leaning against the dock-wall. "now, friend, we'll climb these stairs." "i will--help you--hic--yes--up." "you are very kind, but let me help you first. now go it! tough! you don't gain a peg." "you'll have me--hic--over--friend." "have _you_ over! it's the other way, man." "well--shay! it's all right, aint it?--hic." "o yes! we wont quarrel about it. look here, folks! haven't you got any thing up there we could steer him by--a rope, perhaps, to which he could cling? the water has risen and come up here, and it's not comfortable in one's stocking-feet. wish my fire company was here! we would make short work of it." "shall i ring the church bell?" asked charlie, excitedly. "o don't, don't!" "here's a rope," said aunt stanshy. "yes, yes!" exclaimed charlie, "and we will pull him in." "we might do that, or at least help," said aunt stanshy, laughing. "yesh--hic--pull him in," said the man in the dock. "we will fasten the rope about you, friend, and they'll draw on it, and perhaps you could hold on to it and draw yourself up, and i will shove you behind. now, all, a good try!" will was now shoving, aunt stanshy and charlie hauling, while the man tried to grasp the sides of the steps; and so, out of the slime and the mist and the night, up into the light, and then into aunt stanshy's barn, came the face of--old tim tyler! "horrors!" said aunt stanshy, startled by this unexpected sight of the second mud-turtle. her face wore, indeed, a look of horror at first, and then the expression changed to one of pity. over the door-sill he crawled, and then looking up, he said, in a drunken, but abashed, humiliated way, "stanshy, is it you? real--hic--sorry to trouble--hic--you." aunt stanshy made no audible reply, but stood looking away as if into distant years. she was recalling the words uttered by tim long ago, when he vowed that he would see himself "a-drownin' in that dock first afore he'd ask a favor of her." "he has come up to his word," she said to herself, and then she bowed her troubled face. "well, now," said will, looking round with a worried face, "what next?" "guesh i'll--hic--go home now. thank you, sir," he said, bowing to will. "thank you, stanshy," and he bowed still lower. "timothy," said aunt stanshy, calling him by the old name, "i wouldn't turn a dog into the street a night like this, and you had better stay here. i will get you some clothes, and, will, perhaps you will see that he gets off these." "and bring me one of my suits, too, please. and if charlie will bring me a basin and some water, we will wash here. i will look after my man here. bring my slippers, please." "where's--hic--your boots?" "o, they concluded to stay in the dock." "i'll--get--you another pair--hic." "i may find them at low-water and by daylight." tim tyler stayed at aunt stanshy's that night the next morning he was in his right mind, and, thanking aunt stanshy, said he must go. then he lingered, twirling in his hands the old felt hat that was his daily companion, though a much abused one. "he wants to say something," thought charlie. "constantia, years ago you and i had a falling out. i think i was to blame in tempting that boy's father, and i have often thought so, but have been too proud to say it all these years. i did not like what you said; but no matter, i was to blame for what i did, and i did not answer you back in gentleman-fashion. i want to say i am sorry, and ask you to overlook it and shake hands." he held out his hand to aunt stanshy. "he has spoken like a man and what will she do?" thought will. aunt stanshy was ready to show that she was a woman. she held out her hand, also, and said, "i said more than i needed to, and i am sorry for that. let it go, please." "well," he exclaimed, "it was mean in me to tempt a man, though i did not see then, as i do now, how low drink may bring a man. god knows i am low enough." the tears were now making their way down old tim tyler's face. charlie saw that aunt stanshy turned away from those present and looked in another direction, but the quick-eyed boy thought he noticed a redness to aunt stanshy's eyes when she faced the company again. will somers had come from the store in season to hear tim's words. a fisherman soon called who had hurt his hand with a fish-hook and wished to have a poultice applied by the "young doctor," as people sometimes called will. this second party had closely followed will and had heard what was last said. it was an interesting scene. there was the drunkard, confessing how low he had fallen, and there was the woman who once had loved and respected him. there was charlie, the son of the man whom the drunkard tried to lead astray. there was will, and the fisherman made an additional spectator. will stepped up to tim. "mr. tyler, excuse, me, but why do you stay so low? why not come up again?" "will's tone was full of sympathy. "god knows i would like to come up again." "you can, and be back in your old place, owning your own boat, too." "yes," said aunt stanshy, eagerly, "and fishing from the barn, just the same as before." "you are all kind, very kind. it does me good," and poor tim actually smiled at the prospect. "what would my sister, who has clung to me, say? wouldn't she be taken aback?" the tears were again in the drunkard's eyes. "good deal of the man there yet," thought will. "your sister might be taken aback, but in that kind of way that would help you forward. come," he said, aloud, "i will go into my room and write a pledge for you, and be back in a moment." tim looked intently at the pledge of total abstinence that will brought. "if--if--i had some one to sign with me, some one to stand with me," he murmured. "i will," said the fisherman, stepping forward, and now recognized as a previous acquaintance. "you, john fisher, will you?" "yes, i have taken a drop now and then, but i'll sign and stand with you. i don't want to get into the--" "dock, where i was?" asked tim. "no, i am sure i don't." "and that's the very place where drop-people may fetch up. i was a drop-taker once. i will sign, and god help me!" "o he will," said aunt stanshy, encouragingly. charlie now saw that her eyes were redder than ever. after the name of timothy tyler came the name of john fisher. "now you will make those at home happy," said will. but only those with whom tim made his home really knew how happy it made them. how great was the change there! young tim speedily began to rally, sitting up that very day, while ann went round the house singing. charlie came up the next day with a delicacy from aunt stanshy for the patient. "tell aunt stanshy to wipe out every thing, and we will start once more," was the message that ann sent off by charlie. "it is all wiped out," was aunt stanshy's answer, and the two soon came together and joined hands. the barn-door toward the dock was now open, and, in a humble way, the firm of "tyler & fisher" began business, drying their fish on the flakes adjoining aunt stanshy's barn, while in the barn itself they stored their possessions, as might be necessary. a note from mr. walton arrived about that time. it was written in his frank, simple, hearty way, congratulating both the men on the stand they had taken. referring to tim's desire for fellowship in his new effort, of which mr. walton had heard, he added, "there is another who will stand by you, the great brother who came as a babe at bethlehem, and christmas will soon remind us of it. feeling for us and loving us, he at last died for us. ask him to stand with you. he came to help just such poor weak fellows as we all are." that touched the "firm," and the next sunday they both sat in a back seat near the stove by the church-door. as tim tyler sat there in old st. john's and heard the dreary wind roaring without, he thought of the fishing-boats that scud before such winds anxious to make port and reach home. "that's me, i hope, trying to get home," he thought, "and find harbor in god's church, will hold us all." chapter xviii. a new departure. again the club was only a memory. it was like a walking-stick that, when the mountain-tramp is over, the vacationist puts on the wall as a memento. "how is your club getting along, charlie?" asked miss bertha barry, one day, when she was calling at aunt stanshy's. "we--we--don't meet," said charlie, mournfully. juggie was there, also, calling on a once brother knight, and he, too, looked sad. "now i have an idea," said the teacher. "you know i like a good time as well as any body, but i think if we have clubs, it is a good idea to make them as useful as possible. if you meet again, remember, your name is 'up-the-ladder club,' always to be climbing up, always to be advancing. now you can advance in this way; you can combine the literary element." "come-and-bine what?" asked juggie. "the literary element." "de literal element?" "recitations and so on, i mean." "we did have an entertainment," said charlie, who was not disposed to forget or disparage the glory of "departed days." "but this is something different, and let me explain. let us suppose that we take the subject, 'days of our forefathers,' the times before or at the revolutionary war. one of you could be dressed as a farmer in those days, and tell what farmers did; another as printer could tell what printers did, and so on. that would give you an idea of those days, and make something useful of your club." the plan was popular with the boys of the club. when the subject was proposed to aunt stanshy, she made the comment: "some sense in the idea. the boys will learn something." "and then," said miss barry, "when christmas comes, you can give a christmas entertainment, and ask an admission fee, and, won't you give the money to the missions of our church? that will be putting another round in the ladder, and the 'up-the-ladder club' will go higher still. i want you to help other people all you can. i'll tell you what to do, and be with you." the boys agreed to their teacher's plan. sid was specially enthusiastic. will somers said he would help. aunt stanshy had promised to open the rooms of her house, and one december night, when the sky was like the dark face of an oriental beauty, hung all over with golden jewelry, the white shields and their friends met at aunt stanshy's. how happy were the club boys to find there a banner sent by mr. walton. he wrote that tim tyler was coming to sunday-school, and that they had previously secured four scholars, and tim should be counted the fifth. happy knights to earn that banner! about eight sid came into the front room dressed in a brown, broad-skirted coat, also wearing small clothes, silver knee-buckles, and buckled shoes. he took off his cocked hat, made a low bow, and holding out a diminutive newspaper, yellow with age, began: "i am a printer. i had the honor of printing the 'new hampshire gazette,' which was started in portsmouth in 1756, and is still published in that good old city. in those days newspapers were not so numerous as now. when the revolutionary war closed there were forty-three papers in the country. we did not give such crowded or so large sheets as are now published. my paper, though, was so popular all the spare copies were taken, and i have none by me this moment; but here is a copy of the 'new england chronicle,' that came out in boston on the 4th of july, 1776. it has four pages, you will see, measures ten inches by fifteen, say, and each page has three columns. it was not easy work then to publish a paper. we had no steam-presses, but hand-power had to do the work, and my arms ache to this day. it was hard, too, at the time of the revolutionary war, to get paper, and before the war, too. in 1769 there was only one paper-mill in new england, and that was at milton, mass. they had to advertise for rags, and what they called the bell-cart went through boston picking them up. then in towns like salem, charlestown, portsmouth, they scraped all they could. ten years after, my brother-publisher, of the 'massachusetts spy,' appealed to the 'fair daughters of liberty in this extensive country' to save their rags, and so 'serve their country,' advising them to hang up a bag in one corner of a room that the odds and ends might be saved. for a pound of 'clean white rags' the ladies could get ten shillings! if you had lived then, and had your mother's rags to-day, what heaps of money you could have made! it was hard, too, for us newspaper men to get news. i was looking yesterday at a copy of the 'portsmouth oracle,' published in 1805. that was in this wonderful century. what did it say on the 26th of january? 'news by telegraph?' and did it tell us what the hottentots were doing yesterday? no; it said, 'by the mails,' and had one item from boston two days old, two from new york nine days old, and one from fredericksburg about a trouble with the colored people, and that news was twenty-three days old! rags and news, those two things, how hard they were to get! and then, ladies and gentlemen, how hard it was to get our pay! a brother editor in new york, in 1777, told his customers he must charge them, for 'a quarter of news,' twelve pounds of beef, seven pounds of cheese, and so on, or he must have their worth in money, and he tells them to bring in the produce, or he will have to 'shut up shop.' i will now shut, also." making a low bow again, the wearer of small clothes retired. when juggie's turn arrived, he appeared, whip in hand. "i'm de stage-driber. in de days ob our ancestors dar were no railroads, but jest common roads. de fust canal was built in 1777. dar was a big road dat went from bosson to mouf of kennebec, one up into new hampshire, and den ta canada, one to providence, and one to new york, while new york had two roads, norf and one souf. i was a stage-driber." (here juggie cracked his whip and shouted, "get up, cã¦sar!") "i ran de 'flyin' machine' dat went from new york to philadelfy, and took only two days; and one spell i took a stage from new york to bosson in six days. what do you say to dat? don't it make yer eyes open? who carried de mail, do you say? and haben't you eber heard? de stage. in 1775 de mail went from philadelfy to new england ebery fortnight in winter, but dey improbed and went once a week, and letter-writers could get an answer in free weeks, when before it took six weeks. what progress! de worl' goes on, and--so do i." juggie left, and governor grimes appeared in the dress of a farmer, carrying a shovel in one hand and a hoe in the other. "i am a farmer, and was one in the old days. it is true i did not have so many neighbors as people nowadays, and i went without things that farmers now have. i didn't have newfangled cultivators, reapers, or such things. but then what a stout house i lived in, a big, square house, and its frame wasn't made of pipe-stem sticks! they were big, solid sticks of oak that i had, and you could see them sticking out of the corners and down from the ceiling. what chimneys i had, and the bricks came all the way from england! i had none of your box stoves, but a big fire in the chimney which you could see. my wife, polly, had no carpets on the floor, but she had rugs she made of rags. and my darter, jerusha, what a cook she was! she made pies--cooked 'em, i mean--in a brick oven, and she stewed her chickens in pots hung on hooks from a swinging crane in the chimney. and then i gave jerusha a turn-spit, too, which she put before the fire, and i gave her a tin kitchen. polly had a spinning-wheel and jerusha a hand-loom, and that is where our cloth came from. i raised corn and grass and potatoes, and we had plenty of apples, and what fun we had at huskin' parties and apple parings! i took care of my horses, oxen, cows, and sheep, pigs, too, and had to kill my own critters and cure the hams we used. in those days we had to do many things ourselves, such as dip our candles, and i made my eyes weak mending jedidiah's shoes in the evening, a candle near me, and the tall old family clock ticking in the corner." miss barry was charming in her antique dress, as every white shield thought. it came down from her great-great-grandmother, sally tilton, who was a famous belle in her day. the dress was hooped and ruffled, "trailed," also, in the old style. miss barry's hair was powdered, and she wore white satin shoes. she represented the "daughters of liberty," and told about emily geiger, the south carolina young lady who undertook to carry a written message from general greene to general sumter, and when the british took her, she ate up her letter! the enemy released her, not finding her message. she went on and she did her errand, though, giving the message from memory, as general greene, fearful of a capture, had told her the contents of the letter. then miss barry told about some girls in new york who gave a coat of molasses and flag-down to a young man disrespectful to congress. she gave an account of the young ladies in virginia, massachusetts, and elsewhere. will somers appeared in the dress of a revolutionary soldier, carrying on his shoulder a musket that was a fire-lock, and slung at his side was a powder-horn, while in his tinder-box were flint and steel. how many battles this old continental had been in, what victories he had won, and what hardships he had endured! he was not slow to tell of them all. the entertainment was voted a great success. "there, charles pitt," declared aunt stanshy the next morning at the breakfast-table, "i like that style of a club ever so much. it tells you something." "yes," said charlie, "i know a lot more than i did." "i want you to have a good time in your club, but when it is all play and nothing else, it aint just the thing." "yes, aunty," said the now matured and venerable charlie. "and we're going to have something else." "what is it?" he only winked and looked wise as an owl at midnight. december was now hurrying away. the winter weeks followed one another rapidly, and at last charlie heard mr. walton say in church something about a christmas festival. "christmas is coming!" was charlie's silent response. what a christmas it was! two nights previous to it the club had an entertainment in behalf of missions, as miss barry had suggested. dressed as that benevolent individual, santa claus, different members of the club stepped forward and gave an account of christmas in germany, christmas in russia, christmas in italy, and christmas in australia. the boys were curious to see how much money they had made. "twenty dollars!" declared sid, who counted the funds. "there," said miss barry, "the up-the-ladder club will put rounds under the feet of boys in heathen lands, and help them climb up into the light of a saviour's presence." chapter xix. the wreck. snow still kept away, but winter winds had come, and they swept over the bare ground, cutting like knives. about the first of the year the weather softened. the old gray heads, whose possessors occupied that village-throne of wisdom, the jackknife-carved bench by silas trefethen's stove, prophesied "a spell of weather." "storm brewin'! i feel it in my bones," declared simes badger, squinting at the vane on aunt stanshy's barn and then at the gray, scowling clouds above. the wind was from the "nor'-east." it had a damp, chilly touch, so that the people shrank from it, and were glad to get near their cozy fires. all day threatening clouds rolled in from the sea, as if the storm had planted batteries there and the smoke from the cannonade was thickening. at night charlie, passing a window in his chamber, heard the rain drumming on the panes. he had gone to his warm nest and been there only two minutes, when he said to himself, as he gaped, "if it would only rain so hard that i wouldn't have to go to school to-mor--" here the angel of sleep came along, and, putting his hand on the eyes of a tired boy, closed them and drowned in sweet oblivion all his school anxieties. it rained through the night. it rained all the next day. the tide, too, was unusually high. it rolled over the wharves, swept up the shipyards, and even ventured into the yard back of silas trefethen's store, floating away a hencoop with its squawking tenants. "it beats all!" said simes badger. "the oldest person round here never saw such a tide." the up-the-ladder club did the tide the honor of making it a call in a body, and from the rear of silas trefethen's store watched the swollen current beyond the yard. "let's go down to the beach and see the waves to-morrow. it's saturday, you know, and the waves pile up tremendous in a storm. who's for it!" inquired sid waters. there was not a white shield present who was unwilling to go. some of them, however, went sooner than they expected. toward the morning of the next day, will somers was aroused by the ringing of a bell. he opened his ears, opened his eyes, and then he sprang out of bed. "fire!" he said. "fire!" he rushed to a window, threw it up, and put his head out into the black storm, through which echoed the notes of the bell of old st. john's. they made such an impression it seemed as if they must be living things out in the darkness walking. so strange, so unreal was this, it was a relief to hear the approaching footsteps of somebody who was actually "flesh and blood." "where's the fire?" asked will. "fire!" said the man, walking leisurely along. "i should think any booby might know this is not the night for a fire, when things are so wet; but it is the night for a wreck, and the feller pullin' that bell tells me there is one off gull's p'int." "is it? i am going, then, and i should think any one but a booby would be going in that direction," retorted will, noticing that the man was not moving toward the quarter where the wreck was. the stranger muttered something about knowing his own business best, while will pulled in his head and slammed down the window. "charlie!" he said, stepping into the boy's little chamber after lighting a lamp. "what is it?" asked charlie, winking his eyes at the blinding glare of the light. "do you want to go with me?" "go where?" "to see a wreck." "o yes! just wait a minute and let me ask aunt stanshy." he groped his way to his aunt's bedroom. "aunt stanshy, may i go with will?" in his eagerness he forgot to mention the object of this midnight expedition. aunt stanshy was not thoroughly awake, for the angel of sleep visiting charlie had touched her eyes also. if awake, she might not have granted the request. the idea went confusedly through her brain that charlie wanted to sleep with will. "y-e-s," she murmured, drowsily, and then the angel of sleep had her fully again under his control. charlie stole down into will's room, his clothes on his arm. "now, dress quick as you can. have you an overcoat?" "yes, but it is up in aunt stanshy's closet." "we don't want to disturb her again. here, you put on the cape of my cloak and fold it about you." charlie was proud to be thus enveloped. will then completed his dressing, and looked like a cape codder just arrived from a fishing-smack. he took his young companion by the hand and off they started. "who's that?" asked will, as they turned from water street into beach street. "that boy in the door where there's a light? why, that is tony! he's up. tony, that you?" sang out charlie. "yes! you going down to the beach?" said tony, standing in the lighted door-way of a low-roofed house. "yes." "i heard the bell and got up, and one of the neighbors came and told us it was a wreck, and mr. grimes said i might go if i could go with somebody." "come along," said will. "tell him i will take care of you." tony went eagerly back. he prepared for the trip, and then came out to join will and charlie. "now, boys, take hold of my hand and let's put," said will. they accordingly "put." "isn't this good fun, tony." "yes, charlie, splendid." it was such good fun that charlie thought he was willing to be a sailor on board that wreck even. he changed his mind, however, in a short time. beach street led down to a road that was called "back road." this took as many turns as it pleased, and after a quarter of a mile struck the low, level marshes. traversing the marshes, the road led will and his companions up to the yellow hammocks, at whose base the breakers were discharging their fury in a terrible bombardment of the land. the road wound through the hummocks, and then the party stood upon the beach. it was a cold, ugly atmosphere, pierced by the missiles of the storm, while the surf crashed on the sand in one long, fierce, unearthly roar. people from the town were now gathering on the beach, some of them carrying lanterns that twinkled like stars knocked out of their places by the storm, fallen now to the level of the beach. but where was the wreck? no sign of it anywhere; only rain, surf, storm, blackness--a wild medley. "this is a sell!" said a man. "wish i was in bed agin," exclaimed another. "let's catch the feller that rang that church bell," exclaimed a third, "and duck him in the surf." a fourth made a sensible suggestion: "let's go down to the life-saving station, and they can probably tell us there." a quarter of a mile up the beach was a life-saving station, and a light could be seen winking from one of its windows. several, including will and the boys, walked up the beach, past the crashing waves, and reaching the station, pushed open its door on the land-side of the building, and entered. charlie looked about him with eager curiosity, for it was the first time he had ever been in such a place. the building was of two stories. the larger part of the lower story was taken up by a "boat-room" for various kinds of apparatus for reaching wrecks. charlie also saw the inside of a kitchen, and will told him there was a room up stairs for the beds of the men at the station. charlie and tony warmed themselves at the brisk fire in the store. the man on duty there did not seem to know any thing about the disaster reported in town, but he talked with will and charlie about shipwrecks and storms and efforts at rescuing the wrecked. after a while, charlie said to will, "let's go out and take a run along the beach, and see what's going on." "yes," added tony, "let's do it." "a run up and down the beach to see what is going on, this stormy night? you are enterprising boys. well, we will go. button up your coats snug, though. fold my cape about you, charlie. there, you look like a small monk off on a tare. you fixed, tony? come, boys," said will. bang! how the wind slammed the door after them! and how the sea thundered and roared; then roared and thundered again! it seemed as if every throw of surf was heavier than that before, and yet none of this violence and wrath could be seen unless some one chanced to pass carrying a lantern. then this thing that raged along the sands, this creature, this dragon from the deep, would show an angry whiteness, as if it were the opening of his jaws. will and the boys may have tramped a quarter of a mile along the beach, when will exclaimed, "hullo, there's a light!" it was a lively twinkle upon the sands that came nearer and nearer, and then stopped before the party. "who's this?" asked a voice, pleasantly. charlie lifted up his face toward the shining of this friendly light. "bub, is this you down here at this time of night? don't you know the man who goes fishin' from your aunt stanshy's barn?" "o yes, i know you." it was the junior member of the new firm, "tyler & fisher." "are you a patrolman, mr. fisher?" asked will. "i am at spells, when a man at the station may be sick. you see i can't go fishin' in this storm, and it comes handy to be employed as a substitute at the station. but what are you here for?" "we came down to find a wreck. up in town st. john's bell was rung and we were told there was a wreck at gull point. at the station, though, where we have been, a man said that he did not know of any." "i guess i know how that story got up to town. a little fool was down here with a squeaky voice and sharp little eyes, and he wanted to know if there were any wrecks. the fact is we had been looking for sich all day and through the evening and night. there were one or two vessels off the mouth of the harbor as night came on, trying to get in, and, pizen! they could no more get in than my old tarpaulin, and they wouldn't stand a hundredth part of the chance she would. you see, a nor'easter rakes right across the mouth of our harbor and drives off any sail tryin' to get in, and one of two things will happen--either a ship will be swept out to sea or swept on to gull p'int. well, that feller said to joe danforth--joe and me were together--'has there been a wreck?' 'no,' said joe, 'i think not,' meaning to answer him. but i had said to joe at that time, or just before that feller asked his question, 'hadn't we better go to the station and get a bite?' 'yes,' said joe, meaning to answer _me_, and that person--whoever it was, grabbed up the answer to me and thought it was for him, and went off accordingly. that is how that bell came to ring. it would be an awful night for a wreck, wouldn't it? hullo!" exclaimed john fisher, stopping in his explanation, "what's that? if that aint the crittur hisself!" as the patrolman turned his face to the sea, the boys looked off in that direction, and they were quick enough to see a rocket exploding in the air, scattering down a shower of tinted stars. this bright constellation faded away into the night, when suddenly up, up into the darkness, shot two vivid lines of fire, parting as they swept higher and higher, exploding in stars till the whole seemed like immense forks of gold with spreading, jeweled prongs. "they let go a couple then," said will. "o look, tony!" cried charlie. while the boys were watching the rockets, john fisher was eagerly handling his coston light. the design of this is to signal to any wreck, or to warn vessels away from an unsafe shore. john now ignited his light and, holding it up, ran along the beach. his big, burly form wrapped in a coarse, heavy suit, threw an immense shadow on the sands, while the light of his torch so colored the beach that he seemed to be trampling on red snow. the foam of the waves, broken into patches, changed till it became clots of blood. beyond all, was that wrathful, howling, restless ocean. away ran john fisher, swinging his light, flinging out his big boots till he looked like a sea-monster, with unwieldy limbs, plunging through an atmosphere blood-tinged. at the station they had evidently become aware of the real situation of things, for there was a moving of lamps at the windows, then the opening of a door letting out a bright light. as will and the boys reached the station, they saw the big door in one end of the building swinging back, and out rushed two men pulling a cart. john fisher here came running up. "wreck is down at gull's p'int," he said, "so some one told me, and that agrees with the place where the signals were seen. i guess she is on the nub of the p'int, and our wreck-gun will reach her." "what is a wreck-gun?" charlie wanted to ask, but every body seemed too busy to answer questions. "it will be morning soon," exclaimed will. "i fancy i see a whitish streak now in the east." charlie was not looking at the sky, but, standing on his longest toe, was trying to get a peep into that mysterious cart dragged from the station. a man now stood on the axle and lighted a lamp on a pole. the lamp was inclosed so that the storm could not harm it. charlie saw a stout reel in the cart, about which went many turns of a stout rope. then there was the wreck-gun. there were also shovels and various apparatus. "now, boys," shouted captain peters, who had charge of the station, "all hands for the p'int!" that slow-moving, clumsy man that charlie had seen in the station when he called, was now changed to a very nimble-footed being, and his comrades were as active. away they went, threatening to leave charlie and tony far behind, but the boys grabbed will by the hand and rapidly as possible pushed on after the enterprising apothecary. "getting to be morning," shouted will. while the shadows were still thick on the beach, over in the east was a grayish, uncertain light. there were occasional discharges of rockets from the vessel in distress. "o dear!" said the breathless charlie. "i can't hold out much longer," thought tony. will, though, pushed stoutly on, and it was manifest that a wreck excited him as much as a fire. the distance to gull point from the station was at least a mile and a half. the point itself was a rocky stretch into the sea measuring about six hundred feet in length. day was creeping over the water; finally, a thin, sullen light, revealing a wild, ghostly tumult of waves. the surf that ordinarily broke near the shore seemed to whiten the water as far as the eye could reach. it was the angriest tumult of foam possible, as if the frothing of millions of enraged creatures of the sea. "ah, there she is!" shouted john fisher, as the cart neared the shore-end of the point. "_we_ will get her!" screamed charlie, as he reached the cart. the men laughed. "it's a three-masted schooner," bawled captain peters, "and she's where the life-boat can't reach her, but our wreck-gun will. that craft has keeled over on deep rock, near the very p'int itself! get out the gun!" the men now took from the cart a small cannon, then a mass of rope, and then a rope of larger size. "take out that life-car, too!" shouted captain peters. charlie watched every thing that was done with an intense curiosity. he sat down on the cannon to rest his short, fat legs. "sonny!" shouted john fisher--the roar of the surf compelled every one to shout--"do you know what we are up to?" charlie shook his head. "well, that cannon is loaded, and--" up sprang charlie. he did not want a seat like that. "and the shot has a light but strong line hitched to it. a man will p'int the gun so that when the shot goes out it will fall over the vessel, and carry the line with it. now watch him." charlie watched. "bang!" went the gun. away went the shot, the long rope wriggling after it. "good!" cried john. "what is good?" bawled charlie. "a good shot! the man sent the shot so that the rope has fallen across the vessel, i think." others thought so, too, and a man quickly shouted, "they're pulling on it! hurrah!" then they all cheered. the crew on board the wreck were steadily drawing the rope through the water. charlie looked intently with both eyes, and he wished that his ears also could be eyes for a little while. "come here!" shouted john to charlie, and he led the boy around to a coil of rope, one end of which was attached to the line going through the water. "see there, bub! there is a block, what they call a single pulley-block, and this stouter rope is doubled through it. it will soon go to the wreck." another explanation was then bawled at charlie, who now wished his eyes were ears, so anxious was he to hear. "look at that block, and then there is what they call a tally-board, and it has some printed directions on it, telling the men on the wreck just what to do. only _watch_!" he shouted. the stouter rope had now started on its journey through the waters, and was taken on board the wreck. "there," said john, "you noticed the rope was doubled through that block?" charlie nodded assent. "that gives us what we call an endless line--_line_. o, those noisy waves! the line runs through the block, i told you, which must have got to the wreck by this time. here, you see, one end is made fast. at the wreck the tally-board told them just where to hitch it. now watch! they are hitching on to the line a bigger one yet, and that will be hauled out to the schooner, and fastened _above_ the other line. a second tally-board tells them what to do." here john stopped to lay in a fresh stock of breath. charlie saw that two of the men on shore had been rigging tackles to long supports planted firmly in the sand. "those tackles," resumed john, "help us straighten that second line till it is above the breakers, and--now watch 'em--here comes the life-car, a sort of box, you see, that we suspend from the upper rope, and at the same time it is hitched to the lower or endless line. now all we have got to do is to pull on that endless line, and the life-car, sliding along the upper rope, will spin right out to the vessel, and--here she goes!" the life-car was moving along the upper line bound for the wreck. one or two halts occurred on the way, but the venture was ultimately successful, and charlie saw the life-car as the crew of the wreck eagerly seized it. "she's coming back!" he cried. captain peters shouted, "here she comes, my hearties! pull away on the whip!" this was a title for the endless line. "suthin' in that life-car!" sang out one of the men. "not so very much, i guess," said another. "she runs sort of light." how the breakers tried to reach the car! several times the sea threw itself spitefully, violently upward. one breaker seemed to make a spring for the car, wetting it with a cloud of spray. "a real vixen, aint it?" said john. "it can't harm any thing. but who is that in the car? a small cargo." it was not a large one certainly. one man doubted if any thing were there. nearer and nearer came the car, riding safely over that white, yeasty sea. it was pulled across the surf, and the outermost man laid his hands on it and pushed it. at the same time a little door in the top slid back, and a boy's head rose higher and higher in the car, and as it stopped he was helped to get out. he seemed to be in a heap, and his movements were stiff, for his legs were cramped by the cold. "there!" he screamed, "it's the last time i ever want to go on that pesky old sea." "wort wentworth!" shouted tony, springing forward to meet this returned knight. "hullo, tony! hullo, charlie!" "this _you_?" asked charlie. "yes, it's me just about drowned. they let me come alone. the others were not quite ready." "haven't you been through a lot?" asked tony. "more than i want to see again." "how many are on board the 'white shield?'" "i feared it was she when i laid my eyes on her," said captain peters. "five in the crew, my father, and one passenger." "dis a s'prise," said a new-comer, looking at wort. it was juggie. "it _is_ a surprise," was wort's reply. "catch me going again." "you'd rather be de keeper ob de great seal." "yes, indeed!" among the arrivals by the life-car was the skipper of the "white shield," and there was also a man wrapped in a cloak. "he aint a sailor," said one of the station-hands, criticising the dress of the man in the cloak. "it is the passenger," said wort. he was a man still young, and his clothes had an outlandish cut. he walked up the beach, the four young knights having preceded him. then he halted, and gave a look at the boys. the boys halted, and gave a look at him. suddenly tony bounded away, and bounded into the man's arms. what happened afterward, charlie told aunt stanshy at the breakfast-table. "aunt stanshy, guess what happened at the beach to tony." "i don't know, i am sure. i give it up." "well, the 'white shield' had a passenger, and when he got on the beach, the first thing we knew, tony blanco went rushing at him, and the man put his arms round tony, and then tony came pulling him along to us, and said, 'it's my father, boys!' and he was real pleasant, and said he'd send as some oranges." "tony's father? how did he turn up? i thought he was in italy." "well, you see, aunty, he was in a ship coming from italy, and the ship, i b'lieve, had a storm and was sinking when the 'white shield' and another vessel came along, and they two took the people from tony's father's ship. but that other vessel, you know, was going right to italy, and so all but tony's father went back in her, because you know they were italian sailors. tony's father, though, was a passenger, and he wanted to come to america, and so he got aboard the 'white shield' and came here, right where tony was; and, wasn't that funny?" "i should think it was." "he and tony were real glad to see one another. juggie called it, aunty, 'a second s'prise.'" the "s'prises," though, were not all over. charlie had a nap after breakfast, and finishing it, went to a window to see how the outside world looked. he stayed there only a minute, and then rushed to the head of the stairs leading down cellar, calling: "aunt stanshy! aunt stanshy, come quick, do! there goes tony's father!" aunt stanshy was down cellar fishing for pork in a capacious barrel. she dropped the piece for which she had successfully angled, and rushed to the stairs as if a whirlwind was after her. breathless, she arrived at charlie's window. "there, aunty, that is he!" "what, mr. walton?" "no, mr. walton is coming down the lane; but don't you see that other man going up the lane?" "o, yes, i see now." "well, that is him." "but what are those two men doing? if they aint shaking hands! and now they've got their arms round one another, and there they go walking off together! it is the queerest proceeding! why, they act as if they had known one another a long time!" aunt stanshy had too much of the woman in her to let the matter drop there. she said to herself, "if any one knows about this thing, it is miss persnips. i'll clap on my bonnet and go up there." miss persnips generally had a bag full of news, and it was the only thing in the store for which she did not make a charge. its mouth was hospitably open to all comers, and the distribution of its contents had an effect on her custom like the giving out of a chromo as a present. this morning, though, while the assortment in the bag was quite full and varied, it had nothing on the above subject. aunt stanshy went home disappointed. if she could have gone to mr. walton's she would have witnessed something of interest. mr. walton was leading the stranger into his house, when he said, "stop a moment in the parlor and i will go into the sitting-room and prepare her." "all right." "mother," said mr. walton, stepping into the sitting-room, "would you like to see an old friend this morning? you feel comfortable?" "o yes; bring him in." "shall i tell you who it is?" "no, let me have the surprise." her son led the stranger in. "why, fred!" exclaimed mrs. walton. the man dropped on his knees, and put his head in her lap. and this was all that the mother did--she stroked his head with her hands, saying: "why, fred! fred! my poor boy!" that was the way the long-absent son came home. fred walton had been a wayward young man, finally going to italy in a sailing-vessel, engaging to do any work for the sake of his passage. in italy, he took the name of blanco, purposing to build up a new character on the basis of a new name. the new character he needed, but his old name would have served him. he there married a young italian lady who had met his older brother in his travels and was an object of deep interest to him, but he had relinquished her to the younger brother. their married home was a pretty one, and a view of it fred sent to his family in america. it was a picture of this home, taken at another season of the year, and from a different point of view, that his mother and brother had noticed, and yet failed to identify, when tony's pictures were inspected. fred's wife dying, leaving a little boy, antonio, four years old, fred wished to return to america, but concluded to remain in italy, educating his boy in english as well as italian. a year before this story opens, he wrote his mother that he was about to sail for a port in algeria. it was a wild business enterprise, and he sent his little boy, antonio, with friends--also named blanco--to new york, expecting soon to follow them, and desiring in the meantime to make sure of a good home for antonio. during his absence in africa he wrote home, but his letters miscarried. nothing had been heard since the day he sailed from italy, and his old mother anxiously thought of him on stormy nights, fearing lest he had gone down into the wide grave of the sea. the blanco family that cared for tony in new york, obliged to leave the city by the failure of their work, came to seamont to find it there awhile. when they returned to new york, as tony was attached to seamont, they left him with the badger family for awhile. they were waiting to hear from tony's father about his plans for the boy, when he appeared in an unexpected fashion to look directly after tony, and visit also his relatives; but they and the club were sorry to know that, contrary to his wishes, he must go back to italy, and take tony with him. "ah, now i understand about that boy," said mr. walton, to his mother; "why he looked familiar, and if the people who brought him had had a different name, i might have looked into it, but i thought they must be relatives. of course, not hearing from fred, we had no thought that his child was here." and the mother said, "i hope my boy will now take his true name, and come again soon, and bring antonio walton with him." but would he and tony ever come again? tony came to bid good-bye to charlie, and said, very soberly and touchingly, "we'd better kiss each other, for i feel that we shall never see each other again. good-bye, for we shall never see each other any more." it was a very pathetic speech, and charlie said, mournfully, as he kissed him, "well, good-bye, tony." tony and his father went to italy in a bark that left seamont bound for the mediterranean. charlie watched the vessel from the barn window. like a gull that flying afar sinks lower and then disappears behind some rising billow, so the sails of the bark, receding farther and farther, vanished behind that blue rim of the horizon that rises up to check our sight and hide away the vessels that may hold our dearest hopes. chapter xx. the bound higher up. miss barry was talking to her boys one sunday; "boys, you have had an up-the-ladder club this past year, and i hope it has not been simply a play-ladder, but while playing you have also done something else. i think you have done a good work for temperance, and you have been kind to another in trouble. i think you have tried to keep your badge clean, and not stain it by bad words. you have tried to get hold of some useful knowledge through your club. all that is excellent as far as it goes. but i am thinking, while you are on this ladder, whether there may not be a round you haven't touched, and yet one you ought to put your foot on. between this time and next sunday, please think what that other round may be, the round higher up." the boys looked sober, but no one made a reply. "the round higher up," charlie would sometimes say to himself during the week. sometimes in the midst of his play and his studies, that thought would visit him, "the round higher up." it came to him in his dreams. looking up, he saw a silver ladder and it stretched above him, reaching at last a beautiful palace. over the palace, flashed out, in letters of gold, the words, "god's palace." but what was it charlie saw not far from this ladder? another, but o, so mean and little! charlie knew it. "my ladder!" he shouted. "let me see how many rounds are there!" "i think there is room for a round higher up," said a voice. "that, as it is, wont touch god's palace." startled by the sound charlie awoke. the next sunday miss barry said: "boys, i don't think i need ask about the round higher up which your ladder needs. you understand me, and i want you to put it in. we never can climb very high, unless our life is pure and lovely and noble. it must be like christ's life, and filled with the beautiful thoughts and purposes he had. that is the round higher up we need." these words stirred charlie still more deeply. he thought about that round higher up. if he could only put it into his ladder and get his feet on it! one night he went to his little bedroom, thinking still about the round higher up. he could lie in bed and look up to the white, silver stars that, like ladder-rounds, seemed to stretch across the sky in lines going higher and higher. if he only had rounds by which he could climb as high as they, his ladder would be tall enough. but how find and where get "the round higher up?" once more he dreamed and he was looking again at a ladder that starting on the ground stretched up a little way and then suddenly stopped. "my ladder!" exclaimed charlie. then it seemed to him as if above his ladder he saw a bright, beautiful, silver round, but it was up so high he could not reach it! looking at it, longing to plant his feet upon it, some one seemed to approach charlie whom he immediately knew, because he resembled pictures in the old family bible at aunt stanshy's. he had a shepherd's crook in his hand, and there was a crown of thorns on his head. "that's the good shepherd," thought charlie. "you can't reach that round. let me help you," said the good shepherd. he laid down his crook and lifted charlie at once. then the beauty of the dream, its light, its ladder, the good shepherd, seemed to vanish, slowly though, even as the stars die away out of the early morning sky. charley knew what it all meant. when he awoke and thought it over, he knelt by his bed and he prayed to the saviour. he told him that he wanted to lead that better life, and would he not lift a little fellow where he could not climb himself? and a saviour's arms, ever waiting to raise us all, were lowered for charlie's help, and they lifted him to the "round higher up." is it not time that we all looked upward, beseeching god to forgive us, receive us, and make us his forever? forget not "the round higher up," and through the strength of god, may it become yours! this very day may your feet be planted on it! the end. scanned images of public domain material from the google print project. the girls and i [illustration: 'we ran over the fields by a short cut to a stile on to the road, where we could see her pass, and there we shouted out again all our messages.'--c. xi. p. 168.] the girls and i: a veracious history [illustration] by mrs molesworth illustrated by l. leslie brooke london macmillan & co. mdcccxcii contents chapter i ourselves 1 chapter ii the diamond ornament 16 chapter iii work for the town-crier 30 chapter iv at the dancing class 46 chapter v rodney square 63 chapter vi the valley of the shadow 79 chapter vii four 'if's' and a coincidence 95 chapter viii mossmoor farm 110 chapter ix spying the land 125 chapter x a long ago adventure 140 chapter xi mischief in the air 157 chapter xii miss cross-at-first's fur cape 173 list of illustrations 'jack, do help me to fasten this bracelet' 24 'i'd give anything, i'd almost give myself, to find it' 48 'the door opened a little wider, and two faces appeared' 74 'i just stood still ... and looked well round at the view and everything' 130 'her grandmother ... went quietly out of the pew without a notion but that the child was beside her' 153 'we ran over the fields by a short cut to a stile on to the road, where we could see her pass, and there we shouted out again all our messages' 168 'we all three sat listening and listening' 175 chapter i ourselves i'm jack. i've always been jack, ever since i can remember at least, though i suppose i must have been called 'baby' for a bit before serena came. but she's only a year and a half younger than me, and maud's only a year and a quarter behind her, so i can scarcely remember even serena being 'baby'; and maud's always been so very grown up for her age that you couldn't fancy her anything but 'maud.' my real name isn't john though, as you might fancy. it's a much queerer name, but there's always been one of it in our family ever since some grandfather or other married a german girl, who called her eldest son after her own father. so we're accustomed to it, and it doesn't seem so queer to us as to other people. it's 'joachim.' 'jock' seems a better short for it than 'jack,' doesn't it? and i believe mother once meant to call me 'jock.' but when serry and maud came i _had_ to be jack, for with anne and hebe in front of me, and the two others behind, of course i was 'jack-in-the-middle.' there's never been any more of us, and even if there had i'd have stayed jack, once i'd got settled into it, you see. i'm eleven. i'm writing this in the holidays; and if i don't get it finished before they're done i'll keep adding on to it till i've told all there is to tell. it's a sort of comfort to me to write about everything, for one way and another i've had a good deal to put up with, all because of--_girls_. and i have to be good-tempered and nice just because they _are_ girls. and besides that, i'm really very fond of them; and they're not bad. but no one who hasn't tried it knows in the least what it is to be one boy among a lot of girls, 'specially when some of them are rather boy-ey girls, and when you yourself are just a little perhaps--just a very little--the other way. i don't think i'm a baby. honestly i don't, and i'm not going to write down anything i don't _quite_ think. but i do like to be quiet, and i like to have things tidy and regular. i like rules, and keeping to them; and i hate racket and mess. anne, now, drives me nearly wild with her rushy, helter-skelter ways. you wouldn't think it, would you, considering that she's fourteen, and the eldest, and that she's been the eldest all her life?--eldests _should_ be steady and good examples. and her name sounds steady and neat, doesn't it? and yet of all the untidy, unpunctual--no, i mustn't let myself go like that. besides, it's quite true, as hebe says, anne has got a very good heart, and she's very particular in some _mind_ ways; she never says a word that isn't quite true--she doesn't even exaggerate. i have noticed that rather tiresome, careless people often have very good hearts. i wish they could see how much nicer it would be for other people if they'd put some of their good hearts into their tiresome ways. on the whole, it's hebe that suits the best with me. she particular--_much_ more particular than anne, though not quite as particular as _i'd_ like her to be, and then she is really awfully sweet. that makes her a little worrying sometimes, for she will take sides. if i am in a great state at finding our postage stamps all muddled, for instance--anne and hebe and i have a collection together, i am sorry to say--and _i_ know who's been at them and say something--who could help saying something if they found a lot of carefully-sorted ones ready to gum in, all pitched into the unsorted box with uncle brian's last envelopeful that i haven't looked over?--up flies hebe in anne's defence. 'poor anne, she was in such a hurry, she never meant it'; or 'she only wanted to help you, jack; she didn't know you had sorted these.' now, isn't that rather trying? for it makes me feel as if i was horrid; and if hebe would just say, 'yes, it _is_ awfully tiresome,' i'd feel i had a sort of right to be vexed, and when you feel that, the vexedness often goes away. still, there's no doubt hebe _is_ sweet, and i daresay she flies up for me just as she does for the others when i am the one not there. we're all very fond of hebe. she and serena are rather like each other; they have fair fluffy hair and rosy cheeks, but they're not a bit like each other in themselves. serena is a terrible tomboy--worse than anne, for she really never thinks at all. anne does mean to think, but she does it the wrong way; she gets her head so full of some one thing that she forgets everything else, and then she's awfully sorry. but serry just doesn't think at all, though she's very good-natured, and, of course, when it comes to really vexing or hurting any one, she's sorry too--for about a minute and a half! and then there's maud. it is very funny about maud, the oddest thing about us, though we are rather a topsy-turvy family. maud is only eight and a half, but she's the oldest of us all. 'she's that terrible old-fashioned,' mother's old nurse said when she came to pay us a visit once, 'she's scarce canny.' they call _me_ old-fashioned sometimes, but i'm nothing to maud. why, bless you (i learnt that from old nurse, and i like it, and nobody can say it's naughty to bless anybody), compared to maud i'm careless, and untidy, and unpunctual, and heedless, and everything of these kinds that i shouldn't be. and yet she and i don't get on as well as hebe and i do, and in some ways even not as well as anne and i do. but maud and anne get on very well-i never saw anything like it. she tidies for anne; she reminds her of things she's going to forget; she seems to think she was sent into the world to take care of her big sister. anne is big--at least she's tall--tall and thin, and with rather smooth dark hair. my goodness! if she'd had fluffy hair like us three middle ones--for even mine is rather a bother, it grows so fast and is so curly--what _would_ she have looked like? she seems meant to be neat, and till you know her, and go her all over pretty closely, you'd never guess how untidy she is--pins all over, even though sophy is _always_ mending her frocks and things. and maud is dark too, though her hair is curly like ours; she's like a gipsy, people say, but she's not a bit gipsy in her _ways_--oh dear, no! we live in london--mostly, that's to say. we've got a big dark old house that really belongs to grandfather, but he's so little there that he lets us use it, for father has to be in london a lot. we're always there in winter; that's the time grandfather's generally in france or egypt, or somewhere warm. now and then, if he's later of going away than usual, or sooner of coming back, he's with us a while in london. we don't like it much. that sounds unkind. i don't mean to be unkind. i'm just writing everything down because i want to practise myself at it. father writes books--very clever ones, though they're stories. i've read bits, but i didn't understand them much, only i know they're very clever by the fuss that's made about them. and people wonder how ever he gets time to write them with all the government things he does too. he _must_ be very clever; that's what put it in my head that _perhaps_ some day i might be clever that way too. for i don't want to be either a soldier or a sailor, or a lawyer like father was before he got into government things, and i'm sure i'm not good enough to be a parson, though i think i'd rather like it; and so sometimes i really get frightened that i'll be no good at anything at all, and a boy must be something. i think father and mother would be pleased if i were a great writer. and then we really have had some adventures: that makes it more interesting to make out a story about ourselves, for i think a book just about getting up and going to bed, and breakfast, and dinner, and tea, would be very stupid--though, all the same, in story-books i do like rather to know what the children have to eat, and something about the place they live in too. to go back about grandfather. the reason we don't much like his being with us isn't exactly that we don't care for him. he's not bad. but father's his only child, and our grandmother died a good while ago, and i think she must have been a very giving-in sort of person, and that's bad training for any one. when i'm grown up, _if_ ever i marry, i shall settle with my wife before we start that she mustn't give in to me too much, and i'll stick to it once it's settled. for i've got rather a nasty temper, and i feel in me that if i was to get too much of my own way it would get horrid. it's perhaps because of that that it's been a good thing for me to have four sisters, for they're _nearly_ as bad as four wives sometimes. i don't get too much of my own way at present, i can tell you. i often think i'm rather like grandfather. p'raps if he'd had four sisters or a not-too-giving-in wife he'd have been better. now, i hope that's not rude? i don't mean it to be; i'm rather excusing him. and i can't put down what isn't true, even though nobody should ever see this 'veracious history'--that's what i'm going to put on the title-page--except myself. and the truth is that grandfather expects everybody and everything to give in to him. not _always_ father, for he does see how grand and clever father is, and that he can't be expected to come and go, and do things, and give up things, just like a baby. but oh, as for poor little mums!--that's mother--her life's not her own when gran's with us. and it isn't that she's silly a bit. she's awfully sensible; something like hebe and maud mixed together, though to look at her she's more like anne. it's real goodness makes _her_ give in. 'he's getting old, dears, you know,' she says, 'and practically he's so very good to us.' i'm not quite sure that i understand quite what 'practically' means. i think it's to do with the house--or the houses, for we've got two--and money. for father, though he's so clever, wouldn't be _rich_ without grandfather, i don't think. perhaps it means presents too. he--grandfather--isn't bad about presents. he never forgets birthdays or christmases--oh dear, no, he's got an _awfully_ good memory. sometimes _some_ of us would almost rather be worse off for presents if only he'd forget some other things. i'm like him about remembering too. i think my mind is rather tidy, as well as my outside ways. i've got things very neat inside; i often feel as if it was a cupboard, and i like to know exactly which shelf to go to for anything i want. mums says, 'that's all very well so far as it goes, jack, but don't stop short at that, or you will be in danger of growing narrow-minded and self-satisfied.' and i think i know what she means. there are some things now about anne, for all her tiresome ways, that i know are _grander_ than about me, or even perhaps than about hebe, only hebe's sweetness makes up for everything. but anne would give anything in a moment to do any one a good turn. and i--well, i'd think about it. i didn't at all like having to tear up my nice pocket-handkerchief even the day we found the poor little boy with his leg bleeding so dreadfully in the park, and anne had hers in strips in a moment. and she'll lend her very best things to any one of us. and she's got feelings i don't understand. beautiful church music makes her want so _dreadfully_ to be good, she says. i _like_ it very much, but i don't think i feel it that way. i just feel nice and quiet, and almost a little sleepy if it goes on a good while. i was telling about our house in london. it's big, and rather grand in a dull sort of way, but dark and gloomy. long ago, when they built big houses, i think they fancied it was the proper thing to make them dark. it's nice in winter when it's shut up for the night, and the gas lighted in the hall and on the staircases, and with the lamps in the dining-room and drawing-rooms and library--it is very warm and comfortable then, and though the furniture's old-fashioned, and not a pretty kind of old-fashioned, it looks grand in a way. but when the spring comes, and the bright days show up all the dinginess, poor mother, how she does sigh! 'i would so like to have a pretty house,' she says. 'the curtains are all so dark, you can scarcely see they're any colour at all, and those dreadful heavy gilt frames to the mirrors in the drawing-rooms! oh, alan'--alan is father--'don't you think gran would let us refurnish even the third drawing-room? i could make it a sort of boudoir, you know, and i could have my own friends in there in the daytime. the rooms don't look so bad at night.' but father shakes his head. 'i'm afraid he wouldn't like it,' he says. so i suppose even father gives in a good deal to gran. mums isn't a bit selfish. the brightest rooms in the house have always been ours. they're two floors over the drawing-rooms, which are really _very_ big rooms. we have a nursery, and on one side of it a dressing-room--that's mine--and two other rooms, with two beds each for the girls. we do our lessons in the study--a little room in front of the dining-room, very jolly, for it looks to the front, and the street is wide, and we can see all the barrel-organs and monkeys, and punch and judys, and bands, when we're doing our lessons. i don't mean when we're _having_ our lessons; that's different. my goodness! i'd like to see even serry try to look out of the window when miss stirling is there! miss stirling's our governess. she comes, you know; she's not a living-in-the-house one, and she's pretty strict, so we like her best the way she is. but _doing_ our lessons is when we're learning them. most days, in winter anyway, we go a walk till four, or a quarter to, and then we learn for an hour, and then we have tea; and if we're not finished, we come down again till half-past six or so, and then we dress to go into the drawing-room to mums. she nearly always dresses for dinner early, so we have an hour with her. the little ones, serena and maud, never have much to learn. it's anne and hebe and me. we all do latin-i mean we three do. and twice a week miss stirling takes anne and hebe to french and german classes for 'advanced pupils.' i'm not an advanced pupil, so those mornings i work alone for two hours, and then i've not much to do in the evening those days. and miss stirling gives me french and german the days that the girls are at their music with mrs. meux, their music-teacher. that's how we've done for a long time--ages. but next year i'm going to school. i'm to go when i'm twelve. my birthday comes in november. it's just been; that's how i said 'i'm eleven,' not eleven and a quarter, or eleven and a half--just eleven. and i'm to go at the end of the christmas holidays after that. i don't much mind; at least i don't think i do. i'll have more lessons and more games in a regular way, and i'll have less worries, anyway at first. for i shall be counted a small boy, of course, and i shan't have to look after others and be blamed for them, the way i have to look after the girls at home. it'll really be a sort of rest. i've had such a lot of looking after other people. i really have. mums says so herself sometimes. she even says i have to look after her. and it's true. she's awfully good--she's almost an angel--but she's a tiny bit like anne. she's rather untidy. not to look at, ever. she's as neat as a pin, and then she's very pretty; but she's careless--she says so herself. she so often loses things, because she's got a trick of putting them down anywhere she happens to be. often and often i go to her room when she's dressing, and tap at the door and say-'have you lost something, mums?' and ten to one she'll call back-'yes, my dear town-crier, i have.' ('my gloves,' or 'my card-case,' or 'my keys,' or, oh! almost anything.) 'but i wasn't worrying about it; i knew you'd find it, jack.' and maud does finder for anne, just the same way, only _her_ finding sometimes gets me into trouble. just fancy that. if anne loses something, and maud is hunting away and doesn't find it all at once, they'll turn upon me--they truly will--and say-'you _might_ help her, jack, you really might, poor little thing! it's no trouble to you to run up and down stairs, and she's so little.' when that sort of thing happens, i do feel that i've got a rather nasty temper. i've begun about losing things, because our adventures had to do with a very big losing. the first adventure came straight from it, and the rest had to do with it. it's funny how things hang together like that. you think of something that's come, and you remember what made it happen, and then you go back to the beginning of _that_, and you see it came from something else; and you go on feeling it out like, till you're quite astonished to find what a perfectly different thing had started it all from what you would have thought. i think this will be a good place for ending the first chapter, which isn't really like a story--only an explanation of us. and in the next i'll begin about our adventures. chapter ii the diamond ornament it was two years ago nearly; it was the end of february--no, i think it was a little way on in march. so i was only nine and a quarter, and anne was about twelve, and all the others in proportion younger than they are now, of course. you can count their ages, if you like, though i don't know who 'you' are, or if there's ever going to be any 'you' at all. but it's the sort of thing i like to do myself when i read a story. i count all the people's ages, and the times they did things, and that things are said to have happened, and i can tell you that very often i find that authors make very stupid mistakes. i told father of this once, and i said i'd like to write and tell them. he laughed, but he called me a prig, which i didn't like, so i never have written to any of them. that winter began early, and was very cold, but it went early too. so grandfather took it into his head to come back to england the end of february, for a bit, meaning to go on somewhere else--to ireland, i think, where we have some relations--after he'd been in london a fortnight or so. it all came--all that i've got to tell--of gran's returning from the hot place he'd been at, whichever it was, so much sooner than usual. there was going to be a drawing-room just about the end of the fortnight he was to be with us, and mums was going to it. she had fixed it a good while ago, because she was going to take some friends--a girl who'd got married to a cousin of father's, and another girl--to be presented. they were both rather pretty. we saw them in the morning, when they came for mums to take them. _i_ thought the married one prettiest; she had nice laughing eyes. if ever i marry, i'd like a girl with laughing eyes; they look so jolly. the other one was rather cross, i thought, and so did maud. but anne said she was interesting-looking, as if she had a hidden sorrow, like in poetry. and after that, none of us quite dared to say she was only cross-looking. and she wasn't really cross; we found that out afterwards. it was only the way her face was made. her name was judith, and the married one was dorothea. we always call her that, as she's our cousin. they were prettily dressed, both of them. all white. but dorothea's dress went rather in creases. it looked too loose. i went all round her, ever so many times, peeping at it, though she didn't know, of course. i can tell when a dress fits, as well as anybody, because of helping to dress mums so often. sometimes, for a change from the town-crier, mums calls me a man-milliner. i don't mind. judith's dress was all right. it was of silk, a soft kind, not near so liney as satin. i like it better. they were both very neat. no pins or hair-pins sticking out. but mums looked prettiest. i can tell you how she was dressed, because she's not been at a drawing-room since, for last spring and summer she got a cold or something both times she meant to go. by rights she should go every year, because of what father is. i hope she'll go next spring, for after that i shall be at school, and never able to see her, and i do love to look at her all grand like that. she says she doesn't know how she'll do without me for seeing she's all right. well, her dress was blue and pale pink, the train blue--a flowery pattern--and she had blue and pink bunches of feathers all sticking about it; no flowers except her nosegay, which was blushing roses tied with blue streamers. she did look nice. her hair looked grander than usual, because of something she had never had in it before, and that was a beautiful diamond twisty-twirly thing. i have never seen a diamond brooch or pin quite like it, though i often look in the jewellers' windows. she was very proud of it, though she'd only got the loan of it. i must go back a bit to tell you how she had got it. a day or two before grandfather left, mums told him about the drawing-room. if she had known he was going to be with us then, she wouldn't have fixed to go to it; for, as i have said, he takes up nearly all her time, especially when he's only there for a short visit. i suppose i shouldn't call it a visit, as it's his own house, but it seems the best word. and for her to be a whole day out, not in at luncheon, and a train-show at afternoon tea-time, would have been just what he doesn't like. but it couldn't be helped now, as others were counting on her, especially mrs. chasserton, our cousin's wife--that's dorothea. we were there--anne, hebe, and i--when mother told gran about it. we really felt rather frightened, but she said it so sweetly, i felt sure he _couldn't_ be vexed. and he wasn't. he did frudge up his eyebrows--'frudge' is a word we've made ourselves, it does do so well; we've made several--and they are very thick. anne opened her mouth in a silly way she has, just enough to make him say, 'what are you gaping at, miss anne, may i ask?' but luckily he didn't notice. and hebe squeezed my hand under the table-cloth. it was breakfast time. but in a minute he unfrudged his eyebrows, and then we knew it was over. 'quite right, my dear valeria,' he said. valeria is mums' name; isn't it pretty? 'i am very glad for you to show attention to dick's wife--quite right, as you are at the head of the family. as for judith merthyr--h-m--h-m--she's a strong-minded young woman, i'm told--don't care about strong-minded young women--wonder she condescends to such frivolity. and thank you, my dear, for your consideration for me. but it won't be needed. i must leave for holyhead on tuesday. they are expecting me at tilly' something or other (i don't mean that gran said that, but i can't remember these long irish names). tuesday was the day before the drawing-room. i'm sure mums clapped her inside hands--that's another of our makings up--i know _we_ did. for if gran had been there i don't believe we'd have got in to the train-show at all. and of course it's much jollier to be in the drawing-room in the afternoon, waiting for them to come back, and speaking to the people that are there, and getting a good many extra teas and sandwiches and cakes and ices, than just to see mums start in the morning, however pretty she looks. grandfather was really rather wonderful that day. 'what are you going to wear, my dear valeria?' he asked mother. she told him. 'h-m, h-m,' he said. he has different ways of h-ming. this time it was all right, not like when he spoke of judy merthyr. and actually a smile broke over his face. the night before he was leaving he came into the drawing-room just before dinner-time, looking very smiley. he was holding something in his hand--a dark leather case. 'my dear child,' he said, and though we were all five there we knew he was speaking to mother. i like to hear mother called 'my dear child'--father does it sometimes--it makes her seem so nice and young. 'my dear child,' he said, 'i have got something here that i want you to wear in your hair at the drawing-room. i cannot _give_ it you out and out, though i mean you to have it some day, but i want to lend it you for as long as you like.' and then he opened the case, mother standing close by, and all of us trying to peep too. it was the twisty-twirly diamond ornament. a sort of knot--big diamonds in the middle and littler ones in and out. it is awfully pretty. i never saw diamonds sparkle so--you can see every colour in them when you look close, like thousands of prisms, you know. it had a case on purpose for it, and there were pins of different shapes and sizes, so that it could be a brooch, or a hair-pin, or a hanging thing without a pin at all. mums _was_ pleased. 'oh, thank you, dear gran,' she said. 'it _is_ good of you. yes, indeed, i shall be proud to have such a lovely, splendid ornament in my hair.' then grandfather took it out of the case, and showed her all the different ways of fastening in the pins. they had little screws at their ends, and they all fitted in so neatly, it was quite interesting to see. 'you will wear it in your hair on wednesday, no doubt,' he said. 'so i will fasten in the hair-pin--there, you see it screws quite firmly.' and then he gave it to mother, and she took it upstairs and put it away. the next night--grandfather had left that morning--father and mother were going out to dinner. mother dresses rather early generally, so that she can be with us a little, but that night she had been busy, and she was rather late. she called us into her room when she was nearly ready, not to disappoint us, and because we always like to see her dressed. she had on a red dress that night, i remember. her maid, rowley, had put out all the things on the toilet-table. when mums isn't in a hurry i often choose for her what she's going to wear--we spread all the cases out and then we settle. but to-night there wasn't time for that. rowley had got out a lot of things, because she didn't know which mother would choose, and among them the new, grand, diamond thing of grandfather's. 'oh,' said anne--she and i were first at the toilet-table,--'are you going to wear gran's ornament, mother?' [illustration: 'jack, do help me to fasten this bracelet.'--c. ii. p. 24.] 'no, of course not,' said mums. 'it's only for very grand occasions, and to-night is quite a small dinner. i've got on all the jewellery i need. but, jack, do help me to fasten this bracelet, there's a good boy.' rowley was fussing away at something that wasn't quite right in mother's skirt. mother was rather impatient, and the bracelet was fidgety. but at last i got it done, and rowley stood up with rather a red face from tacking the sweepy, lacey thing that had come undone. mums flew off. 'good-night, dears,' she said. 'i haven't even time to kiss you. father has gone down, and the carriage has been there ever so long.' the girls called out 'good-night,' and hebe and i ran to the top of the staircase to watch her go down. then we went straight back to the nursery, and in a minute or two the three others came in. maud was saying something to anne, and anne was laughing at her. 'did you ever hear such a little prig as maud?' she said. 'she's actually scolding me because i was looking at mums's jewels.' 'anne made them all untidy,' said maud. 'well, rowley'll tidy them again. she came back on purpose; she'd only gone down to put mother's cloak on,' said anne carelessly. 'anne,' said i rather sharply. you see i knew her ways, and mums often leaves me in charge. 'were you playing with mother's jewels?' 'i was doing no harm,' said anne; 'i was only looking at the way the pins fasten in to that big diamond thing. it's quite right, jack, you needn't fuss. rowley's putting them all away.' so i didn't say any more. and to-morrow was the drawing-room day. mother looked beautiful, as i said. we watched her start with the two others, cousin dorothea and miss merthyr. it was rather a cold day; they took lots of warm cloaks in the carriage. i remember hearing judy--we call her judy now--say, 'you must take plenty of wraps, mrs. warwick,'--that's mother. 'my aunt made me bring a fur cape that i thought i should not wear again this year; it would never do for you to catch cold.' mums does look rather delicate, but she isn't delicate really. she's never ill. but judith looked at her so nicely when she said that about not catching cold, that the cross look went quite out of her face, and i saw it was only something about her eyebrows. and i began to think she must be rather nice. but we didn't see her again. she did not get out of the carriage when they came back in the afternoon, but went straight home to her own house. somebody of hers was ill there. cousin dorothea came back with mother, and three other ladies in trains came too, so there was rather a good show. and everybody was laughing and talking, and we'd all had two or three little teas and several ices, and it was all very jolly when a dreadful thing happened. i was standing by mother. i had brought her a cup of tea from the end drawing-room where rowley and the others were pouring it out, and she was just drinking it, when i happened to look up at her head. 'mums,' i said, 'why have you taken out gran's diamond thing? it looked so nice.' mums put her hand to her head--to the place where she knew she had put in the pin: of course it wasn't there, i wouldn't have made such a mistake. mums grew white--really white. i never saw her like that except once when father was thrown from his horse. 'oh, jack,' she said, 'are you sure?' and she kept feeling all over her hair among the feathers and hanging lacey things, as if she thought it must be sticking about somewhere. 'stoop down, mums,' i said, 'and i'll have a good look.' there weren't many people there just then--several had gone, and several were having tea. so mums sat down on a low chair, and i poked all over her hair. but of course the pin was gone--no, i shouldn't say the _pin_, for _it_ was there; its top, with the screwy end, was sticking up, but the beautiful diamond thing was gone! i drew out the pin, and mother gave a little cry of joy as she felt me. 'oh, it's there,' she said, 'there after all----' 'no, dear,' i said quickly, 'it isn't. look--it's only the pin.' mother seized it, and looked at it with great puzzle as well as trouble in her eyes. 'it's come undone,' she said, 'yet how could it have done? gran fixed it on himself, and he's so very particular. there's a little catch that fastens it to the pin as well as the screw--see here, jack,' and she showed me the catch, 'that _couldn't_ have come undone if it was fastened when i put it on. and i _know_ gran clicked it, as well as screwing the head in.' she stared at me, as if she thought it _couldn't_ be true, and as if explaining about it would make it come back somehow. several ladies came up, and she began telling them about it. cousin dorothea had gone, but these other ladies were all very sorry for her, and indeed any one would have been, poor little mother looked so dreadfully troubled. one of them took up the pin and examined it closely. 'there's one comfort,' she said, 'it hasn't been _stolen_. you see it's not been cut off, and that's what very clever thieves do sometimes. they nip off a jewel in a crowd, quite noiselessly and in half a second, i've been told. no, mrs. warwick, it's dropped off, and by advertising and offering a good reward you may very likely get it back. but--excuse me--it was very careless of your maid not to see that it was properly fastened. a very valuable thing, i suppose it is?' 'it's more than valuable,' said poor mother. 'it's an heirloom, _quite_ irreplaceable. i do not know how i shall ever have courage to tell my father-in-law. no, i can't blame my maid. i told her not to touch it, as the general had fastened it himself all ready. but how _can_ it have come undone?' at that moment anne and hebe, who had been having a little refreshment no doubt, came into the front drawing-room where we were. they saw there was something the matter, and when they got close to mother and saw what she was holding in her hand, for the lady had given it back to her, they seemed to know in a moment what had happened. and anne's mouth opened, the way it does when she's startled or frightened, and she stood staring. then i knew what it meant. chapter iii work for the town-crier 'oh, those girls,' i thought to myself; 'why did i leave them alone in mother's room with all her things about?' but anne's face made me feel as if i couldn't say anything--not before all those people; though of course i knew that as soon as she could see mother alone she would tell, herself. i was turning away, thinking it would be better to wait--for, you see, mother was not blaming any one else--when all of a sudden maud ran up. she was all dressed up very nicely, of course; and she's a pretty little thing, everybody says, and then she's the youngest. so a lot of people had been petting her and making a fuss about her. maud doesn't like that at all. she's not the least bit conceited or spoilt, and she really is so sensible that i think it teazes her to be spoken to as if she was only a baby. her face was rather red, i remember; she had been trying to get away from those ladies without being at all rude, for she's far too 'ladylike' to be rude _ever_. and now she ran up, in a hurry to get to her dear anne as usual. but the moment she saw anne's face she knew that something was wrong. for one thing, anne's mouth was wide open, and i have told you about anne's mouth. then there was the pin in mother's hand, the hair-pin, and no top to it! and mums looking so troubled, and all the ladies round her. 'what is it?' said maud in her quick way. 'oh--is mums' brooch broken? oh, anne, you shouldn't have touched it!' everybody--mother and everybody--turned to anne; i _was_ sorry for her. it wasn't like maud to have called it out, she is generally so careful; but you see she was startled, and she only thought the diamond thing was broken or loosened. anne's face grew scarlet. 'what do you mean, maudie?' said mother. 'anne, what does she mean?' it was hard upon anne, for it looked as if she hadn't been going to tell, and that wasn't at all her way. in another moment i daresay she would have blurted it out; but then, you see, she had hardly had time to take in that most likely she had caused the mischief, for she knew she hadn't _meant_ to, and she quite thought she had left the pin just as firmly fastened as she had found it. 'oh, mother,' she cried, 'i didn't think-i never meant-i'm sure i screwed it in again quite the same.' 'when did you touch it? i don't understand anything about it. jack, what do anne and maud mean?' said poor mums, turning to me. 'it was my fault,' i said. 'i shouldn't have left any one in your room, with all your things about, and rowley even not there.' 'and i did tell anne not to touch the diamond brooch,' said maud. for once she really seemed quite angry with anne. then we told mother all there was to tell--at least anne did, for she knew the most of course. she had been fiddling at the diamond thing all the time she was standing by the table, but no one had noticed her except maud. for you remember mums was in a great hurry, and i was helping her to fasten her bracelet, and rowley was fussing at her skirt, and then hebe and i went half-way downstairs to see mother start. oh dear, i did feel vexed with myself! anne said she wanted to see how the ornament could be turned into different things; she had unscrewed the pin and unclicked the little catch, and then she had fixed in the other kind of pin to make it into a brooch, and she wanted to try the screw with a ring to it, to make it a hanging ornament, but maud wouldn't let her stay. so she screwed in the hairpin again--the one that gran had fastened in himself. she meant to do it quite tight, but she couldn't remember if she clicked the little catch. and she was in a hurry, so no doubt she did it carelessly. that was really about all anne had to tell. but it was plain that it had been her fault that the beautiful ornament was lost. it had dropped off. mums didn't say very much to her: it wouldn't have done before all the visitors. they were very good-natured, and very sorry for mother. and several people said again what a good thing it was it was only _lost_, not stolen, for that gave ever so much more chance of finding it. when all the people had gone, father came in. mother had still her dress on, but she was looking very white and tired, and in a moment, like maud, he saw there was something the matter. he was very vexed, dreadfully vexed, only he was too good to scold anne _very_ much. and indeed it would have been difficult to do so, she looked such a miserable creature, her eyes nearly swollen out of her head with crying. and we were all pretty bad--even serry, who never troubles herself much about anything, looked solemn. and as for me, i just couldn't forgive myself for not having stayed in mother's room and seen to putting away her jewel-cases, as i generally do. father set to work at once. first he made mother stand up in the middle of the room, and he called rowley, and he and rowley and i and hebe shook out her train and poked into every little fluthery ruffle--there was a lot of fustled-up net inside the edge, just the place for the diamond thing to get caught in, and we made her shake herself and turn out her pocket and everything. but it was no use. then--the poor little thing was nearly dead, she was so tired!--father made her go to take off her finery, telling rowley to look over all the dress again when mother had got out of it. then he and i went out together to the coach-house, first telling all the servants of the loss, and making them hunt over the hall and up and down the stairs; it was really quite exciting, though it was horrid too, knowing that father and mother were so vexed and anne so miserable. we found the coachman just washing the carriage. we got into it, and poked into every corner, and shook out the rugs, and just did everything, even to looking on the front-door steps behind the scraper, and in the gutter, and shaking out the roll of carpet that had been laid down. for father is splendid at anything like that; he's so practical, and i think i take after him. (i don't know but what i'd like best of all to be a private detective when i grow up. i'll speak to father about it some day.) but all was no use, and when we came up to the drawing-room again there was mums in her crimson teagown, looking _so_ anxious. it went to my heart to have to shake my head, especially when poor anne came out of a corner looking like a dozen ghosts. still, we had rather a nice evening after all, though it seems odd. it was all thanks to father. he made us three come down to dinner with mums and him, 'to cheer your mother up a little,' he said, though i shouldn't have thought there was much cheering to be got out of anne. in reality i think he did it as much for anne's sake as for mums's. and hebe was very sweet to anne, for they don't _always_ get on so very well. hebe sometimes does elder sister too much, which is bad enough when one _is_ elder sister, but rather too bad when one _isn't_, even if it is the real elder sister's own fault. but to-night hebe sat close to anne, holding her hand under the table-cloth, and trying to make her eat some pudding. (it was chocolate pudding, i remember, and mother gave us each some.) and when dessert was on the table, and the servants had gone, father called anne to him, and put his arm round her. 'my dear little girl,' he said, 'you must try to leave off crying. it only makes mother more troubled. i can't deny that this loss _is_ a great vexation: it will annoy grandfather, and--well, there's no use telling you what you know already. but of course it isn't as bad as some troubles, and even though i'm afraid i can't deny that it has come through your fault, it isn't as bad as if your fault had been a worse one--unkindness, or untruthfulness, or some piece of selfishness.' anne hid her face on his shoulder, and sobbed and choked, and said something we couldn't hear. 'but still carelessness _is_ a great fault, and causes troubles without end,' father went on. 'and in this case it was meddlesomeness too. i do hope----' 'oh, father,' said anne, looking up, 'i know what you're going to say. yes, it _will_ be a lesson to me: you'll see. i shall be quite different, and ever so much more thoughtful and careful from now.' and of course she meant what she said. but father looked grave still. 'my dear child, don't be too confident. you won't find that you can cure yourself all at once. the force of bad habit is almost harder to overcome in small things than in great: it is so unconscious.' 'yes, father,' said anne. she understood what he said better than i did then; for she is really clever--much cleverer than i am about poetry and _thinking_ sort of cleverness, though i have such a good memory. so i remembered what father said, and now i understand it. after dinner we went up to the littlest drawing-room--the one mother wanted for so long to refurnish prettily. there was a fire, for it was only march, and mums sat in one of the big old armchairs close to it, and anne and hebe beside her. and father drew a chair to mums' writing-table, and wrote out several advertisements for the next morning's papers, which he sent off to the offices that very evening. some were in the next morning, and some weren't; but it didn't much matter, for none of them did any good. before he sent them he inquired of all the servants if they had looked everywhere he had told them to. 'there is just a chance of daylight showing it in some corner,' he said, when he had done all this, and come to sit down beside mums. 'i don't know that,' she said. 'this house is so dark by day. but, after all, the chance of its being here is very small.' 'yes,' father said, 'i have more hope in the advertisements.' 'and,' mother went on, her voice sounding almost as if she was going to cry--i believe she kept it back a good deal for anne's sake--'if--if they don't bring anything, what about telling your father, alan?' 'alan' is fathers name--'alan joachim,' and mine is 'joachim gerald.' father considered. 'we must wait a little. it will be a good while before i quite give up hopes of it. and there's no use in spoiling gran's time in ireland; for there's no doubt the news _would_ spoil it--he's the sort of person to fret tremendously over a thing of the kind.' 'i'm afraid he is,' said mother, and she sighed deeply. but hearing a faint sob from anne, father gave mother a tiny sign, and then he asked us if we'd like him to read aloud a little sort of fairy story he'd been writing for some magazine. of course we all said 'yes': we're very proud if ever he offers to read us anything, even though we mayn't understand it very well; but this time we did understand it--anne best of all, i expect. and when he had finished, it was time for us to go to bed. we had had, as i told you, rather an extra nice evening after all, and father had managed to make poor mums more cheerful and hopeful. it got worse again, however, the next day, when the hours went on, and there came no letter or telegram or anything about the lost treasure. for mother had got to feel almost sure the advertisements would bring some news of it. and father was very late of coming home. it was a dreadfully busy time for him just then. we were all in bed before he came in, both that night and the next i remember, for i know he looked in to say good-night to me, and to say he hoped we were all being as good as we could be to mums. i think we were, and to anne too, for we were nearly as sorry for her. i had never known her mind about anything so much, or for so long. serry began to be rather tired of it. 'it's so awfully dull to see anne going about with such a long face,' she said the second evening, when we were all sitting with mother. 'mums herself doesn't look half so gloomy. mums, do tell anne not to be so cross; it can't be as bad for her as for you.' 'you're very unkind, serry,' said maud, bristling up for anne; 'and, after all, i think you might feel a little sorry too. you joined anne in looking over all mother's things that night, you know you did, and you only laughed when i said you'd left them in a mess.' serry only laughed now. she tossed back her fluffy hair--it's a way of hers, and i must say she looks very pretty when she does it. 'it's not my nature to fuss about things,' she said. 'it wouldn't suit my name if i did; would it, mums? and you are such a little preacher, maud.' it _was_ funny to hear maud. it's funny still, for she looks such a mite, but two years ago it was even funnier. for she was only six and a half then, though she spoke just as well as she does now. i can't remember ever hearing maud talk babyishly. 'don't begin quarrelling about it, my dear children,' said mother. 'that certainly won't do any good. and, anne, you must just try to put it off your mind a little, as i am doing.' 'i _can't_,' said anne. 'i've never been so long sorry about anything in my life. i didn't know any one _could_ be. i dream about it all night, too--the most provoking dreams of finding it in all sorts of places. last night i dreamt i found it in my teacup, when i had finished drinking my tea, and it seemed so dreadfully _real_, you don't know. i could scarcely help thinking it would be in my cup this morning at breakfast.' 'oh,' said serena, 'that was why you were staring at the dregs so, and sighing so dolefully.' but anne didn't pay any attention to her. 'mother,' she said, 'you don't think it could _mean_ anything--my dream, i mean? could it be that we are to look all through the teacups in the pantry, for you know there were a great lot in the drawing-room that day, and it _might_ have dropped into one that wasn't used, and got put away without being washed.' mums smiled a little. 'i'm afraid that's wildly improbable,' she said; 'but if you like to go downstairs and tell barstow about your dream, you may. it may inspirit them all to go on looking, for i'm afraid they have given up hopes.' barstow is the butler. he's _very_ nice, and he was with father since he--i mean, father--was a baby; he's been always with gran, or what he calls 'in the family.' he's only got one fault, and that is, he can't keep a footman. we've just had _shoals_, and now father and mother say they really can't help it, and barstow must settle them for himself. since they've said that, the last two have stayed rather longer. but he's most exceedingly jolly to us. mums says he spoils us, but i don't think he does, for he's very particular. lots of footmen have been sent away because he didn't think they spoke properly for us to hear. he was terribly shocked one day when serry said something was 'like blazes,' and still worse when he caught me pretending to smoke. he was sure james or thomas had taught me, say what i would, and of course i was only humbugging. i think mums sent anne down to talk to old barstow a bit, partly to cheer her up. anne was away about ten minutes. when she came back she did look rather brighter, though she shook her head. she was holding a note in her hand. 'no,' she said; 'barstow was very nice, and he made alfred climb up to look at some cups on a high shelf that hadn't been used the drawing-room day--they'd just been brought up in case the others ran short. but there was nothing there. at least--look, mother,' she went on, holding out the letter. 'fancy, alfred found _this_ on the shelf. barstow is so angry, and alfred's dreadfully sorry, and i said i'd ask you to forgive him. it came that evening, when we were all in such a fuss, and he forgot to give it you. he was carrying down a tray and put the note on it, meaning to take it up to the drawing-room. and somehow it got among the extra cups.' mums took the note and began to open it. 'i haven't the heart to scold any one for being careless just now,' she said, and then she unfolded the letter and read it. 'i'm rather glad of this,' she said, looking up. 'and it is a good thing it was found, anne, otherwise mrs. liddell would have thought me very rude. it is from her to say that the dancing class begins again on--let me see--yes, it's to-morrow, saturday, and she wants to know how many of you are coming. it's to be at her house, like last year. i must send her a word at once.' mrs. liddell's house isn't far from ours, and it's very big. there's a room with no carpet on, where we dance. she likes to have the class at her house, because her children are awfully delicate, or, anyway, she thinks they are; and if it's the least cold or wet, she's afraid to let them go out. they come up to town early in the spring, and it suits very well for us to go to their class, as it's so near. we rather like it. there's more girls than boys, of course--a lot--but i don't mind, because there are two or three about my size, and one a bit bigger, though he's younger. we were not sorry to hear it was to begin again, and we all said to mums that she should let maud come too. maud had never been yet, and serry had only been one year. mums wasn't sure. dancing is rather expensive, you know, but she said she'd ask father. 'the class is to be every saturday afternoon, like last year,' she said. 'that will do very well.' 'but do persuade father to let maud come too,' we all said. it wasn't till afterwards that i thought to myself that i would look absurder than ever--the only boy to _four_ sisters! it was bad enough the year before with three. chapter iv at the dancing class it's funny to think what came of our going to that first dancing class. if anne hadn't run down to the pantry, the note wouldn't have been found--perhaps not for months, if ever. and though mrs. liddell would have written again the next week most likely, it wouldn't have been in time for us to go to the first class, and everything would have come different. we did go--all five of us. father was quite willing for maud to come too. i think he would have said yes to anything mother asked just then, he was so sorry for her; and he was beginning himself, as the days went on, to feel less hopeful about the diamond ornament being found. and you see mums couldn't put it off her mind, as she kept telling anne _she_ should do, for it was quite dreadful to her to think of grandfather's having to hear about it. she was so really sorry for him to be vexed, for she had thought it so kind of him to lend it to her. there were several children we knew at the dancing class. some, like the little liddells themselves, that we hadn't seen for a good long while, as they always stayed in the country till after christmas, and some that we didn't know as friends, only just at the dancing, you see. it was rather fun. we always found time for a good deal of talking and laughing between the exercises and the dances, for they took us in turns--the little ones, like serena and maud, who were just beginning, and the older ones who could dance pretty well, and one or two dances at the end for the biggest of all or the furthest on ones. anne and hebe were among these, but hebe danced much better than anne. most of the exercises and the marching we did all together. and the mammas or governesses sat at the other end of the room from all of us. there were some children there called barry that we didn't know except meeting them there. but i was glad to see them again, because two of them were boys, one a little older and the other a little younger than me. and they had a sister who was a twin to the younger one. they were nice children, and i liked talking to them, and the girl--her name was flossy--was nice to dance with. i could manage much better with her than with our girls somehow. they put me to dance the polka with flossy. she's not at all a shy girl, and i'm not shy either, so we talked a good deal between times, and after the polka was done we sat down beside anne and hebe, and i went on talking. i was telling flossy about losing the diamond thing, and she was _so_ interested. it wasn't a secret, you see. father said the more we told it the better; there was no saying how it might be traced through talking about it. only i was sorry for anne. i had rather forgotten about her when i begun about it to flossy, and i hadn't told about anne's having meddled with the pin; and when flossy went on talking, i felt as if anne would think me unkind. but anne's not like that. she only sat looking very grave, and when i had answered flossy's questions, she just said-[illustration: 'i'd give anything, i'd almost give myself, to find it.'--c. iv. p. 48.] 'isn't it dreadful to have lost it? i'd give anything, i'd almost give myself, to find it.' that's the queer sort of way anne talks sometimes when she's very tremendously in earnest. flossy looked rather surprised. 'what a funny girl you are,' she said. 'i don't think your mother would agree to give _you_, even to get back her brooch! but, do you know, there's something running in my head about losings and findings that i've been hearing. what can it be? oh yes; it was some of our cousins yesterday-ludo,' and she called her brother, the twin one, 'ludo, do you remember what the little nearns were telling us, about something they'd found?' 'it wasn't they that found it. it was lying on their doorstep the day of the drawing-room; they'd had a party, and it must have dropped off some lady's dress. but their mother had sent to all the ladies that had been there, and it wasn't theirs.' anne was listening so eagerly that her eyes almost looked as if they were going to jump out of her head. 'what is it like--the brooch, i mean--didn't you say it was a brooch?' she asked in a panting sort of voice. ludovic barry stared at her. 'it's because they've lost one,' said flossy quickly, 'at least their mother has, and they would give anything to find it. it's a--i forget the word--a family treasure, you know.' 'an heirloom,' i said. 'yes, that's the worst of it. but, anne, don't look so wild about it,' i went on, laughingly. 'what is the brooch like, that your cousins have found? is it diamonds?' i went on to the barrys. 'i think so,' said ludo. 'it's some kind of jewels. but the nearns are quite small children; they wouldn't know, and i don't suppose they've seen it. they'd only heard their mother and the servants talking about it. we can easily find out, though. i'll run round there--they live in our square--when we go home.' 'no, ludo, i'm afraid you can't, for mamma heard this morning that----' at that very moment we were interrupted by another dance beginning. and when it was over it was time for us all to go. flossy barry didn't finish her sentence. i saw her saying something to her brother, and then she came up to us. 'i'll find out about the found brooch,' she said. 'i won't forget. and if it's the least likely to be yours, i'll ask mamma to write to your mamma. that'll be the best.' 'thank you,' i said. she was a nice, kind little girl, and i was sure she wouldn't forget. but anne looked disappointed. 'i don't see why she tried to stop her brother going about it at once,' she said. 'perhaps there was some reason,' i said. 'and anne, if i were you, i wouldn't say anything about it to mums. raising her hopes, you know, very likely for nothing, for it's such a _chance_ that it's our brooch--ours has been advertised so, these people would have seen the notices.' anne did not answer. flossy had a reason, and a good one, for what she said to her brother. but she had been told not to speak of what her mother had heard, as mrs. barry said it was not certain. the 'it' was that these little cousins of theirs had got the whooping-cough, or rather lady nearn, their mother, was afraid they had, and so she had told the barrys they mustn't come to the house. of course we only heard all that afterwards. we walked home from the dancing with miss stirling. she came with us sometimes, and sometimes mother, and now and then only nurse. for as the class was on saturday afternoon, it wouldn't have done for miss stirling always to take us, as it was giving up part of her holiday. that first day mother was busy or engaged, otherwise she would have come herself. it was getting dusk already as we went home; it was a dull afternoon, looking as if it was going to rain. 'i do hope it's not going to be wet to-morrow,' said hebe. 'i like it to be fine on sunday.' anne started at this. she had been walking very silently, scarcely talking at all. 'is to-morrow sunday?' she said. 'i'd quite forgotten. oh, i do wish it wasn't. there's no post on sunday, you know, jack.' she was next me, and i don't think any one else heard what she said. 'what do you mean?' i said. 'there's never any post on sunday in london. what does it matter?' 'about the brooch, of course,' she answered. 'you see, if flossy tells her mother what we said, and they send to find out, _perhaps_ mrs. barry would write to mums to-night; and if it wasn't sunday, the letter would come to-morrow morning.' i felt quite provoked with her. 'anne,' i said, and i daresay i spoke rather crossly, 'you're really silly. it's just as unlikely as it can be that it's mums' thing, and you'd much better put out of your head that it could be. you'll get yourself into a fidget, and then mums will think there's something new the matter, and----' 'i'm not going to tell her anything about it, i've said so already,' interrupted anne, rather crossly too. 'i'm always being told to put things out of my head now; it would have been better if they hadn't been so much put _in_ my head. i wouldn't have been half so miserable all this time if you hadn't all gone on so about it's being my fault that the horrid thing was lost,' and she gave a little sob, half of anger, half of unhappiness. i was very sorry for her, and i was vexed with myself for having begun about it at the dancing class just when anne might have forgotten it a little. 'if--just _supposing_ mrs. barry thought it was it, she'd very likely send a note round to say; rodney square is quite near us,' said hebe, who always thought of something cheering to say. 'rodney square,' anne repeated, 'yes, that's close to here.' for by this time we were almost at our own house. miss stirling said good-bye to us as soon as the door was opened, and we all five went in together. mother was out; we knew she was, but yet it seemed rather dull to be told she hadn't come in. i always think it's dreadfully dull to come home and find one's mother out. i didn't go upstairs. i had some lessons to finish, though it was saturday afternoon, and so had hebe, because you see we'd been longer at the dancing than if we'd just gone a walk. so we two went straight into the schoolroom, and hebe took off her hat and jacket and put them down on a chair. the other three went on upstairs, and we didn't think any more about them. what happened when they got up to the nursery we heard afterwards. nurse was not there, and the room was rather dark. 'why isn't the gas lighted?' said maud. 'it looks so dull,' and she ran out of the room and down the passage to nurse's own room, calling out, 'nurse, nurse, where are you? we've come in.' maud was very fond of nurse, and of course being the youngest she was nurse's pet. she's married now--our old nurse, i mean. she left us last christmas, and we've got a schoolroom-maid instead, who doesn't pet maud at all of course, but i don't think maud minds. 'nurse, where are you?' she called out. nurse was in her room; she had a fire, and she was ironing some things. 'come in here, dearie,' she answered. 'i didn't think it was so late. i'll have done in a moment, and then i'll light the gas and see about tea.' so maud went in to nurse's room and began telling her about the dancing. and thus anne and serena were left by themselves in the half-dark nursery. anne stood staring in the fire for a minute without speaking. all this, you understand, they told us afterwards. 'won't you come and take your things off, anne?' said serry. but, instead of answering, anne asked her another question. 'do you know the number of the barrys' house in rodney square?' it was. 'no,' said serena. 'but i know the house. it is a corner one, and it has blue and white flower-boxes. what do you want to know about it for?' anne looked round--no, there was no sign of nurse; she and serena were alone. 'serry,' she said in a whisper, 'i've thought of something,' and then she went on to tell serry what it was. that's all i'll tell just now; the rest will come soon. till you try, you've no idea how difficult it is to tell a story--or even not a regular story, just an account of simple things that really happened--at all properly. the bits of it get so mixed. it's like a tangle of thread--the ends you don't want keep coming up the wrong way, and putting themselves in front of the others. i must just go on as well as i can, and put down the things as straight as they'll come. well, hebe and i had about finished the lessons we wanted to get done. it was partly that monday was going to be mother's birthday, and we wanted to have a clear evening. hebe and i always agree about things like that; we like to look forward and arrange comfortably. well, we had just about finished, and i was getting up to begin putting away the books, when the door opened and nurse came in looking just the least little bit vexed. for she is good-natured. she glanced round the room before she spoke, as if she was looking for some one not there. 'the child's right,' she said, as if speaking to herself. 'i must say she generally is. master jack,' she went on, 'and miss hebe, my dears, tea's ready. but where are miss warwick and miss serry?' we stared. 'anne and serry,' i said. 'i'm sure i don't know. upstairs, i suppose. they went straight up with maudie when we came in, ever so long ago.' 'but indeed they're not upstairs,' said nurse, her face growing very uneasy. 'that's what miss maud said too. she saw them go into the nursery when she ran along to my room. but they are not there, nor in any of the bedrooms; i've looked everywhere, and called too.' 'they may be reading in the little drawing-room,' i said, and both hebe and i jumped up to go and help nurse in her search. she had not thought of the drawing-room, knowing mother had not come in. 'have they taken off their hats and jackets?' asked hebe. nurse shook her head. 'i've not seen them anywhere about, and miss anne and miss serry are not young ladies that ever think of putting away their out-door things as you do sometimes, miss hebe.' hebe hung back a little. we were following nurse upstairs. 'jack,' she whispered,'do you know, while you and i were busy in the schoolroom, i am sure i heard the front door shut. i hadn't heard the bell ring, and i wondered for a moment why alfred was opening when no one had rung. but, you see, it may have been some one going out. jack, _do_ you think anne and serry can have gone out by themselves?' 'they'd never do such a thing,' i said. 'why, it's almost quite dark, and they know mother would be really very angry if they did!' but hebe did not seem satisfied. 'the door was shut _very_ softly,' she said. we were at the drawing-room by this time. there was no light in the two big rooms, but there were two lamps in the little one where mums sits when she's alone. no sign of anne or serena, however. and no sign of them in the other rooms either. alfred brought up a candle, and we called to them to come out if they were hiding, and said we were really frightened; but there was no answer. 'they can't be there,' said nurse; 'miss anne has far too kind a heart not to come out, even if they had begun by playing a trick on me. come up to the nursery, my dears, and have your tea. i'll go down and speak to mr. barstow. maybe he can throw some light on it.' 'they must have gone out, nurse,' i said boldly. there was no use not telling her all we knew. she turned upon me quite sharply. '_gone out_, master jack? nonsense, miss anne is far too good and obedient to do such a wild thing, knowing how it would displease your dear mamma too.' but maud, whom we met on the staircase, suddenly thought of an explanation of the mystery. 'come in here,' she said, pulling us all three into the nursery and closing the door. 'listen, i do believe i know where they've gone. it's about the diamond brooch. i believe anne's gone to those children's house where they've found a brooch that might be it.' hebe and i jumped. 'i believe you're right, maud,' i said. 'how stupid of us not to have thought of it!' exclaimed hebe. but nurse, of course, only stared. then we explained to her what maud meant. even then she could scarcely believe anne had really done such a thing. 'it would have been so much better to wait till your mamma came in,' she said. 'alfred could have been sent with a note in a minute.' 'anne didn't want mother to know about it. at least, i said to her it would be a pity to raise mother's hopes, and it was all nicely settled that flossy barry was to find out and ask her mother to write if it seemed possible it _was_ our diamond thing,' i said. 'it is all anne's impatience, and you see, nurse, she knew she shouldn't have gone alone with serry, or she wouldn't have crept out that way without telling any one.' 'i don't know how they can have gone to those people's house,' said hebe. 'i'm not even sure of the name, though i heard it, and i've a better memory than anne. i only know it's in rodney square.' 'they'll have gone to flossy barry's to ask for the redress,' said maud. we couldn't help smiling; it is so funny when maud says words wrong, for she is so wonderfully clever and sensible. 'yes,' exclaimed hebe. 'i'm sure they'll have done that. maud always thinks of the right thing.' but what were _we_ to do? every moment we hoped to hear the front-door bell ring, followed by our sisters' pattering steps running upstairs. we didn't seem to care much about the diamond brooch. even if i had heard anne's voice calling out, 'it _is_ it. we've got it!' i think my first words would have been, 'oh, anne, how _could_ you go out and frighten us so?' and of course, even if it had been the brooch, they would never have given it to two children to bring back. mums would have had to vow it was hers, and all sorts of fuss, i daresay. nurse poured out our three cups of tea. she was very sensible; i think she wanted to stop us getting too excited, though she told me afterwards she had been as frightened as frightened: it had been all she could do to keep quiet and not go off just as she was to look for them. 'i'll just go down and have a word with mr. barstow,' she said. 'i daresay he'll send round to mrs. barry's to see if the young ladies have been there, as miss maudie says, dear child. we'll find mrs. barry's number in the red book. and you don't know the other family's name?' 'it's a lady something,' said hebe. 'not mrs., and not lady mary or lady catharine, but lady ---the name straight off.' 'that won't help so very much, i'm afraid,' said nurse. 'not in rodney square. but they'll be sure to know the name at mrs. barry's. i shouldn't wonder if mr. barstow steps round himself. now go on with your tea, my dears, while i go downstairs for a minute. of course there's nothing at all to be really frightened about.' we pretended to go on with our tea, but we were very unhappy. chapter v rodney square it seemed a long time till nurse came back again. we had finished our tea--it was really rather a pretence one, as i said--when we thought we heard her coming upstairs, and ran out to meet her. it was her: she was coming up the big front staircase, for she still, as she told me afterwards, had a half-silly idea that _perhaps_ the two girls were still hiding somewhere in the drawing-rooms, and might be going to jump out to surprise her. when we looked over the balusters and saw it was nurse, we ran down to the first landing towards her. 'mr. barstow has gone himself,' she said. 'we've been looking out rodney square in the red book; we found mr. barry's--it's no. 37--fast enough, but we can't say which is the other lady's, as you've no idea of the name. there's ever so many might do for it; the very next door is a sir herbert mortimer's.' 'no, it was a short name, i'm sure of that. aren't you, hebe?' i said. 'now, my dears, why didn't you say so before?' said nurse. 'a short name would have been some guide.' 'but it was far the best to go straight to the barrys,' said maud, which was certainly quite true. just then the front bell rang. 'oh,' said nurse, 'if only it could be the young ladies before your mamma comes in!' but no, it was not anne and serena. it was mums herself. she seemed to know by instinct that there was something wrong. she glanced up and saw our heads all looking over the railing. 'what is it?' she said. 'are you all there, dears?' nurse and we three looked at each other. it was no use hiding it. so we went on downstairs to the hall. 'it's nothing really wrong, mums, darling,' i said. 'it's only----' but nurse interrupted me. 'it's miss warwick and miss serena, ma'am, haven't come in yet,' she said. 'we hoped it was them when the bell rang.' mother looked bewildered. 'anne and serry,' she said. 'what do you mean? didn't they go to the dancing with the rest of you?' 'yes, of course; they've been in since then,' said hebe. 'miss stirling brought us all to the door. but they've gone out again, we're afraid;' and seeing mother looking more and more puzzled, she turned to maud. 'you tell mums, maud,' she said. 'you know most.' mother sat down on a chair in the hall. she seemed quite shaky and frightened. nurse ran off to get a glass of water, and maud told her all we knew or guessed in her quiet little particular way. she told _all_--about the ornament that had been found, and everything--it was no use hiding anything. 'oh,' said poor mums at the end, 'i do wish gran had never thought of lending me his diamonds,' and she gave a great sigh. 'but after all,' she went on, 'i don't think we need be very frightened, though it was exceedingly, really _very_ wrong of anne to go, whatever her motive was. i only hope the barrys sent some one with them to these cousins of theirs; they must have thought it extraordinary for two little girls to be out alone so late.' still, on the whole, she did not seem so very frightened now. she drank the water nurse brought, and went into the library, where the lamp was lit, and the fire burning cheerfully. 'barstow will be back immediately, no doubt?' she said to nurse. 'he'll be as quick as he can, i'm sure,' said nurse. 'but perhaps--if he has gone on to the other house--it may be some little time.' at that moment, however, we heard the area bell ring, and almost immediately barstow appeared. his face was rather red, and he seemed out of breath--poor barstow is getting pretty fat. 'are they back?' he exclaimed. then seeing mother, 'i beg your pardon, ma'am. i just ran in to see if the young ladies were returned, for they've not been at mrs. barry's--no one there has heard anything of them. i got the address of the other lady's--lady nearn's----' 'oh yes,' hebe and i interrupted; 'that's the name.' ----'just in case,' barstow continued, 'they hadn't come in. but i really begin to think we're on the wrong tack. perhaps miss anne has only gone to some shop, and it seemed making such a hue and cry to go round to _another_ house, and not of our own acquaintances, you see, ma'am,' he went on, 'and asking for the young ladies. i quite hoped to find they were home.' mother considered. she kept her presence of mind, but i could see she was growing really frightened. 'could they have gone to get cakes for tea, for a surprise,' she said suddenly, 'and have lost their way coming back? there's that german shop in ---street, where there are such nice cakes.' it was possible, but after all ---street was not very far off, and anne had sense enough to ask the way. and as the minutes went on, and no ring came to the bell, we all looked at each other in increasing trouble. 'you'd better go to lady nearn's, barstow,' said mums at last, 'though it seems such a mere chance. how could they have known what house it was, scarcely having heard the name, and certainly not having been told the number!' that was what we all thought. but barstow was off--like a shot, i was going to say, but it wouldn't be a very good description,--as like a shot as a stout elderly butler _could_ be, we'll say. and poor mums began walking up and down the room, squeezing her hands together in a way she has when she's awfully worried. 'if only alan were at home,' i heard her say. 'oh dear! is it a punishment to me for having made too much of the loss of that unlucky brooch? it would seem less, far less than nothing, in comparison with any harm to the children. oh, if only anne were less thoughtless and impulsive, what a comfort it would be!' and i must say, when i saw the poor, dear little thing-i can't help calling mums a little thing sometimes, though of course she's twice as tall as i am, but she's so sweet and soft, and seems to need to be taken care of--when i saw her, i say, so dreadfully upset, it was all i could do not to feel _very_ angry with anne; and yet, you understand, till i could see with my own eyes that she and serry were all right, i didn't _dare_ to feel angry. and all sorts of things began to come into my head, and i am sure they were in mother's already. the one that seemed the plainest was that they had been run over: the streets are not at all well lighted about where we live; there are no shops, and the london gas is horribly dull. still, it wasn't likely that they'd both been run over and hurt so badly that they couldn't speak to tell who they were or where they lived. there was some comfort in that. but-i looked at the library clock, which always keeps good time: father sees to it himself--it was getting on for two hours since they had been out! where _could_ they be? suddenly there came a ring at the bell--rather a sharp ring--and as alfred flew to open the door, we heard the sort of little bustle that there always is if it is a carriage or cab arriving--tiny clickings of the harness and the coachman's voice. yes, it was a carriage. we ran out into the hall and saw a footman in a buff greatcoat standing on the steps, up which came two little dark figures, who ran in past him. then the door was shut, the carriage drove off, and we saw that it was anne and serry. 'oh, children! oh, anne!' cried mother. 'where _have_ you been?' and we all called out in different voice, '_oh_, anne! _oh_, serry!' but before she said anything else anne rushed up to mother. 'oh, mums, it _wasn't_ it after all. it was a star with a pearl in the middle. i was _so_ disappointed!' that shows how silly anne is. she had planned, you know, to say nothing about it to mother, and then she bursts out as if mums had sent her to find out about it! indeed, for that matter, it was only thanks to clever little maud that any of us knew where they had been, or had any idea rather. for as to _knowing_, we had not known; we had only guessed. 'then you _were_ there, after all,' said maud. 'i thought so.' 'but how did you get the address without going to the barrys for it?' said hebe. 'we sent there. barstow went himself. oh, anne, you have frightened us so, especially poor darling mums!' then at last anne and serry began to look rather ashamed of themselves. mother, after the first exclamation, had not spoken. she went back into the library, looking whiter than before almost, and i felt too disgusted with anne's thoughtlessness to ask any questions. still, i _was_ very curious to know all about it, and so were we all. anne followed mums into the library--she was really frightened by this time, i think. 'tell me all about it,' said mother. so they did--anne first, of course, and serena putting in her word now and then. it was just as we had thought about the first part of it. they had gone to find out about the brooch. rodney square wasn't far off, and anne was sure she knew the way there, and would be back directly. but after all, it wasn't so easy to find as she expected. it makes a great difference when it's dark--the turnings are so like each other, especially where there are no shops. they did get to rodney square at last, but they must have gone a very roundabout way, and when they _were_ there, there was a new difficulty: they knew the barrys' house by sight, or they thought they did, but they didn't know the number, only that it was a corner one. they came to one corner, one that looked something like it, and anne thought they'd better try. so they went up the steps and rang the bell, and a footman opened. 'does mrs. barry live here?' asked anne. 'no,' he said,' that's not our name.' but he must have been good-natured, for he went on to say he'd get the red book if they liked, and look for it. 'bury--was that the name?' he said when he had got the book. '_barry_,' anne was just going to say, when a new thought struck her. it was no good going to two houses when she might get the information she wanted at one. 'it isn't really mrs. barry's house i need,' she said. 'i was only going to ask there for another address--lady nern, or some name like that.' 'oh,' said the man, 'lady nearn's!--that's next door, miss. i don't need to look it up.' they thanked him and set off again, thinking they had been very lucky, though _i_ thought if anne had remembered the name as close as that, she might have looked it up in our own red book at home before starting. they rang again next door, and again a footman opened; but he wasn't so good-natured as the other, and he was stupid too. 'is lady nearn at home? can i see her?' asked anne quite coolly. anne is as cool as anything when she's full of some idea. nothing puts her out or frightens her. it was rather dark, and of course no one expects little _ladies_ to be walking about alone so late. so it wasn't much wonder the man thought they were errand girls, or beggars of some kind possibly. 'no,' he said, 'my lady's not at home; and if she was she wouldn't be to no tiresome children like you.' (we made anne and serry tell us exactly all that was said.) 'she leaves word if she's expecting any of her school brats, but she's said nothing this time, so it's no use your teasing.' if _i'd_ been anne i'd have been in a fury, but serry said she didn't seem to mind. 'oh, please,' she said, 'we're not school-children, and we've come about something very particular indeed. don't you think lady nearn will be in soon?' that was anne all over. she'd no intention of giving up now she had got so far. i suppose the footman heard by her voice that she wasn't a common child. 'can't you leave a message?' he said rather more civilly. 'no,' said anne. 'it's something i must see lady nearn herself about.' she had the sense not to speak of the found ornament to him. of course it would have been no use, as lady nearn wouldn't have left it with a servant. 'we're friends of--at least we know mrs. barry's children,' anne went on. 'can't you let us come in and wait, if lady nearn will be in soon?' for it was very chilly on the doorstep, and indeed both anne and serry were very tired by this time--coming straight from the dancing, and losing their way to rodney square, and it being past tea-time and all. the footman seemed to consider. 'step inside,' he said at last; 'i'll see what--somebody--says,' they didn't catch the name. it wasn't nearly such a grand house as the one next door. the hall was quite small, and there was no fireplace in it. 'you can take a seat,' said the man, and he went off. 'somebody' must have taken a good while to find, for he didn't come back for ever so long. i suppose once he saw them in the light, he was satisfied they weren't beggars or anything like that. they were glad to sit down, and it felt warm in the hall compared to outside. there was a door close to where they were. it was one of those houses that have the dining-room at the back and the library to the front, you know, and the door was the library door. [illustration: 'the door opened a little wider, and two faces appeared.'--c. v. p. 74.] after a moment it opened, very slowly and softly, and some one peeped out; then anne and serena heard some whispering, and the door opened a little wider, and two faces appeared. it was two children--a boy and a girl, though their heads looked much the same, as they had both short, dark, curly hair, and they both wore sailor tops. they gradually opened the door still more till they could be seen quite well. they were about six or seven, and they stood smiling at the girls, half shy and half pleased. 'won't you come in here?' said one of them. 'it must be so cold out there. we're having tea in here all by ourselves. it's such fun.' 'we're to stay here till mamma comes home,' said the other. 'we've been by ourselves all day, because lilly and tom are ill--we mustn't be in the nursery to disturb them.' anne and serry walked in. 'they didn't see why they shouldn't,' said serry, and these dear little children were so kind and polite. they handed them the cake and bread-and-butter, and they would have given them tea, only they hadn't cups enough, and they didn't seem quite sure about ringing for more. george, the footman, was rather cross sometimes, they said. but it wasn't often he was so rude as to leave any one in the cold hall. they'd tell mamma when she came in. she did come in very soon. the bell rang, and the children ran to the door to peep out, and when lady nearn hurried in, there she found the four as happy as could be--anne and serry so amused by the children that they had quite forgotten all about how frightened nurse and all of us would be getting; indeed, they'd almost forgotten what they had come to this strange house about at all. lady nearn did look astonished. for half a minute she took serena for flossy barry. 'flossy,' she said, 'i wrote to your----' but then she stopped, and just stared in surprise. anne had got back her wits by then, and she explained it all--how it was partly, anyway, her fault about the brooch being lost, and how pleased she'd be to find it, and all about what flossy had told them, and how she and serry had come off by themselves, not even knowing the name, or the number of the house. lady nearn was very kind, but i don't think she quite took in that it was really naughty of them to have come out without leave. you see, anne hadn't got to think it naughty herself, yet. she fetched the brooch just to show anne--though, indeed, from the way anne spoke of it, she was sure it wasn't it, and of course it wasn't! anne could nearly have cried with disappointment. then it did strike lady nearn to ask how they were going home again. it was quite dark by now. she couldn't send a servant with them, for the house was rather upset--three of the children were ill. 'indeed,' she said, 'i must write to mrs. warwick to explain. i hope no harm will come of it, as you have only seen the twins, who are quite well, so far, and separated from the others.' but all the same she seemed anxious to get them away, and she suddenly rang the bell and told george--who must have looked rather astonished to see the 'school brats' such friends with his mistress--to run round to the stables and tell the coachman to call at the house on his way to fetch lord nearn from somewhere or other. that was how anne and serry came home in a carriage. we didn't hear the whole ins and outs of the story at once, but we made the girls tell it us over afterwards. just now anne could hardly get through with it; for she began crying when she understood how frightened mums had been, and begging her to forgive her. mums did, of course--she always does. and then she sent us upstairs to finish our tea. but as we left the library i heard her say to herself-'i wonder what lady nearn can be going to write to me about.' serena was quite jolly, and as hungry as anything. 'all's well that ends well,' she said, tossing her hair. anne turned upon her pretty sharply. i wasn't sorry. 'serry,' she said, 'i know you're not to blame like me, for i made you come. but you might see now how wrong it was, as i do. and "ends well" indeed! why, we've given mums and all of them a dreadful fright, and we haven't found the brooch.' and--but i must tell that in a new chapter. no, it wasn't 'ends well' _yet_, by a long way. 'if only you'd asked _me_, anne,' said miss maud wisdom. chapter vi the valley of the shadow i was alone with mums in her room the next morning when her letters were brought up. the poor little thing had a headache and was very tired, and, for once, she hadn't got up to breakfast. she had not been able to go to sleep the night before--really she had had a lot of worries lately--and then when she did, it was so nearly morning that she slept on ever so much longer than usual. for she's not a bit lazy, like some mothers i know. when she _does_ have breakfast in bed, she lets me look after her. it's awfully jolly. father is sure to say as he goes off, 'you'll see to your mother, jack.' the girls don't mind. anne wouldn't be much good at anything like that--at least, she wouldn't have been _then_, though she's ever so much better _now_ about forgetting things, and spilling things, and seeming as if all her fingers were thumbs, you know. hebe is very handy, and she always was. but she never put herself before anne, and so we got in the way of me being the one to do most for mums. i told you at the beginning--didn't i?--that some people might think me rather a girl-y boy, but i don't mind one scrap of an atom if they do. i have my own ideas. i know the splendidest cricketer and footballer you ever saw is a fellow whose sister's a cripple, and she can't bear any one to lift her but him, because he's so gentle. and i've seen a young doctor in our village doing up a baby that was burnt nearly to death, as if _his_ fingers were fairy's, and afterwards i heard that he'd been the bravest of the brave in some awful battles in burmah, or somewhere like that. indeed, he got so wounded with cutting in to carry out the men as they dropped--it was what they call a skirmish, i think, not a proper battle where they have ambulances and carrying people and everything ready, i suppose--that he's had to leave off being a soldier-doctor for good. and now that the girls know it can't be for long, except in holidays, that i can look after mums, they're very good about letting me be with her as much as i can. and i've got them into pretty good ways. i don't think she'll miss me so _very_ much when i go. well, i settled the breakfast tray with rowley, and nothing was forgotten. i let rowley carry it up, because i knew it was safer for her to do it, and there's no sense in bragging you're bigger than you are, and can carry things that need long arms when you know you can't. but i walked beside her, opening the doors and watching that the things didn't slide about; that's how i always do. and then when the tray was safe on the bed, and i had arranged the 'courses,' first the roll and butter and ham and egg--i cracked the top of the egg and got it ready--and then the muffin and marmalade, my nice time began. i squatted at the foot of the bed, near enough to reach mums anything she wanted, and then we talked. we talk of lots of things when we're alone like that. mums tells me of anything that's on her mind, and i comfort her up a bit. of course we talked about the unlucky brooch, and about anne, and how easily she and serry might have been run over, or something like that. 'yes, indeed,' said mums, 'i often think we're not half thankful enough for the misfortunes that _don't_ happen.' just then there came a knock at the door. 'bother!' thought i. i don't think i _said_ it, for mums thinks it's such an ugly word. it was rowley again. 'your letters, ma'am,' she said. 'they were forgotten when i brought up the tray.' there were only three. two were nothing particular--accounts or something. but the third was in a strange handwriting, and mums opened it quickly. 'it's from lady nearn,' she said. 'i think it was rather me to write to her. it's very kind of her, but----' she began reading it, and her face got very grave. 'do leave it till you've finished your breakfast, mums,' i said. 'you've not even finished the first course.' but she scarcely listened to me. 'oh, jack!' she said, 'i'm afraid we haven't got to the end of the troubles caused by poor gran's diamonds yet. oh dear, i shall be so uneasy for some days to come!' i couldn't make out what she meant, and when she saw my puzzled face she went on to explain. lady nearn's letter was very kind, but she thought it right to tell mother that anne and serena had run into some risk by coming to her house the night before, for it was quite decided that three of her children had got whooping-cough. not the two they had seen; at least she still _hoped_ they--the twins--wouldn't get it, for they were very delicate, and they had been separated from the others. but still there was no telling how infection might be caught, and she advised mother to be prepared for her little girls having perhaps got the illness. mums did look worried. 'it's a most tiresome and trying thing,' she said; 'and neither hebe nor maud is very strong. perhaps i shouldn't have told you, jack. you must be sure not to speak of it to any of them.' i promised, of course. and then poor mums, instead of having a nice rest, declared she must get up at once, and go off to catch the doctor before he went out. wasn't it too bad? she wanted to know what to do--whether it was any good trying to separate anne and serry from the rest of us, and how soon it would show, and a lot of things like that. for mother was an only child herself, and she always says she isn't at all experienced about children. she's had to learn everything by us, you see. well, she did catch the doctor, and came back looking rather jollier. he had comforted her up. there were ten chances to one against the girls having got it, he said; and as for separating them, now they had been with us all, it would be nonsense. ah, well! doctors don't know everything. _i'd_ have separated them fast enough, i know; and it would have been a good punishment for anne and serena to have been shut up for a day or two; perhaps it would have made them think twice before doing some wild, silly thing again. so mums and i kept our own counsel. she told father, of course, but no one else, not even nurse--it would only have made her nervous. we sent round once or twice to ask how the little nearns were--mums wrote notes, i think, as she didn't want the servants chattering. and we were very sorry to hear that the poor twins had got it after all, and rather badly. 'so you see, jack,' said mother, 'it wasn't any good separating them. dr. marshall must know.' i think this was rather a comfort to her. if the doctor had been right about one thing, there was more chance of his being right about another. and for two or three days we all kept quite well, and mother began to breathe freely. but, alas! i think it was about the fourth morning after that evening, when i ran into the nursery on my way down to prayers, i found mother there, talking to nurse. mother looked very grave, much worse than nurse, who didn't seem particularly put out. 'it's only a cold, ma'am, i'm sure,' she was saying. 'a cold soon makes a child feverish and heavy. i don't think, indeed, there's any need for the doctor; but it's just as you like, of course.' then 'it' had come. poor mums! i stole up to her and slipped my hand into hers. i understood, though nurse didn't. it was rather nice to feel that i was mother's sort of confi---i'm not sure of the word. but who was it that was ill? my heart did go down when i heard it was not anne or serry--really, i think i'd have said they deserved it--but poor old maudie! sensible, good little maud, who never did naughty, silly things, or teased anybody. it did seem too bad. 'may i run in to see her?' i asked. nurse would have said, 'yes, of course, master jack,' in a moment, but mother shook her head. 'not till dr. marshall has been, dear,' she said; and she gave my hand a little squeeze. i'm afraid she began to wish she had separated the girls after all. i could see that nurse thought mums very funny, as she went on asking ever so many questions about maud--above all, was she coughing? 'a little,' said nurse; 'rather a croupy, odd-sounding sort of cough.' but she was too old for croup, of course. it was just cold. 'i must go down to prayers now,' said mother. 'i will come up immediately after breakfast, and i will send for dr. marshall. i am sure it will be best.' just then there came the sound of a cough from maud's room--a queer, croaky sort of cough--and we heard the poor little thing call out-'oh, mums, is that you? do come to see me. i does feel so funny.' 'yes, darling, i will come very soon,' said mother. it was so queer to hear maudie talking babyishly--she always did if she was at all ill. as we went downstairs i was sure mums was crying a little. well, that was the beginning of it all. when the doctor came, of course he looked very owly, and said he couldn't say for a day or two; and pretended to be jolly, and told mother she wasn't to be so silly, and all that kind of talk. but after his 'day or two'--no, indeed, before they were over--he had to allow there was some cause for grave looks. for by then they'd _all_ got it--all except me! just fancy, all four of them! the nursery was like a menagerie, for no sooner did one cough than all the others started too, and they all coughed different ways. if it hadn't been really horrid it would have been rather absurd--something like the mumps, you know. it's _all_ you can do not to laugh at each other when you've got the mumps. i'll never forget serry's face,--never, as long as i live, and she's the prettiest of us, i suppose. i saw my own once in the glass, but i wouldn't look again. and yet it's awfully horrid. it hurts--my goodness! doesn't it just? there was no good separating _me_. i made mums see that, and i promised her i'd do my very best not to get the whooping-cough; and i didn't! that was something to be proud of, now, wasn't it? you mightn't think so, but it was; for i really believe i stopped myself having it. ever so often, when i heard them all crowing and choking, and holding on to the table, and scolding--how serry did scold sometimes--over it, i felt as if i was going to start coughing and whooping too-i did, i give you my word. but i just _wouldn't_. i said to myself it was all fancy and nonsense--though i don't a bit believe it was--and i drank some water, and got all right again. and after a week or two, the catchy feeling in my throat went off. it was a good thing i kept well, for mums did need some comfort. the worst of it didn't come for a good while--that's the tiresome part of the whooping-cough, you never know where you are with it, it lasts such a time; and when you think it's about over, very often you find children have got some other illness from it--i mean something the matter with their chests or throats, or bothers like that. it was maud that got it first, and seemed the worst for a good while; but then she took a turn and got hungry again, and the doctor began to speak of our soon going away somewhere for change of air; and we were getting jollier, and mums looking less worried, when all at once hebe got very bad indeed. it was partly her own fault, though she hadn't meant it. she had been feeling very ill indeed, but she didn't like to say so, for she thought most likely the others felt just as bad, and you know she's dreadfully unselfish. often and often she'd get up in the middle of the night if serry called out she was thirsty or anything--very often it was only that she fancied the clothes were slipping off, or some nonsense like that--and hebe may have caught cold by that. anyway, there came one morning that poor hebe couldn't get up at all; indeed, she could scarcely speak. we all ran in to see what was the matter, and she just smiled a tiny little smile, and put out her poor little hand--it was burning hot--and whispered, 'i daresay i'll be better soon.' nurse was frightened; but she's very good and sensible. she just told me to go down to mother's room and ask her to come up, as hebe had had a bad night, and perhaps we'd better send for the doctor to come early. and, of course, i knew how to do it without startling mums more than could be helped. all the same, if she had been dreadfully startled it couldn't have been worse than had to be. for it was the beginning of hebe's being awfully ill. i can't tell you properly what it was; it was something about her lungs, so bad that she was wrapped in blankets and carried down to a room beside mother's, where she could be perfectly quiet. and a strange nurse came--one with a cap and an apron, like you see in pictures of children in hospitals; she was rather pretty and not old at all, and she and mums took turns of watching hebe; and the air of the room had to be kept exactly the same hotness, like a vinery, you know. and there was a queer, strange, solemn feeling all about, that i can't explain. we all felt it, even though they didn't tell us--not even _me_--how bad the poor little sweet was. the angel of death came very near us that time, mums told us afterwards, and i know it was true. one night i almost felt it myself. i woke all of a sudden, and sat bolt up in bed. i had thought i heard hebe calling me--i was sure i did--and then i remembered i'd been dreaming about her. i thought we were walking in a wood. it was evening, or afternoon, and it seemed to be getting dark, and i fancied we were looking for the others--it was muddled up with their having gone out that night, you see--and i felt very worried and unhappy. 'hebe,' i said, 'it's getting very dark.' 'yes,' she said, 'it is, darker and darker, jack'; and her voice sounded strange. 'jack,' she went on, 'hold my hand, i'm rather frightened'; and i felt that she was shivering. i think i was rather frightened myself, but i tried to comfort her up. 'perhaps it'll get lighter again after a bit,' i said. 'i don't think the sun's set yet.' 'hasn't it?' she said. 'i think it's just going to, though. jack, can you say that verse about the shadows or the darkness? i can't remember it.' but i couldn't remember it properly either; however i tried. i could only say, '"i will be with thee"--is it that, hebe?--"i will be with thee."' and she squeezed my hand tighter, and i thought she said, 'yes, that's it, jack.' and then again i fancied she pulled her hand out of mine, and ran on in front quite fast, calling joyfully, 'i see them, jack. come on quick-jack, jack.' it was then i awoke, and i found i had been squeezing my own hand quite tight. but i felt sure hebe had been calling me. i sat up and listened, but there was no sound. i began to cry; i thought hebe was dead, and then i remembered that the verse i couldn't get right in my dream was about the valley of the shadow of death, and at first that made me feel worse, till all of a sudden it came into my head that it wasn't 'the valley of _death_' but only 'the valley of the _shadow_ of death,' and that seemed to mean that hebe had been _near_ it--near death, i mean,--'near enough for the shadow of his wings to fall over her,' was the way mums said it when i told her my dream afterwards. that comforted me. i got out of bed very softly in the darkness and crept to the landing, where the balusters run round, and listened. the gas lamp was burning faintly down below, and i heard a slight rustling as if people were moving about. and after a while the door of a room opened softly, and two men came out. it was father and the doctor. i couldn't have believed big men could have moved so quietly, and i listened as if i was all ears. 'i think, now----' was the most i could catch of what dr. marshall said. but then came much plainer--of course i know his voice so well--from father, '_thank god_.' and i knew hebe was better. i shall always think of that night, always, even when i'm quite old, when i read that verse. afterwards mother explained to me more about it. she said she thought that to good people--you know what i mean by 'good people'--_christians_--it should always seem as if, after all, even when they really do have to die, it is only the _shadow_ that they have to go through--'the valley of the shadow of death'; that death itself in any dreadful lasting way is not really there, because of the presence that is promised to us--'i will be with thee.' i can't say it anything like as nicely as mums did, but i do understand it pretty well all the same; and if ever i feel frightened of death in a wrong way, i think about it. mother said we're meant to be afraid of death in one way, just as we would be afraid and are meant to be afraid of anything dark and unknown and very solemn. but that's different. and dear little hebe had really been some way into the valley of the shadow. when she got _quite_ well, she told me about it--of the feelings and thoughts she had had that night when for some hours they thought she was going far away from us, out of this world altogether. for she had had all her senses. she thought about us all, and wished she could see us, and she wished she could hold my hand--'your dear, rough, brown hand, jack,' she said. (i'm not quite as particular to keep my hands very nice as i should be, i'm afraid!) wasn't it queer? i'm sure her feelings had come up to me through the floor and made me dream. chapter vii four 'if's' and a coincidence now what happened next was this--in one way it was almost the nicest thing that we had ever had; that is to say, it would have been but for the pull-backs to it. very jolly things generally do have pull-backs, i think. this was it. everybody who knows anything about children's illnesses knows that when they're getting better they should have change of air, especially after whooping-cough. indeed, even before they're much better of whooping-cough they're often sent away, for change of air helps actually to cure it. and a week or two after hebe had been so very bad, the doctor began to talk of the others going away. it was the end of april now, and it was nice, fine weather, and promised to be a mild spring and early summer. anne and serry had really not been very ill in themselves, though they had been noisy enough with their coughing. maud had been the worst next to hebe, but as she had begun first she had got better first. and she got better in a very sensible way. she did everything in a sensible way, you know. she never fussed or fidgeted, and was very patient and cheerful. she took all her medicines, and even if nurse or mums forgot anything the doctor had said, you may be sure, if maud herself had heard it, _she_ wouldn't let it be forgotten. yes, really, she was too 'old-fashioned' for anything, as old nurse said. she wasn't quite as sweet as hebe-hebe looked like a little crushed flower when she first began to be better; you could scarcely help kissing her every minute. she isn't so what people call 'clinging' as hebe, but still she's a good, kind little girl, and it's not hard to get on with her. my life would be a very different affair if i had four sisters all like hebe and maud--wouldn't it just? so maud was pretty well again in herself, and the other two hadn't much the matter with them, and i of course was all right, though dear old mums said i was looking pale, and that i'd been such a comfort to her and knocked myself up. i think she said it partly to show that she wasn't thinking less of me than of the girls because i hadn't been ill. and just as things were like that, dr. marshall said we should go away for change of air. but unluckily 'we' only meant anne and serena and maudie and i. not hebe--no, indeed. that was quite another story. _we_ wanted 'bracing,' the doctor said--nice fresh hill or moor air, but for hebe anything like cold or strong air was out of the question. in the first place she couldn't be moved for some time yet, and when she did go it must be to somewhere mild. he spoke of somewhere abroad first, but then he thought it would be getting too hot at the warm places, and as far as the others were concerned, there were just as good in england. so in a sort of a way it came to be settled that when hebe did go, it should be to the isle of wight. that didn't fix anything about the rest of us, however. and there were a good many things to think of. i knew all about them. you see mums has always told me everything. she knows she can trust me. it's with it being so that i have anything to write. i'm behind the scenes. i don't see how children who are just told things straight off like, 'you're going to the seaside on tuesday,' or 'nurse is leaving to be married, and you're not going to have a regular nurse any more now you're so big'-i don't see how they could have anything interesting to write. it's the way things work out that i think makes life interesting, and children don't often look at things that way. but i couldn't have helped it, for i knew all about how things happened, and how mother planned and thought them over, and when she was happy and when she was anxious. it was all like pictures moving along--one leading into another. just now mother was anxious. i've said already that we're not rich--not as rich as we look. that's to say it's not father's and mother's money, but gran's. of course you might say that's the same thing--father being an only child and gran so proud of him being so clever and distinguished, though not in ways that make much money. but it isn't the same, however kind gran is. and just now it was specially not the same. for, of course, long before this, gran had had to be told about the sad loss of the diamond ornament, and it wasn't in nature for him to be _pleased_ about it, now was it? he'd very likely have been still more vexed if it hadn't been for the whooping-cough coming so soon upon the top of it. he didn't know that the one had brought the other, both thanks to anne. father and mother thought there was no need to tell him that part of it, for he was always ready to be down upon anne. her careless, thoughtless ways were just what worried him particularly. but he was kind and loving in his own way. he never wrote another word of reproach about the diamond thing after he heard of the trouble we were in. he was very glad i didn't get the illness. i don't know that i am a special pet of his, but i'm the only boy and named after him. i daresay it's that, though, as far as real favourites go, i think it's hebe he cares most for. he was terribly sorry about her, and wrote that if she needed anything expensive, mother wasn't to give two thoughts to the cost. that letter came just about the time dr. marshall said we should all go away, and mums and i had a talk over it. 'it's very good of gran,', said mums. 'i do think he's been wonderfully good. but still it doesn't show me what to do. you see, jack, when hebe goes away i _must_ go with her--i think rowley and i could manage without nurse--and that would be pretty expensive to begin with. still, i shouldn't so much mind writing to him about that, but it's for the rest of you. i don't see how i'm to manage it, and i don't want to worry your father just now. he is so busy with his new book, and he's been so put back with the anxiety and bad nights while hebe was so ill.' for you know it isn't only writing books father does. he's busy all day with his other work. i don't think i should say exactly what his appointment is, for then you'd know who he was, but it's to do with parliament and the government. 'why can't we go to furzely?' i said stupidly. for i had been told all about it having been let for six months. furzely is our--at least gran's--country-house. it's not bad, but we're rather tired of it, and the housekeeper is grumpy. 'that wouldn't cost much, would it?' 'my dear boy, you forget, the wilmingtons are to be there till august.' 'oh, of course,' i said. 'and besides, furzely isn't the sort of air dr. marshall wants for you all just now,' she went on. 'it's healthy, but it's nothing particular; it's not hill air or moor air. besides, it's out of the question. strayling or fewforest--those were the places he said, or somewhere in their neighbourhood. and i don't know either of them in the least. i've no idea if there are lodgings or houses to be got; besides a house would cost far too much, and i should have to send two or three servants. oh dear, what troubles have come with gran's lending me that unlucky ornament!' 'i don't think that's quite fair, mums,' i couldn't help saying. 'the troubles have come through anne's fault. i wish _she_ would see it that way, but i don't believe she thinks about it much now.' 'i hope she does,' said mother. 'and of course,' she went on, 'it's wrong of me to grumble so. _illnesses_ come through nobody's fault! and i should be so thankful that hebe is getting better that nothing else should seem anything. but it is real practical difficulty about money just now that i mind the most. you see, dear, i have to pay all your teachers just the same. it wouldn't be fair to miss stirling or any of them to stop just because the girls have got ill.' i felt very sorry, and i didn't really know what to propose. 'isn't there any one you could ask about those places?' i said. 'mightn't we perhaps get lodgings at a farmhouse, where it wouldn't be at all dear? not grand ones, you know, mums. and we'd all wait on ourselves a good deal, so that nurse could help the farmer's wife to cook for us if she needed. nurse loves cooking.' mums' face cleared a little. she does worry sometimes more than she needs to. 'that would be very nice, jack,' she said. 'i wonder if there's anybody who could tell us about where such a place is likely to be found.' 'we'd live quite plainly,' i went on. 'it would be fun to be almost like poor children for a while. i don't mean _poor_, poor children, but like rather well-off cottage children.' 'h-m,' said mother. 'i don't think you'd find it as amusing as you think. however, you would of course have to live plainly in some ways, but still it must be a comfortable sort of place. it would not do to run any risks for the girls after their illness.' just at that moment alfred brought in a note that had come, and 'they,' he said--why do servants always say 'they' for a messenger when there's only one?--'were waiting for an answer.' the note was from young mrs. chasserton, cousin dorothea. she had just come back to london, she said, and she was so sorry to hear how ill "the children" had all been'--thank you, all but one, if you please. and would mother come to see her? she had got a horrid cold, and couldn't go out, but she wasn't a bit afraid of whooping-cough--she'd had it. 'please come to tea this afternoon, and bring any child that's well enough to go out.' 'oh, i can't,' said mother, 'i've too much on my mind!' 'oh, do go,' i said, 'it'll do you good. you've not had the least little change for ever so long. and let me come with you, mums, as the others mayn't go out yet. i like cousin dorothea; and perhaps she could tell us of some farmhouse, as she's always lived in the country.' so mother wrote a word to say she'd go. and that afternoon we did go. i had never been in the chassertons' house before. it was a nice little place, and it was all decked out like a doll's house with dorothea's wedding presents. i amused myself very well by walking round the room looking at them all. they weren't very well arranged. there was a corner cupboard with glass doors, filled with china, and it was all mixty-maxty. blue or plain-coloured china on the same shelf as many-coloured dresden or oriental. (i know something about china, and i mean to know more before i've done with it.) the key was in the lock, and i couldn't resist opening the doors and moving one or two pieces to see how much better they might look. but just then dorothea called me over to tea. she was a sensible girl. she'd had some bread-and-butter and jam ready spread, thicker than those silly wafer slices ladies eat, and the jam was my favourite--strawberry. i felt very comfortable. i was glad i'd made mother come. she looked brighter. i spoke to cousin dorothea about the bad way her china was arranged. 'yes,' she said, 'i know it is.' she spoke quite gravely, but still i thought i saw a kind of a smile go round the corners of her mouth. i suppose she was thinking it was very funny for a boy to care how china was arranged. i don't see why. boys have got eyes, and some of them have got good taste--more than some girls. 'it was washed while we were away,' she said, 'and the housemaid put it all in, according to the size of the things, i suppose. nothing to do with the colour or kinds.' 'i've moved a few of them,' i said; 'they look better already. you've got some nice bits; there are one or two very old; i think i saw some worcester.' 'how learned you are, jack!' said dorothea. but i didn't see it. nothing's easier than to pick up a smattering--just enough to tell one cup from another, and to seem very wise about it. i didn't mean to do that. 'no,' i said; 'i'm not. there's one cup i can't make out at all.' 'do you mean the one with the deep purplish flowers?' said she. 'oh, it is sharp of you to have spotted that one! no one knows for certain what it is; it was given me by an old servant of ours who married and went to live up in yorkshire; and once when we were at harrogate we went to see her. she said there were a few old pieces of it in the cottage her husband and she lived at when they were first married, and she gave us each one for a keepsake.' 'was she your nurse?' asked mother. 'no, only a housemaid; but she was a particularly nice woman, superior to her station. and she and her husband have got on very well. he was under-bailiff to lord uxfort up in the north, and then an uncle died and left him a small farm near--oh, where is it near? i forget,--but it's not so very far from london. i've always promised to go to see her some day.' 'that reminds me,' said mums. 'i haven't told you our present difficulty.' till now dorothea had been hearing about the whooping-cough, and asking all about the diamond brooch losing. she had known about it, for father had written to mr. chasserton to ask if cousin dorothea could possibly throw any light upon it,--had she noticed it on their way home, or had she only noticed it going there, or when?--but she hadn't been able to remember anything at all. she _was_ sorry about it; she's very sweet, very sweet indeed, and nice to tell troubles to; she looks so sorry with her kind blue eyes, though i don't think she's a very clever girl. 'i feel quite guilty about it all,' she said; 'for it was for my sake you went to that unlucky drawing-room, and that all these troubles came. but what was the new one you were going to tell me about, dear valeria?' 'oh, that isn't exactly a trouble, only a difficulty,' said mums. and she went on to explain about the change to the country and my idea of a farmhouse. cousin dorothea listened, and tried to look very wise. 'i'm afraid nowhere near my home would be any good,' she said. 'devonshire's not bracing at all.' suddenly a thought jumped into my head. 'that nice woman,' i said, 'the one who gave you the cup, is it bracing where she lives?' dorothea gave a little jump. 'oh,' she said, 'she'd be the _very_ person to take care of the children _if_ she had rooms, and _if_ her husband would let her take lodgers, and _if_ the place is bracing, and _if_ i could remember where it is!' we couldn't help laughing. 'four "if's" indeed,' said mother. but dorothea didn't laugh; she was too busy cudgelling her brains. 'i've a feeling,' she said, 'that it _is_ a bracing place; that homer--isn't it a funny name for a woman, it was her surname, and the boys used to call her all manner of nonsense because of it--"iliad" and "odyssey" of course,--i've a feeling that homer wrote something about moors and fresh air. if i could but remember!' 'would you know it if you heard it?' i said. 'suppose we got a railway guide and looked at some names?' said mother. 'is there a railway station there?' i asked. 'oh yes, i know there is one near, for homer wrote all that when she asked us to go down for a day. stay, there's something about english history mixed up with it in my mind. i do believe it's coming. ring the bell, jack, dear, and we'll look through an a b c. it's something about putting the fires out at night, you know--the old law.' 'curfew?' said mother. 'ye-es, but it's not quite that. but----' just then the servant came, and we got the railway guide. 'look at "f's," jack,' said dorothea. i read some 'f's,' but she shook her head. then i said to mother-'here's one of the places dr. marshall was speaking about. "fewforest," it----' cousin dorothea clapped her hands. '_that's_ it,' she said joyfully. 'what a coincidence!' said mother. 'i remember about it now,' said dorothea. 'they were so afraid of fire there, because the village stands close to a thick wood--at least it did then--that the curfew bell was rung there long after it had been given up in many places. and so it got from curfew forest to fewforest.' 'it must be a jolly old place, mums,' i said. 'do let's find out about it.' chapter viii mossmoor farm and so we did. dorothea wrote to her home, and got mrs. parsley's proper address. mrs. parsley was the farmer's wife who used to be 'homer'--rather a come-down from 'homer' to 'parsley,' wasn't it? and it _was_ near fewforest. then she wrote to mrs. parsley, 'sounding' her a little, and the day she got the answer she brought it straight off to us. mums and i were in the little drawing-room by ourselves, for the girls were still kept rather out of the way, as they coughed a good deal now and then. hebe by this time was able to get up a little and lie on a sofa in her room, and the others used to go in and sit with her in turns,--anne the most, of course, for she reads aloud nicely, and she's not at all stupid, and hebe's very fond of her. i used to sit with her too a good deal, but really that spring i was very busy. i had some of my lessons. i went to miss stirling's house when the girls began to get better, instead of her coming to us, just for _fear_ of infection, as she'd never had the whooping-cough. and i had heaps to do for mother, besides helping to amuse the two little ones. my greatest rest was to be alone with mums sometimes for a bit in the afternoon. now and then i had tea with her. we were having tea that day when cousin dorothea came in, all in a fuss and quite eager. she had just got the letter. 'such a nice answer from dear old homer' she said. 'she'll be delighted to do anything for relations of mine, and she doesn't think you _could_ find a healthier place. it's as bracing as anything, and yet not cold. she says there's a small convalescent home not far from the farm, and that the place was chosen out of ever so many by some rich people who built it, just because of its healthiness. now i come to think of it, i'm sure i've heard of that home before, but i can't think from whom.' 'that's all very satisfactory indeed, and thank you very much, dear,' said mother. 'but--what about the possibility of lodgings?' 'i was coming to that,' said dorothea, and indeed she was almost out of breath with such a lot to tell. 'homer says there are really none to be had----' 'oh dear!' exclaimed mums and i. 'but,' dorothea went on, 'they _have_ some spare rooms at the farm, and occasionally they have had thoughts of letting them--i mean, of taking lodgers. but they're _very_ plainly furnished, and she's always busy, so her husband was rather afraid of beginning it. she wouldn't exactly like to offer them, but she says if my friends would go down to see the rooms, and thought they'd do, she would be pleased to do her best. i can guarantee they'd be beautifully _clean_.' dorothea looked quite excited about it. she was so proud of being able to help mums. 'i think it sounds charming,' said mother. 'how many rooms are there?' 'two big bedrooms, and a tiny one, and a sort of best kitchen that could be made comfortable in a plain way as a sitting-room,' said dorothea consulting the letter. 'you could take down a few sofa rugs, and two or three folding chairs and so on, i daresay?' 'oh yes, easily,' said mother. 'but i quite agree with mrs. parsley that i had better see the rooms. how long does it take by train, and how far is the farm--what's the name of it, by the bye?--from the station?' 'about a mile and a half. but they have a pony-cart of some kind and could meet you. the name is mossmoor--mossmoor farm, fewforest.' it seemed wonderfully lucky. we were all three as pleased as anything. there was only one thing i wanted to make sure of. 'mums,' i whispered. i was just giving her her second cup of tea. i always make her tea when we're alone. 'mums, if you do go down one day to see the farm, you'll take me with you, won't you?' cousin dorothea has quick ears. she overheard. 'oh yes, valeria,' she said, 'you must take him. i consider it's more than half thanks to him that we've thought of it.' i do like dorothea. mums smiled. 'we must see what father says,' she answered. 'of course there's the railway fare.' 'but you couldn't go alone, mums,' i reminded her; 'and you know i'm only half, still. father would never have time to go, and if you took rowley she'd cost full fare.' 'oh, you old-fashioned child!' said cousin dorothea, laughing. 'dear, you _must_ take him.' i felt sure mums would, after that. 'i know i could help you about the rooms and everything better than anybody,' i said. and i knew i could. i did go. father laughed and said i was the proper person to take his place, as he couldn't possibly go. so it was settled, and one fine morning off we set. it was really a fine morning,--i don't mean it only as an expression. it was really a lovely morning. let me see, it must have been may by then. i'll look it up in my diary of that year, and fill in the exact date afterwards. it was sunny and mild, though there was a little nice wind too. mums and i felt like two children out of school, or two captives out of prison, when we found ourselves in a jolly comfortable railway carriage all alone, flying along through the bright green fields with the trees in their new spring dresses and the sky as blue as blue,--all so jolly, you know, after the long winter in our london square and all the troubles we'd had. everything seemed at last to be going to begin to come right. 'i feel in such much better spirits,' said mums. 'hebe does seem to be improving so fast now, and the weather is so nice.' dear little mums, she was looking so pretty. she had a brown dress with very soft, fussy trimming, and a brown bonnet, with something pink--just a tiny bit of pink. she generally wears bonnets, except when we're regularly in the country. they suit her, and i like them better than hats for her. i hate those mothers who are always trying to look young. and i think mums looks all the younger because she dresses like a mother and not like a girl. i've got ideas about dressing though i am a boy. i can't help having them. 'i do hope mossmoor farm will be nice,' she went on again. 'the only thing is i wish we were going to be all together there.' 'so do i,' i said. i hate being away from mums, and then i've a feeling she may be wanting me always. 'perhaps, if hebe gets much stronger at ventnor, after two or three weeks there, the doctor may let us join you all at this place,' said mother. that was a nice idea. 'it would be awfully jolly,' i said. 'we'd have nothing left to wish for then, would we, mums, except--if only the diamond thing could be found!' i don't know what put it in my head just then; we hadn't spoken of it for ever so long. i was almost sorry i had said it, for mums' face clouded over a little. 'yes, indeed,' she said. 'but i fear there's no chance of that now. and really gran has been _so_ good about it. he might have been very, very angry; for, after all, it _was_ a sort of carelessness of mine. i should have made sure it was firm the very last moment before i put it on.' but i began to talk of other things to put it out of her head. and before long--at least it didn't seem long, railway journeys do so depend on how you're feeling--we pulled up at a pretty little station, and we saw that the name of it was fewforest. we got out, feeling rather important, and perhaps mums was a tiny bit nervous. you see she's very seldom had to do things like looking for houses, by herself. she's always nearly had father or gran. she was rather proud of it, too, and so was i. i was determined she shouldn't feel lonely or bothered if i could help it. and everything went wonderfully right. it is like that sometimes. to begin with, i never saw a jollier railway station. it seems in the middle of a wood, and the station-master's house is like a swiss cottage. i've never been in switzerland-i've never been out of england--but mother has, lots, and of course i've seen pictures. and everybody says fewforest is quite as pretty as heaps of places people travel miles and miles over the sea to visit. there was a little kind of a phaeton standing outside, and a rather fat boy with red cheeks on the box. he touched his cap as we came out, and, getting still redder, he mumbled something about 'measter parsley,' and 'mossmoor.' 'yes,' said mother, 'we are going to mossmoor farm. are you to drive us?' he touched his cap again, and tried to explain that his master was very sorry he couldn't come himself; something or other unexpected, we couldn't make out what, having happened to prevent him. i wasn't sorry. if the farmer had come, we'd have had to talk to him, for civility's sake, and it would have been a great bore, when we wanted to talk to each other and to look about us. we certainly didn't need to talk to the fat boy. he looked most thankful when we were settled in our places behind, and he didn't have to see us at all, though his ears kept red all the way to mossmoor, i could see, just from shyness. i got to know him quite well afterwards, and his ears weren't generally redder than other people's. he was a nice boy; his name was simon wanderer; it didn't suit him, for he'd never been farther away from his home at mossmoor than six miles. i don't believe he has yet, though he must be seventeen by now. it was a lovely drive. i have been it lots of times since of course, and i always like it; but that first time there was something extra about it. it was all new to us, and then we did so enjoy being in the country again, and there was a nice feeling as if we were having an adventure too. part of the way is all through woods; then after that comes a heathy bit, and then a clear bit of common, and then you go up for a while with trees thick at one side of the road and at the other a beautiful sort of stretching-to-the-sky view. _then_ you turn sharp down a lane, and at a corner where another lane--quite a short one--leads on to a heath again, is the farm. we got out at the gate. there's no drive to the front of the house, and this first time mrs. parsley wouldn't have thought it 'manners' to meet us in the stable-yard. she was standing at the gate. i saw in a minute she was nice. she had a pleasant face, not too smiley, and no make up about it. 'i _am_ pleased to see you, ma'am,' she said, 'and master warwick too, and i'm so glad it's a fine day. real may weather, isn't it, ma'am?' 'yes, indeed,' said mums. 'we couldn't see your pretty home to greater advantage, mrs. parsley.' then mrs. parsley smiled more than she had done yet. 'i can't deny, ma'am, that it's a sweet spot,' she said, '_and_ a healthy. it's coldish in winter, it's true, but then it's a cold that you don't feel in the same piercing way as when it's damp. the air's that bracing about here, ma'am.' 'so they tell me,' said mother. 'and that's just what we're looking for.' then she went on to tell about the whooping-cough, and though cousin dorothea had written about it already, mrs. parsley seemed as interested as could be. people like that--i mean people you can't call gentlemen and ladies, though they're not poor, and regular poor people, too--do love talking about illnesses--other people's as well as their own. and she had a lot of questions to ask about 'miss dorothea' too. she 'did hope as she'd come down to mossmoor some day.' all this time we were going towards the house. but it was rather a slow business, doing so much talking by the way, and i _was_ in a fidget to see the rooms and find out if they'd do. there was no hall or passage; we went straight into a large kitchen, a very large one. you didn't see at first how big it was, because just round the door--to keep out the draught, i suppose--there was a fixed wooden screen, like what you see in lots of cottages. i was a little surprised that there was no hall, for, outside, the house looked really rather grand; it might have been called 'mossmoor grange,' for it was built of nice dull red old bricks and the windows were very pretty--out-jutting, you know, and with tiny panes. but once you were well inside the kitchen you couldn't have wished it any different. it was so jolly; not a bit messy, you know, as if plates and dishes were washed there, or potatoes peeled, or anything like that, for there was a good-sized back kitchen where all that was done. the floor was tiled, with good thick rugs here and there, and there was a regular old grandfather's clock and bright brass pans and things on the wall. i wondered at first if this could be the kitchen we were to have as a sitting-room. but mrs. parsley soon explained. 'won't you sit down and rest a bit, ma'am,' she said, 'before i show you the rooms?' but mums and i both said we weren't at all tired. 'well, then,' she said, 'if you'll be so good, we'll step through this way,' and she opened a door at quite the other side of the kitchen. 'you'll have a little lunch, i _hope_,' said the kind woman, 'after we've seen the rooms,' and she nodded towards a table, which was all spread with a white cloth and on it two or three dishes, one with a cold ham, and another with some kind of a pie or tart, and a big jug of milk. i was getting hungry, but still i cared most of all to see the rooms. through the door there _was_ a tiny hall. it had a nice window, and a door stood open at the other end. 'this is the summer kitchen, as we always call it,' said mrs. parsley. 'i had a little fire lighted just for you to see, it's nice and comfortable,'--she called it 'com,' not _cum_-fortable,'--'even if the weather's chilly.' it was a dear room--beautiful deep windows with seats round them, and nice old cupboards, one with glass doors, and a queer kind of sofa with a straight-up back and a long red cushion. the chairs were plain wood and everything was plain, but not a bit common; ever so much nicer than lodgings, you know, like what there are sometimes at the seaside with horrid flowery carpets all staring, and mirrors with gilt frames, and shaky little chiffoniers that won't hold anything. here it was all solid and comfortable; there was nothing we could break supposing we did 'rampage' about, as nurse calls it. even the kitchen fireplace was nice; i thought to myself what jolly toffy we could make on a wet day. 'oh, this _is_ a nice room,' said mums; 'nothing could be better.' mrs. parsley did look pleased, and in a minute or two she opened a door we hadn't noticed. it looked like a part of the wooden panels, and there was a funny little stair. 'this leads to the small bedroom, ma'am,' she said. 'there's a door through it to the other two, but there's also doors to them on the landing over the big kitchen, which you get to up the regular staircase. but if the young gentleman was to have this room it might be a convenience for him to get to it without having to go all the way round and pass through the other bedrooms.' it was a funny little room--very jolly though,--just a bed and a chest of drawers, a toilet-table, and a shelf across a corner for a washhand-stand, and two chairs. but i liked it very much, and the two big bedrooms that we got into through it were really very nice--carpets in the middle, and in one a regular polished bedstead with curtains. _i_ wouldn't have liked it, but, as it turned out, anne did. and it was very big; plenty of room for her and maud too. in the other room there were two smaller beds; one would do for serry, and the other for nurse. and everything was as clean as clean--lavendery too--not a bit fusty or musty. 'really,' said mums, 'nothing could be nicer. i suppose these are all the rooms you have to spare, mrs. parsley?' there was one other, as tiny as mine, but it was at the opposite side of the house. still mother thought it would do for me _if_ hebe was able to come at the end of the time, and then nurse could have mine. 'and if i could run down myself for a night or so,' she said, 'i daresay serry and maud could sleep together; there'd be plenty of room for me beside anne.' then she and mrs. parsley went on to talk about sheets and pillow-cases, and stupid things like that, so i took out my notebook--i always have a notebook--and went poking about to see what things we'd better bring down with us from london. i made quite a tidy list, though mums wouldn't let me bring all i wanted; and some of the things mrs. parsley had already when i spoke about them, only she hadn't put them out. then we went down again by the big staircase--all old brown wood and nobbly balusters: mother said it was really beautiful--which ran down to a kind of hall behind the kitchen, and then we had luncheon. i'll never forget it. either i was awfully hungry, or the things were extra good--perhaps both--but i don't think i ever tasted such nice ham, or such a splendid home-made cake. chapter ix spying the land after luncheon we had still an hour and a half before we needed to start for the station. mrs. parsley asked us if we would like to stroll about the garden and the farm a little, but mums was tired. she did go outside the house to a nice sheltered corner where there was a rustic bench, and there she said she would enjoy the air and rest at the same time. but i wasn't the least tired. i wanted to enjoy the air without resting. so mums asked mrs. parsley to tell me where i could go without any fear of losing my way, or coming back too late. mrs. parsley considered. 'there's a beautiful path through the wood,' she said, 'that brings you out at the end of what we call our village. it's "fewforest, south end," by rights, for fewforest is very straggly. it's divided into north end and south end, and houses between, here and there. the old church is at south end, i'm glad to say, for it makes it nice and convenient for us; no excuses for staying away if it's a bad day, though, indeed, i think our folk love their church. we've been very favoured in the clergy here for a many years.' 'i'd like to see the church,' i said. i always like to see churches. 'will it be open, mrs. parsley?' 'oh yes, sir, bless you, sure to be. we've all the new ways here. mr. joyce would never hold with a church that was kept locked.' mother smiled a little. 'the _old_ ways, i like to call them, mrs. parsley,' she said. 'the old ways we're coming back to, i'm glad to say, after putting them aside for so long that people had almost forgotten they were the really old original ones.' mrs. parsley didn't mind her saying that, i could see. 'true, ma'am, that's just as mr. joyce puts it,' she said. then she explained to me exactly how i should go. i was to make a round, coming back by the high road. in this way i should pass up the village, and see the post office, which was also a telegraph office, and the doctor's house. it's always a good thing in a new place to see all you can. 'and some little distance behind the church, so to say,' added mrs. parsley, 'standing on rather high ground, you'll see the convalescent home, master jack. we're quite proud of it now, though at the beginning some folk were silly enough to think it'd bring infections and illnesses to the place. but them as has charge of it know better than that; every care's taken. and there's some sweet young ladies who come down turn about, one with another, to help with the children. it's a pretty sight, i can tell you, to see the poor dears picking up as they do here. they'll get quite rosy before they go, some of them, and they poor peakit-like faces they come with.' 'peakit-like' means pinched and miserable-looking. it is a north country expression, mums says, for mrs. parsley belonged to the north when she was young. well, off i set. i hadn't any adventures--that was for afterwards. i found my way quite well, and i enjoyed the walk very much. the church was rather queer. it was very old; there were strange tablets on the walls and monuments in the corners, and part of the pavement was gravestones--the side parts, not the middle. but it was new too. there weren't any pews, and it was all open and airy. but still it had the feeling of being very old. i don't know much about architecture--it's one of the things i mean to learn. i know pews are all wrong, still they're rather fun. at one church near furzely, where we sometimes go in wet weather, there are some square ones with curtains all round, and the two biggest pews have even fireplaces in them--they're exactly like tiny rooms. i daresay there were pews like that once in fewforest church, for it certainly is very old. i stood in front of the chancel some time looking at the high painted window behind the altar; it was very old. i could see it by the cracks here and there where you could tell it had been mended. i couldn't help thinking what lots and lots of people must have looked at that window--at those very figures in it and the patterns round the edge--since it was first put up there. lots of children as little as me, who grew up to be men and women, and then got old and died. isn't it queer to think how men and women _must_ die, and that bits of glass that anybody could break with a touch can last on for hundreds of years? i daresay some of the children i was thinking of, the long long ago ones, kept on looking at that window every sunday, and saints' days too--for people long ago went much oftener to church on saints' days, you know,--all through their lives; for before there were railways, or even coaches, and travelling cost so dear, lots of country people never went farther away than a few miles from their own village at all. it is strange to think of. i thought to myself i'd like to show anne the church. she'd understand all these feelings it gave me--perhaps she'd make poetry about it. she does make poetry sometimes. i was sure she'd like the church. but i was afraid of being late for mother, or making her fidgety that i was _going_ to be late, so i turned to go. just as i was leaving the church, i saw that there was some one there beside myself. i hadn't noticed her before, but she must have been there all the time. it was a lady. she had been kneeling, but she got up and passed out quickly. i had only time to catch a very little glimpse of her face, but even in that tiny glimpse i felt as if i had seen it before. but i couldn't think where. she didn't see me, i was a little in shadow, and she looked eager and hurried, as if she had plenty to do, and had only run in to say her prayers for a minute. where had i seen that rather frowning, eager look in a face before? it did bother me so, but i _couldn't_ remember. that was a tiny bit of an adventure, after all. i shouldn't have said i hadn't any at all that day. [illustration: 'i just stood still ... and looked well round at the view and everything.' c. ix. p. 130.] i walked home through the village--that end of it, that's to say, the south end--past the doctor's house, with a big plate on the door, 'dr. hepland,' and the one or two everything shops (don't you _love_ 'everything' shops? i do. i stood at the door of one of them, to sniff the jolly mixty-maxty, regular country shop smell), and the post office. and then i felt i knew the place pretty tidily for a beginning. there was lots of time. i'd seen what o'clock it was at the church, so i strolled along comfortably. some of the people stared at me a bit. it was rather early in the season for visitors, you see. but i didn't mind. i just stood still, with my hands behind me, and looked well round at the view and everything. behind the church the ground rises, and up there, there was a house, standing by itself and looking rather new. i remembered what mrs. parsley had said. 'that must be the getting-well home for children,' i thought. 'i'd like to see through it. perhaps we might have some of the children to tea one day, when we're at the farm. the wellest ones; it would be rather fun.' i'd a good deal to tell the girls about when we got home, hadn't i? but, after all, we didn't tell them very much that night. for both mums and i were pretty tired, though everything had been so nice. the train going home was a much slower one. when we got near london, it seemed to stop at every station. my goodness! it _was_ tiresome. and we were hungry too, for we'd only had luncheon at mossmoor; we had to leave too soon for tea, and, besides, mother didn't want to give mrs. parsley so much trouble. father was going to be late that night. he wasn't coming in to dinner at all. i didn't much mind, for it was all the nicer for me. mums and i had a sort of picnic dinner--with tea, you know, like what people often have when they arrive very late after a journey. and we talked over about the rooms and everything quietly. the girls were all in bed. we just went in to see them. hebe was the widest awake; and she was so pleased to hear that perhaps there'd be room for her too at mossmoor if she was a good girl, and got nearly quite well at ventnor. and the next morning we told all of them everything about it. i had to begin at the beginning, and tell about the railway, and how pretty the fields looked, and what a lovely station there was at fewforest, and the drive in the pony phaeton, and how red the fat boy's ears were; and then about the house and mrs. parsley, and the rooms, and everything. i hadn't time to tell about my walk through the village till luncheon--mum's luncheon, i mean, which is our dinner. and then i began about the nice old church; they were very pleased, anne most of all. but just as i was telling about the lady i'd seen, and how i couldn't remember how i seemed to know her face, all of a sudden it plumped into my mind. i threw down my knife and fork on my plate. i'm afraid they made a clatter, for mums jumped. it was partly perhaps that i called out so. 'i _know_ who it was. it's that girl--miss cross-at-first, you know, anne,' for that was the name we'd given her, and, indeed, i didn't remember her real name. 'miss _what_, jack?' said mums; while anne said quietly, 'oh yes, i know. how funny!' then we explained what we meant. 'judith,' said mother; 'judith merthyr. what a very queer name for her,' and she couldn't help laughing. 'it may have been her, for i know she works among poor children. perhaps she's one of the girls who come down in turns to the convalescent home--the ladies mrs. parsley told us of. i must ask dorothea chasserton; she's sure to know. it would be nice if judith were there, they say she's such a very kind girl.' 'yes,' i said, 'we found that out. it's only the way her face is made--she can't help it.' but somehow we all forgot to ask cousin dorothea. for one thing, there soon began to be a good deal of bustle getting ready to go away, for with this horrid whooping-cough nurse and rowley had been so extra busy that there was a lot of sewing to do. not for me, of course. my sailor suits all come from the man at devonport, and, except for darning my stockings, i don't think i give much mending to do. but of course _girls_ are always wanting things made for them at home. then to add to all the fuss, gran took it into his head to come back all of a sudden. mother hadn't counted on his coming at all till after she'd got back from ventnor with hebe, and by then she thought if hebe was well enough to be with the rest of us at mossmoor, she herself would be free to devote herself to gran. she wanted to be _extra_ good to him, you see, to make up for the worry about the diamond ornament. but gran's often rather changeable; and of course, as mums always says, 'it's his own house: who has a better right to come to it whenever it suits him?' only it _was_ rather inconvenient, and mother looked pretty blank the morning she got the letter. he wasn't going to stay long--he had some other visits to pay before he settled down for his usual two months or so of the season in town. he would only stay about ten days. '_just_ till we are all leaving,' said poor mums. 'and i know he will want me all day,--and i'd gladly be with him all day--but i _am_ so busy.' 'so am i,' said father, looking rather flabbergasted himself. 'but we must just do the best we can, valeria. you tell him frankly that you are and must be very busy, and i will tell him that my new book is announced, and yet i have a good deal to do to it still.' 'yes,' sighed mums,' i must do my best. but it is a pity. he says he is anxious to see the children for himself--to make sure they are coming round satisfactorily. poor gran, and he doesn't say one word about that unlucky brooch. he has been very good about it.' 'perhaps he thinks every one concerned has been sufficiently punished about it,' said father. and anne, who was down at breakfast with us, grew very red, and looked down at her plate. well, gran came, and i think mums managed beautifully, though she must have been pretty tired. _we_ rather went to the wall. that's to say _i_ did, for there was an end of all my nice quiet times with mums--afternoon teas in the little drawing-room, and driving out with her to shop. the doctor ordered drives for the girls now--for anne, and serena, and maud, that's to say,--so they took turns of it in the victoria every fine afternoon. i didn't envy them the days gran went too, for if there's one thing i hate it's the back seat of a victoria, and it gives such a messy look to the turn-out, _i_ think. those days i was a good deal with hebe, reading to her in the afternoons, and sitting with her to make up for mums being so little with her. gran used to come sometimes, and i had to go on reading aloud just the same, with him listening. i didn't like it at all. but he was very kind. he never went out scarcely without bringing in some present for some of us, especially hebe--either fruit, or cakes, not too rich, but very good, or new story-books, or some kind of puzzle or game. he was really very jolly that time. we were awfully pleased though when the day came at last for us all to start. _we_ were to go first--the three girls, and nurse, and i,--and mums, and hebe, and rowley were to go down to ventnor the next day. father was to take them, for poor hebe could scarcely walk yet gran went off on his visit the afternoon of _our_ day. he said he couldn't leave till he had seen us off, and he actually came to the station with us--he and his man. fancy that! and it was rather lucky for us, for he would have us travel first-class, and mums had only meant us to go second. i must say first is ever so much nicer, and it's rubbish of people to say they like second better. it's only silly people, who are ashamed to say they do it for saving reasons. i can't understand that sort of being ashamed. then gran tipped the guard, so that he came at every station to ask if we wanted anything. we never did, but it felt rather grand. altogether, the journey was very nice, and we hadn't time to feel very sad at leaving dear mums and hebe, though all the way i kept thinking of my last going there with mother. it was a fine day, though not so bright as the other time. when we got to fewforest there was a big fly waiting for us, and a spring cart from the farm for the luggage. and no sooner did serry catch sight of it than she tugged my arm, and said quite loud-'is that the red-eared boy, jack?' she _is_ so silly, i wonder he didn't hear her. it _was_ he, sure enough, as red as ever, and grinning now as well, like an old acquaintance. the driver of the fly, on the contrary, was a rather grumpy man. i had been thinking of asking nurse to let me go outside, but when i saw his face i didn't. no chance of _him_ letting me drive part of the way, even though the horse was about a hundred years old, and went jog-jogging along as if it meant to take a month to get to mossmoor. i can generally tell something about people by the look of their faces. so we all squashed inside--nurse and us four. it wasn't a very great squash, for the fly was a regular old-fashioned roomy one. once upon a time i daresay it had been some lady's grand 'coach' in which she drove about paying all her visits. i happened to say this to anne, and she liked the idea. she said she thought she would write a story, and call it _the history of a chariot_. i don't know if she ever has. when we got to mossmoor the stupid coachman was going to drive us into the stable-yard, which would quite have stopped the niceness of our first arriving, especially as i caught sight of dear old mrs. parsley standing at the front door with her best cap on, all in a flutter to welcome us. (i didn't call her 'dear old mrs. parsley' to myself _then_: it's since i've got to know her. and i couldn't have told it was her best cap; it wasn't for some time that we got to understand her caps. they were like degrees of comparison, both upwards and downwards, for she had always about six going at a time.) so i holloaed out to the driver to stop at the little gate, and he did, though he growled and grumbled. he _is_ so surly; his name's griffin, and he and the fly belong to the 'yule log' at fewforest, north end. there's no inn at south end. i was only just in time, for you can't turn, farther up the lane, unless you drive on a bit, _or_ turn in the stable-yard. you see it was a good thing for the girls that i'd been there before, and knew all the ins and outs of the place, wasn't it? it _was_ fun showing them the rooms and everything. and even though i had described them as particularly as i could, they all declared--nurse too--that i hadn't made them out half nice enough. i was glad of that. we had plenty of time to poke about, because the luggage hadn't yet come. and mrs. parsley had tea set out all ready; she wasn't one of those horrid landladies who won't give anything at the first start for fear they should possibly not be paid back for it. i'm sure she never charged anything for the cake she'd made us, and the jam and honey, that first night, though there was precious little over of any of them when we'd finished. chapter x a long ago adventure we were very busy and happy the next morning getting all our things settled, and making the summer kitchen look as pretty as we could. we had brought one or two folding chairs and some rugs and table-covers to brighten it up, and it did look very nice indeed. it was a good thing we were taken up that way, for--wasn't it provoking?--that first day it took it into its head to rain! all the morning at least, though it cleared up about our dinner-time. but it was very tiresome, for though it was quite mild, it was of course damp under foot, and nurse wouldn't hear of us going a nice scrambly walk as we had planned. and she would come with us. i daresay she was right, but it was a bore. 'which way shall we go, jack?' said anne, when we were all ready to start and nurse had satisfied herself that the girls had all got their thickest boots on, and waterproofs and umbrellas in case it came on to rain again. nurse had been consulting mrs. parsley, i'm sure. 'we must keep to the high-road,' she said. 'it dries up very quickly as it's a sandy soil.' 'anne wasn't asking you, nurse,' said serry rather pertly. 'she was asking jack.' 'all the same, miss serena, i must do my duty,' said nurse. 'i am in charge of you, and your mamma wouldn't be pleased if i let you all go stravaging over the wet fields to get bad colds and pleurisys and newmens, and what not.' 'newmens,' said anne, 'what _do_ you mean?' but nurse was put out, and wouldn't explain. it wasn't till some time after that we found out she meant that bad kind of cold on your chest that cows have so often, as well as people. i tried to smooth nurse down, and i frowned at serry, who was just in a humour to go on setting her up. it was a pity to start so grumpily on our first walk, but things never do go quite right for long in this world, do they? 'i'll tell you what we can do,' i said; 'we can see the church. it's just a nice little walk by the road from here--you'd like that, wouldn't you, anne?' 'yes,' said anne, 'i like old churches.' 'so do i,' said maud. 'are there places you could hide in, in this church,' said serry, 'like in the old church at furzely? whenever i go there i can't help thinking what lovely hide-and-seek we might have there.' 'miss serry,' said nurse, quite shocked, 'i think you should have different ideas from that in your mind when you go to church.' and of course we all thought so too. but it isn't much use taking up anything serry says, seriously. she _is_ so scatter-brained. we had a nice enough walk after all. the road was beginning to dry up, except at the side next the wood where the trees dripped on to it, for the trees were really soaking. and we soon got nurse into a good humour again; she's never cross for long. we made plans about all the nice things we'd do, if only the weather would be really fine--tea in the woods and things like that, you know. 'but it's early in the season still, my dears, you must remember,' said nurse. 'it's not often you can plan for much out-of-doors before june is near its end.' 'and then july is always a rainy month, people say,' said anne. 'i do think england's horrid for the weather being so uncertain.' 'well, indeed,' said nurse, 'take it all in all, i think i'd rather have our climate up in the north. it's cold, to be sure, a great part of the year, but the summer is summer while it lasts. and then you know where you are; in winter you can hap yourselves up and make the best of it, while here in the south it seems to me that every day you have to think if it's warm or cold, or what it is, all the year round, summer and winter alike.' i forget if i told you that nurse is scotch. she hasn't really been in scotland since she was quite little, but she's very proud of it, and she's very fond of using funny words, like 'stravaging.' 'they say the air here is like scotland,' i said, 'so fresh and moor-y. so you should like it, nurse. and you know there's a place here that they send little ill children to from london; i can show you the house, we can see it up above when we get to the church.' and, funnily enough, just as we got close to the village we came upon a little party of the convalescent children going a walk. they were all dressed alike--the girls in brown frocks and red cloaks and brown hats, and the boys in some sort of corduroy. and there was a sort of servanty looking person with them, and also a lady; just for half a moment i wondered if it was miss cross-at-first, but it wasn't. this one was quite different; she was short and round-faced, and extremely good-natured looking. she smiled at us as she passed us. and the children all looked very happy. 'you see they've come a walk along the wood like us,' said maud, 'because i daresay it's wet in their garden too.' 'i'd like to go to see them very much,' said anne. 'what a pity it isn't miss cross-at-first with them! and mums never remembered to write to cousin dorothea to ask if it could have been her you saw in the church that day.' 'i'm certain it was,' i said. 'i don't need cousin dorothea or anybody to say so. but i'd like to know if she's gone away or if she's coming back again. they say girls--ladies, i mean--take it in turns to come and look after the children.' 'perhaps mrs. parsley could find out for us,' said anne. 'you know, nurse, we want to have some of the children at tea at the farm before we go. mother said she daresayed we might.' 'it's time enough, miss anne, to talk about what you'll do before you go, seeing as you're scarcely come,' said nurse, rather grumpily. she's not very fond of things to do with poor children; she's always afraid of our catching illnesses. 'and it would be no kindness to ask any other children to come to see you at present. as likely as not they'd be getting the whooping-cough.' we hadn't thought of that; it was rather a disappointment. we had got to the church by now, and we all went in. it didn't look quite so pretty as the day i had seen it first, for there was no sunshine coming in through the coloured windows and lighting up the queer old tablets and figures here and there. still it looked very nice, and anne and maud admired it very much. so did serry, only she said she'd have liked it better with high pews and curtains to draw round the big square ones. just fancy that! 'you _couldn't_ think it was nicer like that,' i said. 'not prettier, but there must have been such jolly corners and hiding-places,' said serena. her head was full of hiding. 'there'd be nowhere to hide in this church. you'd be seen in a minute.' 'nobody wants to hide in church,' i said; 'that's not what people come for.' 'they _might_ though,' said serena; 'that's to say, supposing any one got locked up in a church all night, they'd like to have some comfortable corner to creep into where nobody could get at them.' 'but there'd be nobody _to_ get at them,' said anne. 'i don't say i'd like at all to be shut up in a church all night; still, the best of it would be you'd know you were safe from anybody.' serry didn't seem convinced. 'i don't know,' she said. 'there might be--well, bats and owls and things like that, and then there'd be _feelings_. you'd be sure to fancy there were people or things there, and it wouldn't be half so frightening if you could get into a pew with a carpet, and make a bed of the cushions and hassocks.' 'eh,' said nurse all of a sudden, 'you put me in mind, miss serry, of an old story my mother told me when i was a child.' 'oh, do tell it us,' cried maud. but nurse said we must wait, of course, till we were out of the church. nurse has quite proper feelings about churches, though, when she was little, she belonged to the scotch kirk, you know, which is different. she said she'd tell us the story either on the way home or after tea when we were all sitting together in our kitchen-parlour, for it was too damp an evening for us to go out again. and at first we thought we'd have the story on the way home, but then we settled we'd wait till the evening. for there were plenty of things to amuse us going home; i had to show them the post office and the shops--we went farther down the village on purpose,--and i don't think stories are ever quite so nice when people are walking as when they're sitting still. we all felt quite hungry when we got back to the farm, and we were very glad that it was nearly tea time. nurse was very pleased, for anne and maud had never got back their good appetites since they'd been ill, though serry had never lost hers all through--i don't much think _anything_ would make serry lose her good appetite,--and of course _i'd_ kept all right. after tea we helped nurse to clear away. we always did that at mossmoor, for you see mums had promised mrs. parsley that we should give as little trouble as possible,--it wasn't as if she had been a lodging-house keeper, and she had only one servant who was rather rough and clumsy. we liked doing it too, and dear mrs. parsley was even better than her word about making us as comfortable as she possibly could. there was scarcely a day that she didn't do something 'extra' to please us. this very evening she had made us some lovely kind of scones for tea. she said they were a kind she had learnt to make up in the north, and she 'wanted to make us feel at home; it must be a bit lonely just at first, and such a wet day to begin.' wasn't it sweet of her? well, as i said, we did justice to the scones, and when tea was over and all nicely tidied up, we brought our chairs near the fire. for it was chilly after the rain, and we were glad of a fire. and nurse got out her knitting--nurse has always got socks for me or stockings for the girls on hand,--and we began to feel very jolly. we _had_ felt a very little lonely, perhaps almost an atom homesick, i think, with the dull morning and the strangeness and the not having father and mother and hebe, even though everything was so nice. 'now for your story, nurse,' said i. 'i hope it's been growing into a very big one all this time we've been waiting for it.' 'no, indeed, master jack,' said nurse, 'it's nothing of the kind. it's scarce to be called a story at all, and but little worth listening to.' but we made her tell it all the same. i'm not going to try to write it in scotch words, for i don't know scotch a bit, and i'm not sure that nurse knows much either, as she's been in england ever since she was very young. so i'll just tell it straight off; anyway it'll be the sense of what she said, though she did put in some extra scotch words. i think she's rather proud when we have to ask her to explain them. nurse's story. 'it was my mother that told it me,' said nurse, 'for it happened to herself when she was a little girl. she lived at home with her father and mother and brothers in a good-sized cottage on the muirness estate, for my grandfather was one of the head men on the place, which belonged to old sir patrick muir. they were a good way--five miles or so--from even a village, and i daresay double as far from the nearest town, which was only a small one. but in those days people were content with stay-at-home lives, and they didn't feel dull or lonely even in very out-of-the-way places. it is a good while ago since my mother was a child. she was not young when she married, and she was nearly forty when i was born, and i'm getting on for that myself now. my grandmother had been rather above my grandfather, for she was the daughter of a well-to-do man who farmed his own land. when my mother was a child these old folk were still living, and their little place was very near muirness; indeed, i believe it was bought several years ago by sir herbert, old sir patrick's grandson, and now belongs to the big estate. 'my mother was a great favourite with her grandfather and grandmother, for she was the only granddaughter, all the others being boys. she used often to go over to oldbiggins farm to stay for a day or two; and her grandmother was very fond of having her from a saturday to a monday to take her to church with them on sunday, and send her back early on monday morning in time to go to school. my mother didn't care for these visits as much as for week-day ones, for her grandmother used to take her to church on sunday morning and keep her there straight on through the afternoon service too, which was really too much for a child. her mother was not so strict, and understood better about children's feelings; and she used always to let mother and her brothers go home after the morning service, even if she stayed on for the afternoon herself. it was five miles away, so it was a long walk, but the old people used to drive in a cart there and back; for if they hadn't done so, they wouldn't have been able to go to church at all. 'one saturday afternoon--it was late in the autumn--mother's grandmother sent over to say that she wanted maggie, that was mother's name, to come to stay till monday, and she should drive to church and back with her on the sunday--the 'sabbath-day' was what they called it always. maggie didn't want much to go, but her mother didn't like to refuse; the old people were kind, and it wouldn't do to vex them. so the child was sent off. she was about eight years old. '"mayn't i come home with my brothers after the morning church is done?" she said. but her mother shook her head. for some reason they were not going till the afternoon. i think somebody was ill. '"if i can get in the afternoon, i'll look out for you, and you can come home with me then, dearie," she said. "tell your grandmother i'd like to have you back to-morrow evening if she doesn't mind." 'the sunday evenings at oldbiggins were rather hard upon a child too, for, on the top of the two long services, the old grandfather always read out a very long sermon, difficult for any one to understand, as he read very feebly, and the words were often puzzling. [illustration: 'her grandmother ... went quietly out of the pew without a notion but that the child was beside her.'--c. x. p. 153.] 'so, with the hope of getting home again before the sunday evening, little maggie started. she was a gentle, quiet child, and the old people had no idea but that she was quite happy and liked the long hours in the church as much as they did. she went to church alone with her grandmother and the farm-man who drove the cart, and they took with them a packet of bread-and-butter, or bread-and-jam maybe--what was called "a piece"--to eat outside the church between the two services. there was only an hour between them. maggie looked out for her own people before she and her grandmother went back into the church again, but they must have been a little late, and the old lady liked to be in her place in good time, so the child did not see them. but she thought to herself she'd be sure to meet them after church, and this thought kept her quiet, though she couldn't possibly get a glimpse of them from her corner of the high pew, even if she had dared to look about. she must have been very tired, and she had cried in bed the night before, and i daresay the cold air outside made it feel warm in the church, anyway this was what happened. the poor little thing fell fast asleep. and her grandmother, who was very blind except with her glasses on--and she always took them off and put them away when the last psalm had been sung--went quietly out of the pew without a notion but that the child was beside her. 'when maggie woke it was quite dark, the church had been shut up ever so long; there was no evening service. at first she thought she was in bed, and that the clothes had tumbled off her, then feeling about, she found she had her frock and cape and bonnet on, and everything near her was hard and cold, not like bed at all. and by bits it all came back to her mind--her last waking thoughts in church, and how she was hoping to see her mother,--and she began to take in where she was. i've always thought it was really dreadful for her, and she must have been a brave, sensible child-i know she grew up a brave, sensible woman. for, though she couldn't help crying at first with loneliness and cold and the queer sort of fear, she soon settled to do the best she could. there was some moonlight coming in at one window, though not much, but enough to make her see where the pulpit was, and up into the pulpit maggie climbed, because she had an idea she'd be safer there; and it certainly was warmer, for it was a sort of little box with a door to it, and there were one or two stools and cushions and some red cloth hanging round the top, which miss maggie ventured to pull down and wrap round her. and there she composed herself to sleep, and sleep she did, in spite of her loneliness and hunger--oh, i forgot to say she found a wee bit of her "piece" still in her pocket,--till the sunshine woke her up the next morning, for luckily it was a bright mild day. then down she came, and walked up and down the aisles as fast as she dared, considering it was a church, to get her cramped legs warm again, and just as she was thinking what she was to do to get out, the door opened, to her delight, and in came the man who had care of the church--what we call a verger--followed by the old body who cleaned and swept it. 'they _were_ astonished, as you can fancy; such a thing had never happened before within the memory of man. 'old peter took her off with him to his cottage, and his wife gave her some hot breakfast, and then he borrowed a cart and drove maggie home--straight home to muirness, not to oldbiggins. it was home maggie wanted to go, you may be sure, and when peter heard the story, he declared her granny deserved a good fright for not looking after her better. "p'raps she thought i'd run off to mother and the boys," said maggie. 'and that was just what it turned out to be. 'the old lady, instead of being frightened, was very angry. she had stayed talking to some friend at the church door, and somehow her daughter and the boys had fancied she and maggie had driven off, not seeing them about. maggie's mother was in a hurry to get home to the one that was ill, and just thought the little girl had gone back quietly with her grandmother till the next morning. and when the granny had missed the child, _she_ thought maggie had run off to her mother--for some one called out that mistress gray and her children had driven off,--and was too offended to send to muirness to ask! 'and at home they hadn't missed her of course. so, after all, maggie wasn't made much of a heroine of, for all she'd been so brave and sensible. 'but i'm sure she never minded that, so glad was she to be in her own dear home again, safe and sound. and you may be sure her mother petted her enough to make up all she could for the poor little thing's disagreeable adventure. it was talked of through the country-side for many a day after that. maybe it is still.' 'and i hope they never let her go back to that horrid old grandmother again,' said anne. 'nay, my dear, she wasn't so bad as that. but old people have their ways.' 'i think our gran is _much_ nicer than that,' said maud in her clear little voice. and i'm sure we all agreed with her. but we all thanked nurse very nicely for telling us the story, which was really very interesting. and it gave us a good deal to talk about. chapter xi mischief in the air yes, it gave us a good deal to talk about. stories that do that are much the nicest; they seem to make themselves over and over, and to last so long. we talked for some days after that, about what we'd each of us do if _we_ were locked up all night alone in a church, and we made ever so many plans. and the next sunday--that was our first one at mossmoor,--when we all came home from church and were at dinner, serena astonished us very much, when nurse said she'd been a very good girl, for she's generally a dreadful fidget, by saying quite coolly-'oh, i didn't mind the sermon a bit to-day, though it was very long. for i was settling all the time what i'd do if i was like maggie in _that_ church. and i know quite well, only i won't tell any of you. so if ever _i'm_ lost on a sunday you'll have a nice hunt.' she tossed back her head the way she does when she means to be aggravating. 'you silly girl,' said maud in her superior way, 'you couldn't hide in that church not to be found. you're so boasty. and if you did, there'd be no fun in it.' serry gave another toss, and a particular sort of a smile. that smile meant mischief. 'miss serena's certainly very clever at hiding places,' said nurse. 'but there couldn't be very much cleverness wanted to hide in a church; it's not like finding out queer places you'd never think of in a house. now, i daresay, miss serry, if it came a very wet day again while we're here and mrs. parsley let you have a good game, as i've no doubt she would, i daresay you'd keep us hunting like anything.' 'i daresay i could,' said serry. but i knew by her voice that _she_ knew that nurse was speaking that way on purpose to put hiding in the church out of her head. for, as i've said, serry's very queer; for all she's so changeable and flighty, there are times that if she takes up a thing, _nothing_ will get it from her--make her drop it, i mean,--till she's done it. and she'd gone on so about hiding in the church that i think nurse was a little uncomfortable. perhaps she began to wish she hadn't told us the story of her mother, but i wouldn't say so, for i didn't want to vex her. she'd been really so very kind. after that sunday, however, for some weeks nothing more was said about it, and we left off talking of the maggie story. we had so many other things to do and to speak about. the weather got all right again, even better than before, for every day now was getting us nearer and nearer into the real summer; though, of course, even in the middle of summer there do come cold wet bits, just like our first day at mossmoor. but for some time we had nothing but lovely weather. it's a very drying soil all about fewforest; after two or three fine days, even in the woods, the ground is so dry that you'd think it hadn't rained since the world was made. it's partly with the trees being mostly firs which are so neat and bare low down--no mess of undergrowth about them. and the soil is very nice, so beautifully clean and crunchy to walk on, for it's made of the pricks that fall off the firs, in great part. it's perfectly splendid to lie on--springy and yielding and not a bit dirty--your things don't get soiled in the least. they say, too, that the scent or breath of pines and firs--i think it's rather nice to think it's the sweet breath of the trees, don't you?--is awfully good for coughs or illnesses to do with coughs. so it suited us very well indeed to spend a great part of our time in the woods. and certainly the girls' coughs soon went quite away. i was glad. i really could _hardly_ help hitting them sometimes when they would go on barking and whooping, even though i suppose they couldn't stop it. they still coughed a little if they ran too fast, or if they got excited or angry. i do believe serry pretended it sometimes just to be aggravating, for she was in rather an aggravating humour at that time. i think it was partly from not having hebe, who has such a good way with her, and as anne and maud always stick together, you see serena was rather left to me, and i don't pretend to have a good way with her at all, she makes me so angry. though we get on a good deal better now than we did then. still, on the whole, we were very happy indeed. we did a little lessons--at least anne and i did regularly. miss stirling had set me some latin and french, and anne didn't want to get behind me in latin, so she did it with me, and she was very good in helping me with my french, for she's much farther on than me in french. that was in the mornings, for an hour or so. then we used to go what nurse calls a 'good bracing walk,' right over the heath that edges the woods, for two or three miles sometimes. we used to come in for dinner pretty hungry, i can tell you. but mrs. parsley didn't mind how much she had to cook for us. she was as pleased as if you'd given her a present when nurse said she never had known our appetites so good. sometimes we met the getting-well children from the home. but i rather fancy the people there had heard about the whooping-cough; for though the young lady who was with them smiled at us very nicely always, she rather shoo'd them away from us. and it was always the same round-faced, beamy-looking girl--not miss cross-at-first, certainly. then in the afternoons we mostly played or sat about the woods, coming in for tea, and sometimes, when it was very fine and mild, nurse let us go out again a little after tea. but if it was the least chilly or windy or anything, she wouldn't let the girls go out, and then we sat all together playing games, or now and then telling stories till bed-time. very often dear mrs. parsley would come in, and we always made her sit down and talk to us. and sometimes i'd go out a stroll by myself in the evening--towards the village generally, for there was often a letter to post or some little message for nurse to the shop. and then i got another reason for walking that way in the evening, which i'll tell you about directly. we had been five weeks at the farm when one day we got very jolly news from mums. the news had been pretty jolly all the time; hebe had gone on getting better, though the doctor at ventnor had thought her very weak at first, and so she and mums had stayed on longer than they'd expected they would. but this letter told that they had really fixed a day for coming back to london, and that the nice ventnor doctor said no air could be better for hebe now than fewforest, and so mums was going to bring her down the very next friday to be with us for the last three weeks. mums was coming herself too, to stay from friday to monday, for father had to be away with gran those two days. gran was at brighton, i think, but he was coming back now mums would be there. there was a postscript to the letter--it was to anne,--in which mums said she might perhaps want nurse to come up to london for a few hours to see about clothes or something. 'if i do,' she wrote, 'do you think i can trust you and jack to take care of the two little ones? i am sure mrs. parsley would be most kind, but of course i do not want to give her more trouble than we can help.' 'oh,' said serena, when anne had read all that aloud--i wished she had stopped before the postscript--'that would be fun. we'd lead old jack a dance wouldn't we, maud? as for anne, we'd find her a new book, and then she wouldn't trouble us.' maud looked at her with scorn, but would not condescend to speak. i do believe from that moment serry settled to play some kind of trick if we _were_ left alone. but when i said to anne that i hoped to goodness we shouldn't be left in charge of serry, she only said it would be all right; serry made herself out worse than she was, and so on. anne _is_ so easygoing. now i must tell you why i liked strolling down to the church in the evenings. it only began the week before hebe and mums were to come. i happened to have gone to the village rather late with a letter, and, coming back, i noticed that there was some light in the church, even though it wasn't the time for any service. and, standing still for a moment, suddenly i heard the organ begin. some one was playing it. the door was a little open, and i went inside the porch and found i could hear quite well. it was beautiful, far nicer than on sundays, and after a while i heard singing too. such lovely singing--it was a woman's voice--and she sang some of the things i liked best, and i stayed there listening as long as i dared. the next evening i couldn't come, but the one after that i did, and she was there again, and i listened ever so long. after that i came whenever i could; sometimes she was there and sometimes not,--it was rather fun wondering if she would be. i told anne about it, and she said she'd like awfully to come with me one evening, but we didn't know how to manage it, for we really couldn't tell serry. she'd have teased so to come too, and she'd have spoilt it all with her fidgeting, and if we'd told nurse and asked her to let us go without the little ones, serry would have made some sort of a fuss i'm sure. so i just kept on going whenever i could, though very often there was no music. and i promised anne that the first chance i could see i'd take her too. mums wrote for nurse to go up to london on the thursday--just the day before she and hebe were coming. nurse was to go up by an afternoon train, and she'd get back about nine in the evening, mums wrote; and we--anne and i--might help to put the little ones to bed, and then we might sit up till nurse came back. there was really nothing to be anxious about, mrs. parsley was so kind, and really we were old enough to be left an hour or two by ourselves. still nurse seemed a little uneasy. i'm sure it was all about serena. anne and i promised her we'd be awfully careful and good. 'i know i can depend upon you, master jack,' said nurse. we were alone at the time--she and i--'and really miss anne is wonderfully improved. since the diamond ornament was lost, and it being partly through her fault, she's hardly like the same young lady. it's an ill wind that does nobody any good, they say; perhaps miss serry will take a sensible turn after a while.' 'i hope it won't have to cost another diamond ornament, and us all having whooping-cough again--no, i suppose you can't have it twice, but i daresay there are plenty of other illnesses just as horrid or horrider,' i said rather grumpily. 'i hope not,' said nurse, 'though i would really be thankful if miss serry would take thought. there's never any saying what she'll be after next. the rest of the nursery work all put together isn't above half what the mending and tidying up of her things alone is.' serry could take thought if she chose; she had an uncommonly, good memory when it suited her. this was the day before nurse was going. i had found out by now that the music at the church was mostly every other evening, and as i'd heard it the night before, very likely the lady would be playing and singing again the next day. so all of a sudden i thought i'd better tell nurse about it, and get leave to go if it was a fine evening with anne, and mrs. parsley would take care of the little ones. nurse wasn't sure about it, but when i told her very likely serry would be better alone with maud and mrs. parsley than if we were all together the whole long evening, she gave in. 'very well,' she said, 'but don't you and miss anne stay out late--not above half an hour.' i promised her we wouldn't. anne was very pleased, only she said wouldn't it perhaps be better if we all four went; it would be a little treat for serry to look forward to, and perhaps it would keep her good the rest of the time. i thought afterwards anne had been right, but i wouldn't agree with her when she said it. i didn't want serry at all; i wouldn't have minded maud, but i knew serry would spoil it all. so i said to anne it would never do; they'd fidget or make a noise, and the lady who was playing might hear us and be vexed, and it would be horrid to have any fuss in a church, we might get scolded by the verger or possibly even the clergyman,--what _would_ father and mother and gran think of such a thing? anne gave in. but i gave in to her a bit too. she said it was much best to make no mystery about it. serry was as sharp as a needle about mysteries, and she'd only set herself to find out. so that thursday morning at breakfast--the day nurse was to be away--i said quietly, 'anne and i are going to church this evening for half an hour. nurse, please tell serry that she and maud may stay with mrs. parsley in her kitchen while we're out.' 'yes,' said nurse. 'you hear, miss serry and miss maud. it'll make a little change for you.' 'i like being in mrs. parsley's kitchen for a while in the evening very much, don't you, serry?' said maud. but serry did not answer. i think she pretended not to hear. still she couldn't make out now that she hadn't been properly told. well, with many charges and warnings, poor nurse set off. the red-eared boy drove her to the station, and we ran over the fields by a short cut to a stile on to the road, where we could see her pass, and there we shouted out again all our messages to mums and hebe--nurse couldn't possibly have remembered all the things we told her to say, and it didn't matter certainly, considering we were going to see them the very next day. the first part of the afternoon we got on all right. we'd had dinner earlier than usual, so that nurse should be in time for the train, and after she was fairly off we went out into the woods with baskets to get all the flowers we could for mums and hebe--i mean to make the rooms look nice for them. there weren't very many, for of course the spring flowers were over, and it was too early for the regular summer ones. besides, the spring is always the best time for flowers that grow in the woods. still we got some, pretty nice, and some trails of ivy and these pretty reddy leaves that you can find most of the year. and we got a lot of fir cones too--mums does so love the scent of them in the fire, and as people often feel a little chilly when they first come out to the country, we fixed we'd have a nice fire in the evening, and make it nearly all of the cones. after that we went in and arranged our flowers; there's always lots of moss in the woods, and with moss you can make a good show even with very little. then there came tea-time. we were a good while over tea, for even though serry had been all right so far, both anne and i felt a little fidgety-serry was almost _too_ good, if you understand. it was half-past five, or nearer six than that, i daresay, when we had finished tea. anne and i wanted to go to the church about a quarter to seven, meaning to be back before half-past, which was the two little ones' bed-time, so that we could help mrs. parsley if she needed us. mrs. parsley looked rather worried when she came in to take away the tea things--not _crossly_ worried, for she was as kind as could be, but just troubled. and afterwards we knew that the reason was that an old aunt of theirs who lived a mile or two off was very ill, and had sent for her, but she didn't like to go because of leaving us. she didn't tell us; i almost think it would have been better if she had, for then anne and i would have given up going out and have looked after serry and maud till nurse came back. only, if we _had_ done that, very likely nothing would have happened the same, and the wond----no, i must go straight on. well, we played 'patience,' and did everything we could to please serry till about half-past six. did i tell you that there's a very jolly old clock in the parsley's summer kitchen?--so we always know the time. then i said to anne i thought she might go and get ready, and we might as well start, and 'you two,' i said to serry and maud, 'can go to mrs. parsley till we come back.' maud began gathering up the cards and counters and things we'd been playing with, and putting them together tidily--she's always so tidy,--but serry had got a 'patience' half set out. 'do let me finish this,' she said, 'and then i promise you i'll go into mrs. parsley's kitchen.' 'you promise,' i said. by this time anne had come downstairs with her hat and jacket on, and i was standing by the door with my cap in my hand. 'promise,' said serena, 'word of honour.' well, she's not a story-teller after all, and she wouldn't break a right-down promise like that, so i thought it was all right. 'we shan't be long,' i said, and off we set, anne and i, thinking we had managed beautifully. it was very nice and peaceful outside; anne is really very jolly when you get her alone and she isn't thinking of some book or other she's reading, and we quite enjoyed the little walk. the church was open as usual, but there was no sound of music yet, only there was a light up in the organ loft, which i was sure showed the lady was coming, though anne thought it was perhaps only a reflection of the evening light through the window. but i knew by this time that it was always pretty dark up by the organ, except perhaps in the very middle of the day in very bright weather. we didn't stay in the porch like i'd done at first. i had found a nice little corner just inside, where we could hear beautifully, and yet slip out in a moment, _in case_ any one came and found fault. and there we sat quite happily, and in a minute or two we heard a hum beginning and then some notes, and then the playing started properly. it was beautiful. anne squeezed my hand, and i felt quite proud of having found it out--like a showman, you know. but 'wait till you hear her singing,' i whispered. she was still only playing, _luckily_, when, what _do_ you think happened? the big door behind us was slowly pushed openly, and in walked, as cool as twenty cucumbers, two small figures, giving us--no that was only serry--a condescending little nod and smile as they slipped into a seat almost alongside ours. chapter xii miss cross-at-first's fur cape i couldn't help it, even though it was in church, i felt so boiling. i jumped up and caught hold of serry's arm and pulled her out into the porch. poor maud came too of herself, and when we got outside into the light, i saw that she looked pale and frightened. then anne appeared, quite puzzled and dazed, for she'd been all up in the music and had almost forgotten where she was, or if she was anywhere, as she does sometimes. _i_ was all there though. i closed the door so that our voices couldn't possibly be heard from the inside, and then i faced round upon serry. 'what's the meaning of this?' i said. 'the very moment nurse's back is turned you begin disobeying her?' serena's eyes sparkled. she has very funny eyes. sometimes, when she's very mischievous, they look really green, though sometimes they're very pretty. 'then you shouldn't go plotting for you and anne to have treats, and to keep us out of them,' she said. '"treats,"--nonsense,' said. 'as if it was a _treat_. a simple thing like this, coming down to listen to the organ.' 'well, why shouldn't maud and i have a simple pleasure too?' 'you don't care for music, at least you hate sitting still, and maud was quite happy at the farm. _she_ didn't want to come.' 'no, jack, truly i didn't,' said maud almost crying. 'but serry said if i didn't she'd run off into the wood and hide herself so that we couldn't find her. and she told the servant to tell mrs. parsley we'd gone with you after all, and we'd be all home soon. and mrs. parsley was upstairs, and she called down, "all right, my dears," and serry said if i said anything she'd----' i never knew what serry had said she'd do, for now maud began crying, and anne put her arms round her, and kissed and comforted her. then anne and i looked at each other. what should we do? after all it wasn't a very big thing; it wouldn't do any harm for them to sit listening to the music too if serry would be quiet. and perhaps she would be, to make up for having been so naughty. so i said, 'as you are here, you had better stay. take maud into the church, anne. i'll look after serry.' but when i was going to take hold of serry she slipped away. 'i won't be pulled and dragged about,' she said. 'i'll go into a corner and be quite quiet if you'll leave me alone, but i'll scream if you don't.' just then the singing began. i _didn't_ want to miss any of it, and serry was more likely to be quiet if i gave in. so i let her go; she went in before me very quickly, right into a corner as she said, and she gave me a sort of a nod over her shoulder. i hoped it meant she was going to be sensible. [illustration: 'we all three sat listening and listening.'--c. xii. p. 175.] the singing was most beautiful that night. we all three sat listening and listening. i think anne soon went up into the clouds again and forgot everything else. maudie liked it too; she leant against me, but every now and then i felt her shiver, and little sobs went through her. maud scarcely ever cries, but when she does it seems to tire her out. and serry had worried her very badly. 'are you cold, dear?' i whispered, and she said she was a little. serry had hurried her out without seeing that she was properly wrapped up, and it was a chilly evening, i forgot to say. perhaps it would have been better if i had made them all come away then, but it did seem such a pity to miss the singing. i think it was 'angels ever bright and fair,' but i'm not sure. we've heard so many of her beautiful songs since then that i'm not sure which it was. suddenly we heard the door pushed open, and some one came into the church. it was a girl; she came in very quickly, and hurried up the aisle and in through a door or a curtain somewhere at the side. it was already darker than when we came. a minute after, we heard talking--the singing had stopped, i forgot to say--and then two people came out at the side, and hurried back again down the aisle and out at the door. it was the person who had been playing, and the girl who had come evidently to fetch her. they didn't shut the door to, only closed it a little. 'what a pity,' said anne, 'she's been fetched away.' 'yes,' said i, 'but maudie's rather cold. perhaps it's best for us to go home,' and we got up and went towards the door. i looked round for serry. she wasn't in the corner we had seen her in. 'i expect serry's outside in the porch,' i said to anne. but no, she wasn't. 'she was sitting in the same place just before the girl came in,' said anne. 'i saw her.' 'she can't have gone home,' i said. 'she's not very fond of walking about alone. she must be somewhere in the church.' and then all of a sudden there came over me the remembrance of her boast about being able to hide in the church so that we couldn't find her. was that what she had been after? was that her reason for following us, that she thought it would be a good chance for playing us this trick? it was too bad. there was poor maud tired and cold, and anne and me who had been worried enough already. i really felt as if i couldn't stand it. i asked maud what she thought, but of course serry hadn't said a word to her about hiding. it wasn't likely she would, but every minute we got surer that she _was_ hiding. you can't shout out in a church, and yet it wasn't easy to hunt. we began; we poked into any of the dark corners we could think of, and behind the doors and curtains, and even in the pulpit, though it was a sort of open-work that a mouse could scarcely have hidden in--not like the one in the 'maggie' story. but it was all no use, and it was more provoking than you can fancy to know that all the time the naughty child was hearing us, and laughing at us. we went on for a quarter of an hour or more, i daresay; then i determined i'd bother no more. 'stop, anne,' i said, in a low voice, 'i'm not going to----' but anne interrupted me. 'i hear something,' she said. 'listen; what is it?' there was a little sound of footsteps, but not inside the church, i thought. still it _might_ be serry; she might have slipped out to baffle us. but first i thought i'd try my new idea. i slipped out as near the middle as i could, and then i said, loud and clear, though not shouting, of course--do you know i felt quite frightened when i heard my own voice so loud, it seemed so unreverent-'serena'--this was what i said--'you can hear me quite well, i know, so i give you fair warning that if you don't come out before i finish counting twelve we'll go home, and leave you to yourself--to stay here all night if you choose.' then i began, 'one, two, three, four'--was it fancy, or did i hear a little smothered laugh just as i was going to say 'five?'--but then all was still again, and i went on, till, just as i was, you may say, on the stroke of 'twelve,' there came a flutter and rush down the aisle, and there was miss serry, tossing her hair back, her eyes looking, i am sure, if there had been light enough to see them by, very bright green indeed. but, just as she appeared, there came another sound--a harsh, rasping, grating sound,--a queer feeling went through me as i heard it, only i was so taken up with serry that i didn't seem to have attention to spare, and i didn't really take in for the moment what it meant. there was serry as triumphant as could be. 'i don't mind coming out now,' she said. 'i've proved that you couldn't find me.' 'you have been about as naughty as you could be,' said anne, 'and whether jack tells mother all about it or not, i know _i_ shall.' serena did not answer. she really seemed startled. it is not often that anne takes that tone. she used to be so constantly in scrapes herself--about carelessness, and forgettings, and losings, and all that sort of thing--that i think she felt as if she had no right to find fault with others. but after a moment serry got back her coolness. 'well, anyway i've gained,' she said. 'you don't know where i was hidden, and you'd never have found me.' and to this day she has never told us! 'let us get home now as fast as we can,' said anne; 'there is poor maudie shivering with cold. i'm afraid she's got a chill.' we turned towards the door, but suddenly the remembrance of the sound i had heard came back to me, and a great fear went through me. i hurried on. yes, it was too true; the door was locked, locked from the outside, and we were prisoners--prisoners pretty certainly for the night! i faced round upon the girls and told them. 'i remember hearing the sound of locking,' i said. but at first they wouldn't believe me; i could scarcely believe it myself. we rattled and shook at the door in the silly way people do in such cases; of course it was no use. then we made journeys round the church to all the other doors; none of them had been open in the daytime, so it wasn't likely they would be now. then we considered together if it would be any use shouting, but we were sure it wouldn't be. there was no house very near the church; the convalescent home, on rising ground a little behind it, was about the nearest, and we knew our voices could never be heard there. and we were too far back from the road to hope that any passer-by would hear us; beside which, unluckily, it was a windy night--the wind had risen a good deal since we had come out. we could hear it outside, and it almost sounded as if it was raining too. 'there is nothing for it,' i said at last, 'but to stay quietly and make ourselves as comfortable as we can till some one comes to let us out. mrs. parsley is sure to miss us and send, as she knows where we are. the great thing is to keep poor maud from catching cold.' i wasn't cold myself; i had been moving about, and then i wasn't getting well of an illness like the girls. so i took off my ulster and made maudie put it on. there were no cushions in the church, but we collected all the hassocks we could, and built up a sort of little nest, and then we all huddled in together. it was fast getting dark, and after we had been sitting there a while we heard the clock outside strike eight. i couldn't make it out; they _must_ have missed us at the farm before this. but they hadn't, and i may as well explain here--a lot of explainings together at the end are so confusing, i think--how it was. you remember my saying mrs. parsley had had bad news that day. well, just as serry called out to her that she and maud were coming with us after all, another message had come that she _must_ go at once to the old lady who was so ill. there was no choice, she had to go, so the horse was put to and the red-eared boy drove her off. mr. parsley hadn't come in, so all she could do was to tell the servant we'd all be in soon, and she must tell us what had happened, and that she'd send the cart back to the station to meet nurse at nine. now, the servant was very stupid; she got 'nine' into her head, and when mr. parsley came in about half-past seven she told him we were all to be in at nine; and he said afterwards he'd got some vague idea that we had all gone in the cart to meet nurse. anyhow, he wasn't a bit uneasy, and after he'd had his supper he set off walking to the old aunt's to see how she was, and to arrange about mrs. parsley staying all night if she had to. so you see, till nurse got back, there was no one to be uneasy about us. but _we_ didn't know it, and there we sat, more and more puzzled, and even frightened in a strange sort of way. it seemed as if we'd dropped out of the world and nobody cared. 'at the worst,' i whispered to anne, 'when nurse comes they'll hunt us up. she knows we were to be in the church, and she'll think of the maggie story.' 'only,' said anne, '_suppose_ she misses her train, or that it's very late. it's maudie i'm so unhappy about, jack. hush----' for we heard a little sob, and we didn't want to wake her. she had fallen asleep, and anne and i were both cuddling her close to keep her warm. 'is she waking?' i said, very low. but anne pinched my hand. the sob wasn't from maud, it was from serry. i must say i was rather glad. it was about time for her to sob and cry, i thought. we waited on and on. after a bit i think anne and serry too got drowsy, and perhaps i did myself. anyhow, i grew stupid, and as if i didn't care; but i was very cold too. it seemed such a tremendous time. i heard a story not long ago of a man who got shut in somewhere--i think it was in the catacombs, or some place like that--who went through, as he thought, days of it. he grew terribly hungry, for one thing, and ate his candle, and was released just when he believed he was at the last gasp, and after all he'd only been there three hours! it did seem absurd, but i can quite believe it. he'd lost all sense of time, you see. well, i suppose it was rather like that with us. i know, when at last we heard the clock strike, i was _sure_ it was going on to twelve. i couldn't _believe_ it was only nine! 'anne,' i whispered, 'are you awake? how ever are we to wait here till to-morrow morning? it's only nine o'clock!' 'nurse will be coming home soon then,' said anne, hopefully; 'she'll _never_ wait till to-morrow morning to find us.' 'i don't know,' i said. 'i can't make anything out. i think it's as if we were all dead and buried, and nobody cares.' 'hush,' said a clear little voice; 'that's not good, jack. _god_ cares, always.' 'it was poor little maudie, and again i heard the choky sob from serena. just then, as if in answer to maud, _at last_ we heard a sound, or sounds--voices and footsteps, and then the grating of the key in the lock. 'they've come for us, they've come for us!' we cried, and up we all jumped. it was quite dark, but as the door opened a light came in; the people, whoever they were, had a lantern. but it wasn't mr. parsley, nor his wife, nor the red-eared boy, nor any one we knew--at least, not any one we expected. it was--the light was full in her face, and she was frowning just the sort of way i remembered--it was miss cross-at-first! and just fancy what i did? i ran at her, i was so confused and stupid, calling her _that_! 'oh, miss cross-at-first,' i said, 'please let us out! we've been locked in, hours, and maud is so cold!' it must have been awfully muddling for _her_. she frowned worse than ever, and turned to the girl with her--a girl about fifteen, not a lady, but very nice. 'who are they, linny?' she said. 'do you know?' but linny shook her head. 'some mistake,' she began, but i interrupted her. 'i'll tell you who we are,' i said. 'you know us, and we know you, but i can't remember your proper name,' and then it flashed upon me what i had called her, and i got scarlet. 'my name isn't "crossley," or whatever you said,' she began (oh, how thankful i was she hadn't heard properly! _afterwards_ we told her the name we'd given her, and she didn't mind a bit), 'but i seem to know you. i'm staying at the home here. i left my music in church, for i went off in a hurry. but what in the world were you all doing here?' 'we came to listen to you,' i said, and then anne went on to explain. she did it so nicely, not exactly putting the blame on serry, which would not have been kind just then, but she quite made miss merthyr understand. 'you poor little souls!' she exclaimed. 'of course, i remember hearing you were somewhere down here, but i've been away. i only came back again a few days ago. and maud, poor child, you _do_ look blue. i'll tell you what, come back to the home with me and get warm. linny, run back and tell them to heat some milk, and then linny and i will wrap you up and take you home.' 'but,' said a little voice, 'won't the getting-well children catch the whooping-cough?' judith--that's what we always call her now--couldn't help laughing. it was maud who had said it. 'the home children are all in bed and asleep long ago,' she said. 'they'll run no risk, and i've not heard any of you coughing. i'm sure the infection's over. so come along. oh, my music! linny, take the lantern; oh no, she's gone! never mind, i'll get it on my way home. i don't want the organist to confuse it with his.' and in five minutes we found ourselves in the kitchen at the home, in front of a jolly fire, and with nice hot milk to drink. for it really was a cold night; it had been raining, too, pretty sharply. the other ladies at the home--there were two, and two servants--were very nice to us. but maud kept hold of miss cross-at-first's hand as if she couldn't let go. 'now, we must get you home,' said judith. 'let's see, how can we wrap you up? why, this is your brother's jacket. my boy, _you_ must have been cold! here, put on your coat, and i'll fetch some shawls and things. i have a bundle i have never undone since i came, for it hasn't been cold till now.' she flew upstairs, and was down again in a moment. 'here's a shawl for each of you,' she said to anne and serry; 'and here, oh yes, this short fur tippet will be just the thing for maud. i didn't know i'd got it here.' it was a nice little cape, with a hood at the back. she opened it out and gave it a shake, as people often do when a thing has been folded up, and--something hard dropped out of it and rolled on to the stone floor with a clatter. 'what's that?' said judith. 'there must have been some pin or something caught in the fur. i haven't worn it for ever so long--not since----' she stooped and looked about a little on the floor. but she is near-sighted--that's why she frowns so,--and she didn't see anything. 'never mind, i daresay it was only a safety-pin,' she said. 'here, maudie, dear,' and she held out the cape. but anne had been looking about on the floor too, and suddenly she made a dive under a table standing at one side. when she stood up again her face looked all--i don't know how. 'jack,' she said, as if she were choking, 'it's----' and she held out her hand. there, on her palm--looking not quite so bright as the last time we had seen it, but otherwise none the worse--lay _the diamond ornament_, gran's curious old-fashioned treasure, which had caused poor mums and anne, and indeed all of us, so much trouble and distress. i gasped. i couldn't speak. judith stared. 'what is it?' she said. then i tried to get my voice. 'it's the thing that was lost,' i said, 'worth ever so much, and an heirloom too. didn't you know? cousin dorothea knew. mother lost it the day of the drawing-room. oh,' as light began to break in upon me, 'it must have dropped on to your cape and caught in the fur--it is very fuzzy fur--and there it's been ever since! oh, to think of it!' 'yes,' said judith, 'there it has been ever since. i've never had on the cape since, and my maid put it in with these shawls when i was coming down here. i remember her saying it might be cold here sometimes. no, i never heard a word about the ornament being lost. you know i didn't come back to your house that day; i went straight home. i wonder i never heard of it. but i've been in germany till lately; and if i had heard of it i don't think i would ever have thought of this little cape. it must have fallen into the hood of my cape in the carriage. i remember i sat beside mrs. warwick. it is really wonderful!' wasn't it? we could talk of nothing else all the way to the farm, for we set off almost at once, and we only got there in time to prevent poor nurse and mrs. parsley from being most terribly frightened about us, as they had just arrived, mrs. parsley having driven to the station to pick up nurse on her own way home, as the old aunt was a little better, and she'd got a neighbour to come in for the night. nurse was rather uneasy when she heard from mrs. parsley that she'd had to leave us, still fanny, the servant, was very good-natured, and, as mrs. parsley said, it was difficult to think what harm _could_ come to us in a couple of hours. certainly, getting locked up in church was a very out-of-the-way sort of accident to happen! but the finding the diamond brooch seemed to put everything else out of our heads. i don't know how late we didn't sit up talking. maudie grew quite bright again, and i think the excitement kept her from catching cold. serry, for a wonder, was the quietest of all. she told me afterwards that she was more thankful than she could say that her naughtiness hadn't done maud any harm, and she told it all to mother--all of her own self. i think that was good of her. the only thing she kept up her mischief about was that she _never_ has told us where she hid. we made a beautiful plan with miss cross-at-first--judith, i mean. she was to go with us to the station the next morning to meet mums and hebe, with the diamond brooch in a nice little box she found for it. and we carried out the plan exactly. mother _was_ astonished when she saw judith, and very pleased even before she knew what had happened. and she thought us all looking _so_ well. no wonder we were all so happy, just bursting to tell her. and i _can't_ tell you how delighted she was, and how wonderful she thought it. she sent off a telegram that minute--we went to the post office on purpose--to gran, for he had really been so good about it. it really seemed too much happiness to be all together again, and dear old hebe looking so well, and poor little sweet mums so bright and merry. the rest of the time at fewforest passed very jollily, though we had no particular adventures. we've been there two or three times since, and we like it extra much if it happens to be miss cross-at-first's turn at the getting-well home, for we've grown _awfully_ fond of her. we count her one of our very most particular friends, and she sings _so_ beautifully. that's all i have to write about just now. it seems to finish up pretty well. i daresay i shall write more some day, for things are always happening, unless being at school gets me out of the way of it. perhaps even if it does i'll write stories like father when i'm a man. if ever i do, and if people like them (i'm afraid they'd never be anything like his), it would be rather funny to remember that i was only eleven when i wrote my first one--about the girls and me! the end july, 1892. a classified catalogue of books in general literature published by macmillan and co. bedford street, strand, london, w.c. _for purely educational works see macmillan and co.'s educational catalogue._ * * * * * agriculture. (_see also_ botany; gardening.) frankland (prof. p. f.).--a handbook of agricultural chemical analysis. cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. tanner (henry).--elementary lessons in the science of agricultural practice. fcp. 8vo. 3_s_. 6_d_. ---first principles of agriculture. 18mo. 1_s_. ---the principles of agriculture. for use in elementary schools. ext. fcp. 8vo.--the alphabet of the principles of agriculture. 6_d_.--further steps in the principles of agriculture. 1_s_.--elementary school readings on the principles of agriculture for the third stage. 1_s_. ---the abbot's farm; or, practice with science. cr. 8vo. 3_s_. 6_d_. anatomy, human. (_see_ physiology.) anthropology. brown (j. allen).--palã�olithic man in north-west middlesex. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. dawkins (prof. w. boyd).--early man in britain and his place in the tertiary period. med. 8vo. 25_s_. dawson (james).--australian aborigines. small 4to. 14_s_. finck (henry t.).--romantic love and personal beauty. 2 vols. cr. 8vo. 18_s_. fison (l.)and howitt (a. w.).--kamilaroi and kurnai group. group-marriage and relationship, and marriage by elopement. 8vo. 15_s_. frazer (j. g.).--the golden bough: a study in comparative religion. 2 vols. 8vo. 28_s_. galton (francis).--english men of science: their nature and nurture. 8vo. 8_s_. 6_d_. ---inquiries into human faculty and its development. 8vo. 16_s_. ---record of family faculties. consisting of tabular forms and directions for entering data. 4to. 2_s_. 6_d_. ---life-history album: being a personal note-book, combining diary, photograph album, a register of height, weight, and other anthropometrical observations, and a record of illnesses. 4to. 3_s_. 6_d_.--or with cards of wool for testing colour vision. 4_s_. 6_d_. ---natural inheritance. 8vo. 9_s_. m'lennan (j. f.).--the patriarchal theory. edited and completed by donald m'lennan, m.a. 8vo. 14_s_. ---studies in ancient history. comprising "primitive marriage." 8vo. 16_s_. montelius-woods.--the civilisation of sweden in heathen times. by prof. oscar montelius. translated by rev. f. h. woods. illustr. 8vo. 14_s_. turner (rev. geo.).--samoa, a hundred years ago and long before. cr. 8vo. 9_s_. tylor (e. b.)--anthropology. with illustrations. cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. westermarck (dr. edward).--the history of human marriage. with preface by dr. a. r. wallace. 8vo. 14_s_. net. wilson (sir daniel).--prehistoric annals of scotland. illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo. 36_s_. ---prehistoric man: researches into the origin of civilisation in the old and new world. illustrated. 2 vols. 8vo. 36_s_. ---the right hand: left handedness. cr. 8vo. 4_s_. 6_d_. antiquities. (_see also_ anthropology.) atkinson (rev. j. c.).--forty years in a moorland parish. ext. cr. 8vo. 8_s_. 6_d_. net.--_illustrated edition_. 12_s_. net. burn (robert).--roman literature in relation to roman art. with illustrations. ext. cr. 8vo. 14_s_. dilettanti society's publications. antiquities of ionia. vols. i.-iii. 2_l_. 2_s_. each, or 5_l_. 5_s_. the set, net.--vol. iv. folio, half morocco, 3_l_. 13_s_. 6_d_. net. an investigation of the principles of athenian architecture. by f. c. penrose. illustrated. folio. 7_l_. 7_s_. net. specimens of ancient sculpture: egyptian, etruscan, greek, and roman. vol. ii. folio. 5_l_. 5_s_. net. dyer (louis).--studies of the gods in greece at certain sanctuaries recently excavated. ext. cr. 8vo. 8_s_. 6_d_. net. gardner (percy).--samos and samian coins: an essay. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. gow (j., litt.d.).--a companion to school classics. illustrated. 3rd ed. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. harrison (miss jane) and verrall (mrs.).--mythology and monuments of ancient athens. illustrated. cr. 8vo. 16_s_. lanciani (prof. r.).--ancient rome in the light of recent discoveries. 4to. 24_s_. mahaffy (prof. j. p.).--a primer of greek antiquities. 18mo. 1_s_. ---social life in greece from homer to menander. 6th edit. cr. 8vo. 9_s_. ---rambles and studies in greece. illustrated. 3rd edit. cr. 8vo. 10_s_. 6_d_. (_see also_ history.) newton (sir c. t.).--essays on art and archã�ology. 8vo. 12_s_. 6_d_. shuchhardt (carl).--dr. schliemann's excavations at troy, tiryns, mycenae, orchomenos, ithaca, in the light of recent knowledge. trans. by eugenie sellers. preface by walter leaf, litt.d. illustrated. 8vo. 18_s_. net. strangford. (_see_ voyages & travels.) waldstein (c.).--catalogue of casts in the museum of classical archã�ology, cambridge. crown 8vo. 1_s_. 6_d_.--large paper edition. small 4to. 5_s_. white (gilbert). (_see_ natural history.) wilkins (prof. a. s.).--a primer of roman antiquities. 18mo. 1_s_. archã�ology. (_see_ antiquities.) architecture. freeman (prof. e. a.).--history of the cathedral church of wells. cr. 8vo. 3_s_. 6_d_. ---historical and architectural sketches, chiefly italian. illustrated by the author. cr. 8vo. 10_s_. 6_d_. hull (e.).--a treatise on ornamental and building stones of great britain and foreign countries. 8vo. 12_s_. moore (prof. c. h.).--the development and character of gothic architecture. illustrated. med. 8vo. 18_s_. penrose (f. c.). (_see_ antiquities.) stevenson (j. j.).--house architecture. with illustrations. 2 vols. roy. 8vo. 18_s_. each.--vol. i. architecture; vol. ii. house planning. art. (_see also_ music.) art at home series. edited by w. j. loftie, b.a. cr. 8vo. the bedroom and boudoir. by lady barker. 2_s_. 6_d_. needlework. by elizabeth glaister. illustrated. 2_s_. 6_d_. music in the house. by john hullah. 4th edit. 2_s_. 6_d_. the library. by andrew lang, with a chapter on english illustrated books, by austin dobson. 3_s_. 6_d_. the dining-room. by mrs. loftie. with illustrations. 2nd edit. 2_s_. 6_d_. amateur theatricals. by walter h. pollock and lady pollock. illustrated by kate greenaway. 2_s_. 6_d_. atkinson (j. b.).--an art tour to northern capitals of europe. 8vo. 12_s_. burn (robert). (_see_ antiquities.) carr (j. comyns).--papers on art. cr. 8vo. 8_s_. 6_d_. collier (hon. john).--a primer of art. 18mo. 1_s_. cook (e. t.).--a popular handbook to the national gallery. including notes collected from the works of mr. ruskin. 3rd edit. cr. 8vo, half morocco. 14_s_.--large paper edition, 250 copies. 2 vols. 8vo. crane (lucy).--lectures on art and the formation of taste. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. delamotte (prof. p. h.).--a beginner's drawing-book. cr. 8vo. 3_s_. 6_d_. ellis (tristram).--sketching from nature. illustr. by h. stacy marks, r.a., and the author. 2nd edit. cr. 8vo. 3_s_. 6_d_. hamerton (p. g.).--thoughts about art. new edit. cr. 8vo. 8_s_. 6_d_. herkomer (h.).--etching and mezzotint engraving. 4to. 42_s_. net. hooper (w. h.)and phillips (w. c.).--a manual of marks on pottery and porcelain. 16mo. 4_s_. 6_d_. hunt (w.).--talks about art. with a letter from sir j. e. millais, bart., r.a. cr. 8vo. 3_s_. 6_d_. lectures on art. by regd. stuart poole, professor w. b. richmond, e. j. poynter, r.a., j. t. micklethwaite, and william morris. cr. 8vo. 4_s_. 6_d_. newton (sir c. t.).--(_see_ antiquities.) palgrave (prof. f. t.).--essays on art. ext. fcp. 8vo. 6_s_. pater (w.).--the renaissance: studies in art and poetry. 4th edit. cr. 8vo. 10_s_. 6_d_. pennell (joseph).--pen drawing and pen draughtsmen. with 158 illustrations. 4to. 3_l_. 13_s_. 6_d_. net. propert (j. lumsden).--a history of miniature art. illustrated. super roy. 4to. 3_l_. 13_s_. 6_d_.--bound in vellum. 4_l_. 14_s_. 6_d_. turners liber studiorum: a description and a catalogue. by w. g. rawlinson. med. 8vo. 12_s_. 6_d_. tyrwhitt (rev. r. st. john).--our sketching club. 5th edit. cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. wyatt (sir m. digby).--fine art: a sketch of its history, theory, practice, and application to industry. 8vo. 5_s_. astronomy. airy (sir g. b.).--popular astronomy. illustrated. 7th edit. fcp. 8vo. 4_s_. 6_d_. ---gravitation. an elementary explanation of the principal perturbations in the solar system. 2nd edit. cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. blake (j. f.).--astronomical myths. with illustrations. cr. 8vo. 9_s_. cheyne (c. h. h.).--an elementary treatise on the planetary theory. cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. clark (l.) and sadler (h.).--the star guide. roy. 8vo. 5_s_. crossley (e.), gledhill (j.), and wilson (j. m.).--a handbook of double stars. 8vo. 21_s_. ---corrections to the handbook of double stars. 8vo. 1_s_. forbes (prof. george).--the transit of venus. illustrated. cr. 8vo. 3_s_. 6_d_. godfray (hugh).--an elementary treatise on the lunar theory. 2nd edit. cr. 8vo. 5_s_. 6_d_. ---a treatise on astronomy, for the use of colleges and schools. 8vo. 12_s_. 6_d_. lockyer (j. norman, f.r.s.).--a primer of astronomy. illustrated. 18mo. 1_s_. ---elementary lessons in astronomy. illustr. new edition. fcp. 8vo. 5_s_. 6_d_. ---questions on the same. by j. forbes robertson. fcp. 8vo. 1_s_. 6_d_. ---the chemistry of the sun. illustrated. 8vo. 14_s_. ---the meteoritic hypothesis of the origin of cosmical systems. illustrated. 8vo. 17_s_. net. ---the evolution of the heavens and the earth. illustrated. cr. 8vo. ---star-gazing past and present. expanded from notes with the assistance of g. m. seabroke. roy. 8vo. 21_s_. miller (r. kalley).--the romance of astronomy. 2nd edit. cr. 8vo. 4_s_. 6_d_. newcomb (prof. simon).--popular astronomy. engravings and maps. 8vo. 18_s_. penrose (francis).--on a method of predicting, by graphical construction, occultations of stars by the moon and solar eclipses for any given place. 4to. 12_s_. radcliffe (charles b.).--behind the tides. 8vo. 4_s_. 6_d_. roscoe-schuster. (_see_ chemistry.) atlases. (_see also_ geography.). bartholomew (j. g.).--elementary school atlas. 4to. 1_s_. ---physical and political school atlas. 80 maps. 4to. 8_s_. 6_d_.; half mor. 10_s_. 6_d_. ---library reference atlas of the world. with index to 100,000 places. folio, 52_s_. 6_d_. net.--also in 7 monthly parts. part i. march, 1891. 5_s_. net; geographical index, 7_s_. 6_d_. net. labberton (r. h.).--new historical atlas and general history. 4to. 15_s_. bible. (_see under_ theology.) bibliography. a bibliographical catalogue of macmillan and co.'s publications, 1843-89. med. 8vo. 10_s_. net. mayor (prof. john e. b.).--a bibliographical clue to latin literature. cr. 8vo. 10_s_. 6_d_. ryland (f.).--chronological outlines of english literature. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. biography. (_see also_ history.) _for other subjects of_ biography, _see_ english men of letters, english men of action, twelve english statesmen. abbott (e. a.).--the anglican career of cardinal newman. 2 vols. 8vo. 25_s_. net. agassiz (louis): his life and correspondence. edited by elizabeth cary agassiz. 2 vols. cr. 8vo. 18_s_. albemarle (earl of).--fifty years of my life. 3rd edit., revised. cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. alfred the great. by thomas hughes. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. amiel (henri frã©deric).--the journal intime. translated by mrs. humphry ward. 2nd edit. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. andrews (dr. thomas). (_see_ physics.) arnauld, angelique. by frances martin. cr. 8vo. 4_s_. 6_d_. artevelde. james and philip van artevelde. by w. j. ashley. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. bacon (francis): an account of his life and works. by e. a. abbott. 8vo. 14_s_. barnes. life of william barnes, poet and philologist. by his daughter, lucy baxter ("leader scott"). cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. berlioz (hector): autobiography of. trans. by r. & e. holmes, 2 vols. cr. 8vo. 21_s_. bernard (st.). the life and times of st. bernard, abbot of clairvaux. by j. c. morison, m.a. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. blackburne. life of the right hon. francis blackburne, late lord chancellor of ireland, by his son, edward blackburne. with portrait. 8vo. 12_s_. blake. life of william blake. with selections from his poems, etc. illustr. from blake's own works. by alexander gilchrist. 2 vols. med. 8vo. 42_s_. boleyn (anne): a chapter of english history, 1527-36. by paul friedmann. 2 vols. 8vo. 28_s_. brooke (sir jas.), the raja of sarawak (life of). by gertrude l. jacob. 2 vols. 8vo. 25_s_. burke. by john morley. globe 8vo. 5_s_. calvin. (_see_ select biography.) carlyle (thomas). edited by charles e. norton. cr. 8vo. ---reminiscences. 2 vols. 12_s_. ---early letters, 1814-26. 2 vols. 18_s_. ---letters, 1826-36. 2 vols. 18_s_. ---correspondence between goethe and carlyle. 9_s_. carstares (wm.): a character and career of the revolutionary epoch (1649-1715). by r. h. story. 8vo. 12_s_. cavour. (_see_ select biography.) chatterton: a story of the year 1770. by prof. david masson. cr. 8vo. 5_s_. ---a biographical study. by sir daniel wilson. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. 6_d_. clark. memorials from journals and letters of samuel clark, m.a. edited by his wife. cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. clough (a. h.). (_see_ literature.) combe. life of george combe. by charles gibbon. 2 vols. 8vo. 32_s_. cromwell. (_see_ select biography.) damien (father): a journey from cashmere to his home in hawaii. by edward clifford. portrait. cr. 8vo. 2_s_. 6_d_. dante: and other essays. by dean church. globe 8vo. 5_s_. darwin (charles): memorial notices, by t. h. huxley, g. j. romanes, sir arch. geikie, and w. thiselton dyer. with portrait. cr. 8vo. 2_s_. 6_d_. deã�k (francis): hungarian statesman. a memoir. 8vo. 12_s_. 6_d_. drummond of hawthornden. by prof. d. masson. cr. 8vo. 10_s_. 6_d_. eadie. life of john eadie, d.d. by james brown, d.d. cr. 8vo. 7_s_. 6_d_. elliott. life of h. v. elliott, of brighton. by j. bateman. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. emerson. life of ralph waldo emerson. by j. l. cabot. 2 vols. cr. 8vo. 18_s_. english men of action. cr. 8vo. with portraits. 2_s_. 6_d_. each. clive. by colonel sir charles wilson. cook (captain). by walter besant. dampier. by w. clark russell. drake. by julian corbett. gordon (general). by col. sir w. butler. hastings (warren). by sir a. lyall. havelock (sir henry). by a. forbes. henry v. by the rev. a. j. church. lawrence (lord). by sir rich. temple. livingstone. by thomas hughes. monk. by julian corbett. montrose. by mowbray morris. moore (sir john). by col. maurice. [_in prep._] napier (sir charles). by colonel sir wm. butler. peterborough. by w. stebbing. rodney. by david hannay. simon de montfort. by g. w. prothero. [_in prep._] strafford. by h. d. traill. warwick, the king-maker. by c. w. oman. wellington. by george hooper. english men of letters. edited by john morley. cr. 8vo. 2_s_. 6_d_. each. cheap edition, 1_s_. 6_d_.; sewed, 1_s_. addison. by w. j. courthope. bacon. by dean church. bentley. by prof. jebb. bunyan. by j. a. froude. burke. by john morley. burns. by principal shairp. byron. by john nichol. carlyle. by john nichol. [_in the press._] chaucer. by prof. a. w. ward. coleridge. by h. d. traill. cowper. by goldwin smith. defoe. by w. minto. de quincey. by prof. masson. dickens. by a. w. ward. dryden. by g. saintsbury. fielding. by austin dobson. gibbon. by j. cotter morison. goldsmith. by william black. gray. by edmund gosse. hawthorne. by henry james. hume. by t. h. huxley. johnson. by leslie stephen. keats. by sidney colvin. lamb. by rev. alfred ainger. landor. by sidney colvin. locke. by prof. fowler. macaulay. by j. cotter morison. milton. by mark pattison. pope. by leslie stephen. scott. by r. h. hutton. shelley. by j. a. symonds. sheridan. by mrs. oliphant. sidney. by j. a. symonds. southey. by prof. dowden. spenser. by dean church. sterne. by h. d. traill. swift. by leslie stephen. thackeray. by anthony trollope. wordsworth. by f. w. h. myers. english statesmen, twelve. cr. 8vo. 2_s_. 6_d_. each. william the conqueror. by edward a. freeman, d.c.l., ll.d. henry ii. by mrs. j. r. green. edward i. by t. f. tout, m.a. [_in prep._] henry vii. by james gairdner. cardinal wolsey. by bp. creighton. elizabeth. by e. s. beesly. oliver cromwell. by f. harrison. william iii. by h. d. traill. walpole. by john morley. chatham. by john morley. [_in the press._] pitt. by lord rosebery. peel. by j. r. thursfield. epictetus. (_see_ select biography.) fairfax. life of robert fairfax of steeton, vice-admiral, alderman, and member for york, a.d. 1666-1725. by clements r. markham, c.b. 8vo. 12_s_. 6_d_. fitzgerald (edward). (_see_ literature.) forbes (edward): memoir of. by george wilson, m.p., and sir archibald geikie, f.r.s., etc. demy 8vo. 14_s_. francis of assisi. by mrs. oliphant. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. fraser. james fraser, second bishop of manchester: a memoir. by t. hughes. cr. 8vo. 6_s_. garibaldi. (_see_ select biography.) goethe: life of. by prof. heinrich dã�ntzer. translated by t. w. lyster. 2 vols. cr. 8vo. 21_s_. goethe and carlyle. (_see_ carlyle.) gordon (general): a sketch. by reginald h. barnes. cr. 8vo. 1_s_. ---letters of general c. g. gordon to his sister, m.a. gordon. 4th edit. cr. 8vo. 3_s_. 6_d_. handel: life of. by w. s. rockstro. cr. 8vo. 10_s_. 6_d_. hobart. (_see_ collected works.) hodgson. memoir of rev. francis hodgson, b.d. by his son, rev. james t. hodgson, m.a. 2 vols. cr. 8vo. 18_s_. jevons (w. stanley).--letters and journal. edited by his wife. 8vo. 14_s_. kavanagh (rt. hon. a. mcmurrough): a biography. from papers chiefly unpublished, compiled by his cousin, sarah l. steele. with portrait. 8vo. 14_s_. net. kingsley: his letters, and memories of his life. edited by his wife. 2 vols. cr. 8vo. 12s.--cheap edition, 1 vol. 6_s_. lamb. the life of charles lamb. by rev. alfred ainger, m.a. globe 8vo. 5_s_. louis (st.). 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(_see_ natural history.) macmillan and co. bedford street, strand, london. proofreading team real folks by mrs. a. d. t. whitney 1893 contents i. this way, and that ii. luclarion iii. by story-rail: twenty-six years an hour iv. afterwards is a long time v. how the news came to homesworth vi. and vii. waking up viii. eavesdropping in aspen street ix. hazel's inspiration x. cockles and crambo xi. more witch-work xii. crumbs xiii. pieces of worlds xiv. "sesame; and lilies" xv. with all one's might xvi. swarming xvii. questions and answers xviii. all at once xix. inside xx. neighbors and next of kin xxi. the horseshoe xxii. morning glories i. this way, and that. the parlor blinds were shut, and all the windows of the third-story rooms were shaded; but the pantry window, looking out on a long low shed, such as city houses have to keep their wood in and to dry their clothes upon, was open; and out at this window had come two little girls, with quiet steps and hushed voices, and carried their books and crickets to the very further end, establishing themselves there, where the shade of a tall, round fir tree, planted at the foot of the yard below, fell across the building of a morning. "it was prettier down on the bricks," luclarion had told them. but they thought otherwise. "luclarion doesn't know," said frank. "people _don't_ know things, i think. i wonder why, when they've got old, and ought to? it's like the sea-shore here, i guess, only the stones are all stuck down, and you mustn't pick up the loose ones either." frank touched lightly, as she spoke, the white and black and gray bits of gravel that covered the flat roof. "and it smells--like the pine forests!" the sun was hot and bright upon the fir branches and along the tar-cemented roof. "how do you know about sea-shores and pine forests?" asked laura, with crushing common sense. "i don't know; but i do," said frank. "you don't know anything but stories and pictures and one tree, and a little gravel, all stuck down tight." "i'm glad i've got one tree. and the rest of it,--why listen! it's in the _word_, laura. _forest_. doesn't that sound like thousands of them, all fresh and rustling? and ellen went to the sea-shore, in that book; and picked up pebbles; and the sea came up to her feet, just as the air comes up here, and you can't get any farther,"--said frank, walking to the very edge and putting one foot out over, while the wind blew in her face up the long opening between rows of brick houses of which theirs was in the midst upon one side. "a great sea!" exclaimed laura, contemptuously. "with all those other wood-sheds right out in it, all the way down!" "well, there's another side to the sea; and capes, and islands," answered frank, turning back. "besides, i don't pretend it _is_; i only think it seems a little bit like it. i'm often put in mind of things. i don't know why." "i'll tell you what it is like," said laura. "it's like the gallery at church, where the singers stand up in a row, and look down, and all the people look up at them. i like high places. i like cecilia, in the 'bracelets,' sitting at the top, behind, when her name was called out for the prize; and 'they all made way, and she was on the floor in an instant.' i should like to have been cecilia!" "leonora was a great deal the best." "i know it; but she don't _stand out_." "laura! you're just like the pharisees! you're always wishing for long clothes and high seats!" "there ain't any pharisees, nowadays," said laura, securely. after which, of course, there was nothing more to be insisted. mrs. lake, the housekeeper, came to the middle upper window, and moved the blind a little. frank and laura were behind the fir. they saw her through the branches. she, through the farther thickness of the tree, did not notice them. "that was good," said laura. "she would have beckoned us in. i hate that forefinger of hers; it's always hushing or beckoning. it's only two inches long. what makes us have to mind it so?" "she puts it all into those two inches," answered frank. "all the _must_ there is in the house. and then you've got to." "i wouldn't--if father wasn't sick." "laura," said frank, gravely, "i don't believe father is going to get well. what do you suppose they're letting us stay at home from school for?" "o, that," said laura, "was because mrs. lake didn't have time to sew the sleeves into your brown dress." "i could have worn my gingham, laura. what if he should die pretty soon? i heard her tell luclarion that there must be a change before long. they talk in little bits, laura, and they say it solemn." the children were silent for a few minutes. frank sat looking through the fir-tree at the far-off flecks of blue. mr. shiere had been ill a long time. they could hardly think, now, what it would seem again not to have a sick father; and they had had no mother for several years,--many out of their short remembrance of life. mrs. lake had kept the house, and mended their clothes, and held up her forefinger at them. even when mr. shiere was well, he had been a reserved man, much absorbed in business since his wife's death, he had been a very sad man. he loved his children, but he was very little with them. frank and laura could not feel the shock and loss that children feel when death comes and robs them suddenly of a close companionship. "what do you suppose would happen then?" asked laura, after awhile. "we shouldn't be anybody's children." "yes, we should," said frank; "we should be god's.' "everybody else is that,--_besides_," said laura. "we shall have black silk pantalets again, i suppose,"--she began, afresh, looking down at her white ones with double crimped ruffles,--"and mrs. gibbs will come in and help, and we shall have to pipe and overcast." "o, laura, how nice it was ever so long ago!" cried frank, suddenly, never heeding the pantalets, "when mother sent us out to ask company to tea,--that pleasant saturday, you know,--and made lace pelerines for our dolls while we were gone! it's horrid, when other girls have mothers, only to have a _housekeeper_! and pretty soon we sha'n't have anything, only a little corner, away back, that we can't hardly recollect." "they'll do something with us; they always do," said laura, composedly. the children of this world, even _as_ children, are wisest in their generation. frank believed they would be god's children; she could not see exactly what was to come of that, though, practically. laura knew that people always did something; something would be sure to be done with them. she was not frightened; she was even a little curious. a head came up at the corner of the shed behind them, a pair of shoulders,--high, square, turned forward; a pair of arms, long thence to the elbows, as they say women's are who might be good nurses of children; the hands held on to the sides of the steep steps that led up from the bricked yard. the young woman's face was thin and strong; two great, clear, hazel eyes looked straight out, like arrow shots; it was a clear, undeviating glance; it never wandered, or searched, or wavered, any more than a sunbeam; it struck full upon whatever was there; it struck _through_ many things that were transparent to their quality. she had square, white, strong teeth, that set together like the faces of a die; they showed easily when she spoke, but the lips closed over them absolutely and firmly. yet they were pleasant lips, and had a smile in them that never went quite out; it lay in all the muscles of the mouth and chin; it lay behind, in the living spirit that had moulded to itself the muscles. this was luclarion. "your aunt oldways and mrs. oferr have come. hurry in!" now mrs. oldways was only an uncle's wife; mrs. oferr was their father's sister. but mrs. oferr was a rich woman who lived in new york, and who came on grand and potent, with a scarf or a pair of shoe-bows for each of the children in her big trunk, and a hundred and one suggestions for their ordering and behavior at her tongue's end, once a year. mrs. oldways lived up in the country, and was "aunt" to half the neighborhood at home, and turned into an aunt instantly, wherever she went and found children. if there were no children, perhaps older folks did not call her by the name, but they felt the special human kinship that is of no-blood or law, but is next to motherhood in the spirit. mrs. oferr found the open pantry window, before the children had got in. "out there!" she exclaimed, "in the eyes of all the neighbors in the circumstances of the family! who does, or _don't_ look after you?" "hearts'-sake!" came up the pleasant tones of mrs. oldways from behind, "how can they help it? there isn't any other out-doors. if they were down at homesworth now, there'd be the lilac garden and the old chestnuts, and the seat under the wall. poor little souls!" she added, pitifully, as she lifted them in, and kissed them. "it's well they can take any comfort. let 'em have all there is." mrs. oferr drew the blinds, and closed the window. frank and laura remembered the strangeness of that day all their lives. how they sat, shy and silent, while luclarion brought in cake and wine; how mrs. oferr sat in the large morocco easy-chair and took some; and mrs. oldways lifted laura, great girl as she was, into her lap first, and broke a slice for her; how mrs. oldways went up-stairs to mrs. lake, and then down into the kitchen to do something that was needed; and mrs. oferr, after she had visited her brother, lay down in the spare chamber for a nap, tired with her long journey from new york, though it had been by boat and cars, while there was a long staging from homesworth down to nashua, on mrs. oldways' route. mrs. oldways, however, was "used," she said, "to stepping round." it was the sitting that had tired her. how they were told not to go out any more, or to run up and down-stairs; and how they sat in the front windows, looking out through the green slats at so much of the street world as they could see in strips; how they obtained surreptitious bits of bread from dinner, and opened a bit of the sash, and shoved out crumbs under the blinds for the pigeons that flew down upon the sidewalk; how they wondered what kind of a day it was in other houses, where there were not circumstances in the family, where children played, and fathers were not ill, but came and went to and from their stores; and where two aunts had not come, both at once, from great ways off, to wait for something strange and awful that was likely to befall. when they were taken in, at bedtime, to kiss their father and say good-night, there was something portentous in the stillness there; in the look of the sick man, raised high against the pillows, and turning his eyes wistfully toward them, with no slightest movement of the head; in the waiting aspect of all things,--the appearance as of everybody being to sit up all night except themselves. edward shiere brought his children close to him with the magnetism of that look; they bent down to receive his kiss and his good-night, so long and solemn. he had not been in the way of talking to them about religion in his life. he had only insisted on their truth and obedience; that was the beginning of all religion. now it was given him in the hour of his death what he should speak; and because he had never said many such words to them before, they fell like the very touch of the holy ghost upon their young spirits now,-"love god, and keep his commandments. good-by." in the morning, when they woke, mrs. lake was in their room, talking in a low voice with mrs. oferr, who stood by an open bureau. they heard luclarion dusting down the stairs. who was taking care of their father? they did not ask. in the night, he had been taken care of. it was morning with him, now, also. mrs. lake and mrs. oferr were calculating,--about black pantalets, and other things. this story is not with the details of their early orphan life. when edward shiere was buried came family consultations. the two aunts were the nearest friends. nobody thought of mr. titus oldways. he never was counted. he was mrs. shiere's uncle,--aunt oldways' uncle-in-law, therefore, and grand-uncle to these children. but titus oldways never took up any family responsibilities; he had been shy of them all his single, solitary life. he seemed to think he could not drop them as he could other things, if he did not find them satisfactory. besides, what would he know about two young girls? he saw the death in the paper, and came to the funeral; then he went away again to his house in greenley street at the far west end, and to his stiff old housekeeper, mrs. froke, who knew his stiff old ways. and, turning his back on everybody, everybody forgot all about him. except as now and then, at intervals of years, there broke out here or there, at some distant point in some family crisis, a sudden recollection from which would spring a half suggestion, "why, there's uncle titus! if he was only,"--or, "if he would only,"--and there it ended. much as it might be with a housewife, who says of some stored-away possession forty times, perhaps, before it ever turns out available, "why, there's that old gray taffety! if it were only green, now!" or, "if there were three or four yards more of it!" uncle titus was just uncle titus, neither more nor less; so mrs. oferr and aunt oldways consulted about their own measures and materials; and never reckoned the old taffety at all. there was money enough to clothe and educate; little more. "i will take home _one_," said mrs. oferr, distinctly. so, they were to be separated? they did not realize what this was, however. they were told of letters and visits; of sweet country-living, of city sights and pleasures; of kittens and birds' nests, and the great barns; of music and dancing lessons, and little parties,--"by-and-by, when it was proper." "let me go to homesworth," whispered frank to aunt oldways. laura gravitated as surely to the streets and shops, and the great school of young ladies. "one taken and the other left," quoted luclarion, over the packing of the two small trunks. "we're both going," says laura, surprised. "_one_ taken? where?" "where the carcass is," answered luclarion. "there's one thing you'll have to see to for yourselves. i can't pack it. it won't go into the trunks." "what, luclarion?" "what your father said to you that night." they were silent. presently frank answered, softly,--"i hope i shan't forget that." laura, the pause once broken, remarked, rather glibly, that she "was afraid there wouldn't be much chance to recollect things at aunt oferr's." "she isn't exactly what i call a heavenly-minded woman," said luclarion, quietly. "she is very much _occupied_," replied laura, grandly taking up the oferr style. "she visits a great deal, and she goes out in the carriage. you have to change your dress every day for dinner, and i'm to take french lessons." the absurd little sinner was actually proud of her magnificent temptations. she was only a child. men and women never are, of course. "i'm afraid it will be pretty hard to remember," repeated laura, with condescension. "_that's_ your stump!" luclarion fixed the steadfast arrow of her look straight upon her, and drew the bow with this twang. ii. luclarion. how mrs. grapp ever came to, was the wonder. her having the baby was nothing. her having the name for it was the astonishment. her own name was lucy; her husband's luther: that, perhaps, accounted for the first syllable; afterwards, whether her mind lapsed off into combinations of such outshining appellatives as "clara" and "marion," or whether mr. grapp having played the clarionet, and wooed her sweetly with it in her youth, had anything to do with it, cannot be told; but in those prescriptive days of quiet which followed the domestic advent, the name did somehow grow together in the fancy of mrs. luther; and in due time the life-atom which had been born indistinguishable into the natural world, was baptized into the christian church as "luclarion" grapp. thenceforth, and no wonder, it took to itself a very especial individuality, and became what this story will partly tell. marcus grapp, who had the start of luclarion in this "meander,"--as their father called the vale of tears,--by just two years' time, and was y-_clipped_, by everybody but his mother "mark,"--in his turn, as they grew old together, cut his sister down to "luke." then luther grapp called them both "the apostles." and not far wrong; since if ever the kingdom of heaven does send forth its apostles--nay, its little christs--into the work on earth, in these days, it is as little children into loving homes. the apostles got up early one autumn morning, when mark was about six years old, and luke four. they crept out of their small trundle-bed in their mother's room adjoining the great kitchen, and made their way out softly to the warm wide hearth. there were new shoes, a pair apiece, brought home from the mills the night before, set under the little crickets in the corners. these had got into their dreams, somehow, and into the red rooster's first halloo from the end room roof, and into the streak of pale daylight that just stirred and lifted the darkness, and showed doors and windows, but not yet the blue meeting-houses on the yellow wall-paper, by which they always knew when it was really morning; and while mrs. grapp was taking that last beguiling nap in which one is conscious that one means to get up presently, and rests so sweetly on one's good intentions, letting the hazy mirage of the day's work that is to be done play along the horizon of dim thoughts with its unrisen activities,--two little flannel night-gowns were cuddled in small heaps by the chimney-side, little bare feet were trying themselves into the new shoes, and lifting themselves up, crippled with two inches of stout string between the heels. then the shoes were turned into spans of horses, and chirruped and trotted softly into their cricket-stables; and then--what else was there to do, until the strings were cut, and the flannel night-gowns taken off? it was so still out here, in the big, busy, day-time room; it was like getting back where the world had not begun; surely one must do something wonderful with the materials all lying round, and such an opportunity as that. it was old-time then, when kitchens had fire-places; or rather the house was chiefly fire-place, in front of and about which was more or less of kitchen-space. in the deep fire-place lay a huge mound of gray ashes, a vesuvius, under which red bowels of fire lay hidden. in one corner of the chimney leaned an iron bar, used sometimes in some forgotten, old fashioned way, across dogs or pothooks,--who knows now? at any rate, there it always was. mark, ambitious, put all his little strength to it this morning and drew it down, carefully, without much clatter, on the hearth. then he thought how it would turn red under those ashes, where the big coals were, and how it would shine and sparkle when he pulled it out again, like the red-hot, hissing iron jack-the-giant-killer struck into the one-eyed monster's eye. so he shoved it in; and forgot it there, while he told luke--very much twisted and dislocated, and misjoined--the leading incidents of the giant story; and then lapsed off, by some queer association, into the scripture narrative of joseph and his brethren, who "pulled his red coat off, and put him in a _fit_, and left him there." "and then what?" says luke. "then,--o, my iron's done! see here, luke!"--and taking it prudently with the tongs, he pulled back the rod, till the glowing end, a foot or more of live, palpitating, flamy red, lay out upon the broad open bricks. "there, luke! you daresn't put your foot on _that_!" dear little luke, who wouldn't, at even four years old, be dared! and dear little white, tender, pink-and-lily foot! the next instant, a shriek of pain shot through mrs. grapp's ears, and sent her out of her dreams and out of her bed, and with one single impulse into the kitchen, with her own bare feet, and in her night-gown. the little foot had only touched; a dainty, timid, yet most resolute touch; but the sweet flesh shriveled, and the fierce anguish ran up every fibre of the baby body, to the very heart and brain. "o! o, o!" came the long, pitiful, shivering cries, as the mother gathered her in her arms. "what is it? what did you do? how came you to?" and all the while she moved quickly here and there, to cupboard and press-drawer, holding the child fast, and picking up as she could with one hand, cotton wool, and sweet-oil flask, and old linen bits; and so she bound it up, saying still, every now and again, as all she could say,--"what _did_ you do? how came you to?" till, in a little lull of the fearful smart, as the air was shut away, and the oil felt momentarily cool upon the ache, luke answered her,-"he hed i dare-hn't, and ho i did!" "you little fool!" the rough word was half reaction of relief, that the child could speak at all, half horrible spasm of all her own motherly nerves that thrilled through and through with every pang that touched the little frame, hers also. mothers never do part bonds with babies they have borne. until the day they die, each quiver of their life goes back straight to the heart beside which it began. "you marcus! what did you mean?" "i meant she darsn't; and she no business to 'a dars't," said mark, pale with remorse and fright, but standing up stiff and manful, with bare common sense, when brought to bay. and then he marched away into his mother's bedroom, plunged his head down into the clothes, and cried,--harder than luclarion. nobody wore any new shoes that day; mark for a punishment,--though he flouted at the penalty as such, with an, "i guess you'd see me!" and there were many days before poor little luclarion could wear any shoes at all. the foot got well, however, without hindrance. but luke was the same little fool as ever; that was not burnt out. she would never be "dared" to anything. they called it "stumps" as they grew older. they played "stumps" all through the barns and woods and meadows; over walls and rocks, and rafters and house-roofs. but the burnt foot saved luke's neck scores of times, doubtless. mark remembered it; he never "stumped" her to any certain hurt, or where he could not lead the way himself. the mischief they got into and out of is no part of my story; but one day something happened--things do happen as far back in lives as that--which gave luclarion her clew to the world. they had got into the best parlor,--that sacred place of the new england farm-house, that is only entered by the high-priests themselves on solemn festivals, weddings and burials, thanksgivings and quiltings; or devoutly, now and then to set the shrine in order, shut the blinds again, and so depart, leaving it to gather the gloom and grandeur that things and places and people do when they are good for nothing else. the children had been left alone; for their mother had gone to a sewing society, and grashy, the girl, was up-stairs in her kitchen-chamber-bedroom, with a nail over the door-latch to keep them out while she "fixed over" her best gown. "le's play lake ontario," says marcus. now lake ontario, however they had pitched upon it, stood with them for all the waters that are upon the face of the earth, and all the confusion and peril of them. to play it, they turned the room into one vast shipwreck, of upset and piled up chairs, stools, boxes, buckets, and what else they could lay hands on; and among and over them they navigated their difficult and hilarious way. by no means were they to touch the floor; that was the lake,--that were to drown. it was columbus sometimes; sometimes it was captain cook; to-day, it was no less than jason sailing after the golden fleece. out of odd volumes in the garret, and out of "best books" taken down from the secretary in the "settin'-room," and put into their hands, with charges, of a sunday, to keep them still, they had got these things, jumbled into strange far-off and near fantasies in their childish minds. "lake ontario" included and connected all. "i'll tell you what it is," said marcus, tumbling up against the parlor door and an idea at once. "in here!" "what?" asked luke, breathless, without looking up, and paddling with the shovel, from an inverted rocking-chair. "the golden thing! hush!" at this moment grashy came into the kitchen, took a little tin kettle from a nail over the dresser, and her sun-bonnet from another behind the door, and made her way through the apartment as well as she could for bristling chair-legs, with exemplary placidity. she was used to "lake ontario." "don't get into any mischief, you apostles," was her injunction. "i'm goin' down to miss ruddock's for some 'east." "good,"; says mark, the instant the door was shut "now this is colchis, and i'm going in." he pronounced it much like "cold-cheese," and it never occurred to him that he was naming any unusual or ancient locality. there was a "jason" in the mills village. he kept a grocer's shop. colchis might be close by for all he knew; out beyond the wall, perhaps, among the old barrels. children _place_ all they read or hear about, or even all they imagine, within a very limited horizon. they cannot go beyond their world. why should they? neither could those very venerable ancients. "'tain't," says luclarion, with unbeguiled practicality. "it's just ma's best parlor, and you mustn't." it was the "mustn't" that was the whole of it. if mark had asserted that the back kitchen, or the cellar-way closet was colchis, she would have indorsed it with enthusiasm, and followed on like a loyal argonaut, as she was. but her imagination here was prepossessed. nothing in old fable could be more environed with awe and mystery than this best parlor. "and, besides," said luclarion, "i don't care for the golden fleece; i'm tired of it. let's play something else." "i'll tell you what there is in here," persisted mark. "there's two enchanted children. i've seen 'em!" "just as though," said luke contemptuously. "ma ain't a witch." "tain't ma. she don't know. they ain't visible to her. _she_ thinks it's nothing but the best parlor. but it opens out, right into the witch country,--not for her. 'twill if we go. see if it don't." he had got hold of her now; luclarion could not resist that. anything might be true of that wonderful best room, after all. it was the farthest euxine, the witch-land, everything, to them. so mark turned the latch and they crept in "we must open a shutter," mark said, groping his way. "grashy will be back," suggested luke, fearfully. "guess so!" said mark. "she ain't got coaxed to take her sun-bonnet off yet, an' it'll take her ninety-'leven hours to get it on again." he had let in the light now from the south window. the red carpet on the floor; the high sofa of figured hair-cloth, with brass-headed nails, and brass rosettes in the ends of the hard, cylinder pillows; the tall, carved cupboard press, its doors and drawers glittering with hanging brass handles; right opposite the door by which they had come in, the large, leaning mirror, gilt--garnished with grooved and beaded rim and an eagle and ball-chains over the top,--all this, opening right in from the familiar every-day kitchen and their lake ontario,--it certainly meant something that such a place should be. it meant a great deal more than sixteen feet square could hold, and what it really was did not stop short at the gray-and-crimson stenciled walls. the two were all alone in it; perhaps they had never been all alone in it before. i think, notwithstanding their mischief and enterprise, they never had. and deep in the mirror, face to face with them, coming down, it seemed, the red slant of an inner and more brilliant floor, they saw two other little figures. their own they knew, really, but elsewhere they never saw their own figures entire. there was not another looking-glass in the house that was more than two feet long, and they were all hung up so high! "there!" whispered mark. "there they are, and they can't get out." "of course they can't," said sensible luclarion. "if we only knew the right thing to say, or do, they might," said mark. "it's that they're waiting for, you see. they always do. it's like the sleeping beauty grashy told us." "then they've got to wait a hundred years," said luke. "who knows when they began?" "they do everything that we do," said luclarion, her imagination kindling, but as under protest. "if we could jump in perhaps they would jump out." "we might jump _at_ 'em," said marcus. "jest get 'em going, and may-be they'd jump over. le's try." so they set up two chairs from lake ontario in the kitchen doorway, to jump from; but they could only jump to the middle round of the carpet, and who could expect that the shadow children should be beguiled by that into a leap over bounds? they only came to the middle round of _their_ carpet. "we must go nearer; we must set the chairs in the middle, and jump close. jest _shave_, you know," said marcus. "o, i'm afraid," said luclarion. "i'll tell you what! le's _run_ and jump! clear from the other side of the kitchen, you know. then they'll have to run too, and may-be they can't stop." so they picked up chairs and made a path, and ran from across the broad kitchen into the parlor doorway, quite on to the middle round of the carpet, and then with great leaps came down bodily upon the floor close in front of the large glass that, leaned over them, with two little fallen figures in it, rolling aside quickly also, over the slanting red carpet. but, o dear what did it? had the time come, anyhow, for the old string to part its last fibre, that held the mirror tilting from the wall,--or was it the crash of a completed spell? there came a snap,--a strain,--as some nails or screws that held it otherwise gave way before the forward pressing weight, and down, flat-face upon the floor, between the children, covering them with fragments of splintered glass and gilded wood,--eagle, ball-chains, and all,--that whole magnificence and mystery lay prostrate. behind, where it had been, was a blank, brown-stained cobwebbed wall, thrown up harsh and sudden against them, making the room small, and all the enchanted chamber, with its red slanting carpet, and its far reflected corners, gone. the house hushed up again after that terrible noise, and stood just the same as ever. when a thing like that happens, it tells its own story, just once, and then it is over. _people_ are different. they keep talking. there was grashy to come home. she had not got there in time to hear the house tell it. she must learn it from the children. why? "because they knew," luclarion said. "because, then, they could not wait and let it be found out." "we never touched it," said mark. "we jumped," said luke. "we couldn't help it, if _that_ did it. s'posin' we'd jumped in the kitchen, or--the--flat-irons had tumbled down,--or anything? that old string was all wore out." "well, we was here, and we jumped; and we know." "we was here, of course; and of course we couldn't help knowing, with all that slam-bang. why, it almost upset lake ontario! we can tell how it slammed, and how we thought the house was coming down. i did." "and how we were in the best parlor, and how we jumped," reiterated luclarion, slowly. "marcus, it's a stump!" they were out in the middle of lake ontario now, sitting right down underneath the wrecks, upon the floor; that is, under water, without ever thinking of it. the parlor door was shut, with all that disaster and dismay behind it. "go ahead, then!" said marcus, and he laid himself back desperately on the floor. "there's grashy!" "sakes and patience!" ejaculated grashy, merrily, coming in. "they're drownded,--dead, both of 'em; down to the bottom of lake ontariah!" "no we ain't," said luclarion, quietly. "it isn't lake ontario now. it's nothing but a clutter. but there's an awful thing in the best parlor, and we don't know whether we did it or not. we were in there, and we jumped." grashy went straight to the parlor door, and opened it. she looked in, turned pale, and said "'lection!" that is a word the women have, up in the country, for solemn surprise, or exceeding emergency, or dire confusion. i do not know whether it is derived from religion or politics. it denotes a vital crisis, either way, and your hands full. perhaps it had the theological association in grashy's mind, for the next thing she said was, "my soul!" "do you know what that's a sign of, you children?" "sign the old thing was rotten," said marcus, rather sullenly. "wish that was all," said grashy, her lips white yet. "hope there mayn't nothin' dreadful happen in this house before the year's out. it's wuss'n thirteen at the table." "do you s'pose we did it?" asked luke, anxiously. "where was you when it tumbled?" "right in front of it. but we were rolling away. _we_ tumbled." "'twould er come down the fust jar, anyway, if a door had slammed. the string's cut right through," said grashy, looking at the two ends sticking up stiff and straight from the top fragment of the frame. "but the mercy is you war'n't smashed yourselves to bits and flinders. think o'that!" "do you s'pose ma'll think of that?" asked luclarion. "well--yes; but it may make her kinder madder,--just at first, you know. between you and me and the lookin'-glass, you see,--well, yer ma is a pretty strong-feelin' woman," said grashy, reflectively. "'fi was you i wouldn't say nothin' about it. what's the use? _i_ shan't." "it's a stump," repeated luclarion, sadly, but in very resolute earnest. grashy stared. "well, if you ain't the curiousest young one, luke grapp!" said she, only half comprehending. when mrs. grapp came home, luclarion went into her bedroom after her, and told her the whole story. mrs. grapp went into the parlor, viewed the scene of calamity, took in the sense of loss and narrowly escaped danger, laid the whole weight of them upon the disobedience to be dealt with, and just as she had said, "you little fool!" out of the very shock of her own distress when luke had burned her baby foot, she turned back now, took the two children up-stairs in silence, gave them each a good old orthodox whipping, and tucked them into their beds. they slept one on each side of the great kitchen-chamber. "mark," whispered luke, tenderly, after mrs. grapp's step had died away down the stairs. "how do you feel?" "hot!" said mark. "how do you?" "you ain't mad with me, be you?" "no." "then i feel real cleared up and comfortable. but it _was_ a stump, wasn't it?" * * * * * from that time forward, luclarion grapp had got her light to go by. she understood life. it was "stumps" all through. the lord set them, and let them; she found that out afterward, when she was older, and "experienced religion." i think she was mistaken in the dates, though; it was _recognition_, this later thing; the experience was away back,--at lake ontario. it was a stump when her father died, and her mother had to manage the farm, and she to help her. the mortgage they had to work off was a stump; but faith and luclarion's dairy did it. it was a stump when marcus wanted to go to college, and they undertook that, after the mortgage. it was a stump when adam burge wanted her to marry him, and go and live in the long red cottage at side hill, and she could not go till they had got through with helping marcus. it was a terrible stump when adam burge married persis cone instead, and she had to live on and bear it. it was a stump when her mother died, and the farm was sold. marcus married; he never knew; he had a belles-lettres professorship in a new college up in d----. he would not take a cent of the farm money; he had had his share long ago; the four thousand dollars were invested for luke. he did the best he could, and all he knew; but human creatures can never pay each other back. only god can do that, either way. luclarion did not stay in ----. there were too few there now, and too many. she came down to boston. her two hundred and eighty dollars a year was very good, as far as it went, but it would not keep her idle; neither did she wish to live idle. she learned dress-making; she had taste and knack; she was doing well; she enjoyed going about from house to house for her days' work, and then coming back to her snug room at night, and her cup of tea and her book. then it turned out that so much sewing was not good for her; her health was threatened; she had been used to farm work and "all out-doors." it was a "stump" again. that was all she called it; she did not talk piously about a "cross." what difference did it make? there is another word, also, for "cross" in hebrew. luclarion came at last to live with mrs. edward shiere. and in that household, at eight and twenty, we have just found her. iii. by story-rail: twenty-six years an hour. laura shiere did not think much about the "stump," when, in her dark gray merino travelling dress, and her black ribbons, nicely appointed, as mrs. oferr's niece should be, down to her black kid gloves and broad-hemmed pocket-handkerchief, and little black straw travelling-basket (for morocco bags were not yet in those days), she stepped into the train with her aunt at the providence station, on her way to stonington and new york. the world seemed easily laid out before her. she was like a cousin in a story-book, going to arrive presently at a new home, and begin a new life, in which she would be very interesting to herself and to those about her. she felt rather important, too, with her money independence--there being really "property" of hers to be spoken of as she had heard it of late. she had her mother's diamond ring on her third finger, and was comfortably conscious of it when she drew off her left-hand glove. laura shiere's nature had only been stirred, as yet, a very little below the surface, and the surface rippled pleasantly in the sunlight that was breaking forth from the brief clouds. among the disreputable and vociferous crowd of new york hack drivers, that swarmed upon the pier as the _massachusetts_ glided into her dock, it was good to see that subduedly respectable and consciously private and superior man in the drab overcoat and the nice gloves and boots, who came forward and touched his hat to mrs. oferr, took her shawl and basket, and led the way, among the aggravated public menials, to a handsome private carriage waiting on the street. "all well at home, david?" asked mrs. oferr. "all well, ma'am, thank you," replied david. and another man sat upon the box, in another drab coat, and touched _his_ hat; and when they reached waverley place and alighted, mrs. oferr had something to say to him of certain directions, and addressed him as "moses." it was very grand and wonderful to order "david" and "moses" about. laura felt as if her aunt were something only a little less than "michael with the sword." laura had a susceptibility for dignities; she appreciated, as we have seen out upon the wood-shed, "high places, and all the people looking up." david and moses were brothers, she found out; she supposed that was the reason they dressed alike, in drab coats; as she and frank used to wear their red merinos, and their blue ginghams. a little spasm did come up in her throat for a minute, as she thought of the old frocks and the old times already dropped so far behind; but alice and geraldine oferr met her the next instant on the broad staircase at the back of the marble-paved hall, looking slight and delicate, and princess-like, in the grand space built about them for their lives to move in; and in the distance and magnificence of it all, the faint little momentary image of frank faded away. she went up with them out of the great square hall, over the stately staircase, past the open doors of drawing-rooms and library, stretching back in a long suite, with the conservatory gleaming green from the far end over the garden, up the second stairway to the floor where their rooms were; bedrooms and nursery,--this last called so still, though the great, airy front-room was the place used now for their books and amusements as growing young ladies,--all leading one into another around the skylighted upper hall, into which the sunshine came streaked with amber and violet from the richly colored glass. she had a little side apartment given to her for her own, with a recessed window, in which were blossoming plants just set there from the conservatory; opposite stood a white, low bed in a curtained alcove, and beyond was a dressing-closet. laura thought she should not be able to sleep there at all for a night or two, for the beauty of it and the good time she should be having. at that same moment frank and her aunt oldways were getting down from the stage that had brought them over from ipsley, where they slept after their day's journey from boston,--at the doorstone of the low, broad-roofed, wide-built, roomy old farm-house in homesworth. right in the edge of the town it stood, its fields stretching over the south slope of green hills in sunny uplands, and down in meadowy richness to the wild, hidden, sequestered river-side, where the brown water ran through a narrow, rocky valley,--swift river they called it. there are a great many swift rivers in new england. it was only a vehement little tributary of a larger stream, beside which lay larger towns; it was doing no work for the world, apparently, at present; there were no mills, except a little grist-mill to which the farmers brought their corn, cuddled among the rocks and wild birches and alders, at a turn where the road came down, and half a dozen planks made a bit of a bridge. "o, what beautiful places!" cried frank, as they crossed the little bridge, and glanced either way into a green, gray, silvery vista of shrubs and rocks, and rushing water, with the white spires of meadow-sweet and the pink hardback, and the first bright plumes of the golden rod nodding and shining against the shade,--as they passed the head of a narrow, grassy lane, trod by cows' feet, and smelling of their milky breaths, and the sweetness of hay-barns,--as they came up, at length, over the long slope of turf that carpeted the way, as for a bride's feet, from the roadside to the very threshold. she looked along the low, treble-piled garden wall, too, and out to the open sheds, deep with pine chips; and upon the broad brown house-roof, with its long, gradual decline, till its eaves were within reach of a child's fingers from the ground; and her quick eye took in facilities. "o, if laura could see this! after the old shed-top in brier street, and the one tree!" but laura had got what the shed-top stood for with her; it was frank who had hearkened to whole forests in the stir of the one brick-rooted fir. to that which each child had, it was already given. in a week or two frank wrote laura a letter. it was an old-fashioned letter, you know; a big sheet, written close, four pages, all but the middle of the last page, which was left for the "superscription." then it was folded, the first leaf turned down twice, lengthwise; then the two ends laid over, toward each other; then the last doubling, or rather trebling, across; and the open edge slipped over the folds. a wafer sealed it, and a thimble pressed it,--and there were twenty-five cents postage to pay. that was a letter in the old times, when laura and frank shiere were little girls. and this was that letter:- dear laura,--we got here safe, aunt oldways and i, a week ago last saturday, and it is _beautiful_. there is a green lane,--almost everybody has a green lane,--and the cows go up and down, and the swallows build in the barn-eaves. they fly out at sundown, and fill all the sky up. it is like the specks we used to watch in the sunshine when it came in across the kitchen, and they danced up and down and through and away, and seemed to be live things; only we couldn't tell, you know, what they were, or if they really did know how good it was. but these are big and real, and you can see their wings, and you know what they mean by it. i guess it is all the same thing, only some things are little and some are big. you can see the stars here, too,--such a sky full. and that is all the same again. there are beautiful roofs and walls here. i guess you would think you were high up! harett and i go up from under the cheese-room windows right over the whole house, and we sit on the peak by the chimney. harett is mrs. dillon's girl. not the girl that lives with her,--her daughter. but the girls that live with people are daughters here. somebody's else, i mean. they are all alike. i suppose her name is harriet, but they all call her harett. i don't like to ask her for fear she should think i thought they didn't know how to pronounce. i go to school with harett; up to the west district. we carry brown bread and butter, and doughnuts, and cheese, and apple-pie in tin pails, for luncheon. don't you remember the brown cupboard in aunt oldways' kitchen, how sagey, and doughnutty, and good it always smelt? it smells just so now, and everything tastes just the same. there is a great rock under an oak tree half way up to school, by the side of the road. we always stop there to rest, coming home. three of the girls come the same way as far as that, and we always save some of our dinner to eat up there, and we tell stories. i tell them about dancing-school, and the time we went to the theatre to see "cinderella," and going shopping with mother, and our little tea-parties, and the dutch dolls we made up in the long front chamber. o, _don't_ you remember, laura? what different pieces we have got into our remembrances already! i feel as if i was making patchwork. some-time, may-be, i shall tell somebody about living _here_. well, they will be beautiful stories! homesworth is an elegant place to live in. you will see when you come next summer. there is an apple tree down in the south orchard that bends just like a horse's back. then the branches come up over your head and shade you. we ride there, and we sit and eat summer apples there. little rosy apples with dark streaks in them all warm with the sun. you can't think what a smell they have, just like pinks and spice boxes. why don't they keep a little way off from each other in cities, and so have room for apple trees? i don't see why they need to crowd so. i hate to think of you all shut up tight when i am let right out into green grass, and blue sky, and apple orchards. that puts me in mind of something! zebiah jane, aunt oldways' girl, always washes her face in the morning at the pump-basin out in the back dooryard, just like the ducks. she says she can't spatter round in a room; she wants all creation for a slop-bowl. i feel as if we had all creation for everything up here. but i can't put all creation in a letter if i try. _that_ would spatter dreadfully. i expect a long letter from you every day now. but i don't see what you will make it out of. i think i have got all the _things_ and you won't have anything left but the _words_. i am sure you don't sit out on the wood-shed at aunt oferr's, and i don't believe you pound stones and bricks, and make colors. do you know when we rubbed our new shoes with pounded stone and made them gray? i never told you about luclarion. she came up as soon as the things were all sent off, and she lives at the minister's. where she used to live is only two miles from here, but other people live there now, and it is built on to and painted straw color, with a green door. your affectionate sister, frances shiere. when laura's letter came this was it:- dear frank,--i received your kind letter a week ago, but we have been very busy having a dressmaker and doing all our fall shopping, and i have not had time to answer it before. we shall begin to go to school next week, for the vacations are over, and then i shall have ever so much studying to do. i am to take lessons on the piano, too, and shall have to practice two hours a day. in the winter we shall have dancing-school and practicing parties. aunt has had a new bonnet made for me. she did not like the plain black silk one. this is of _gros d'afrique_, with little bands and cordings round the crown and front; and i have a dress of _gros d'afrique_, too, trimmed with double folds piped on. for every-day i have a new black _mousseline_ with white clover leaves on it, and an all-black french chally to wear to dinner. i don't wear my black and white calico at all. next summer aunt means to have me wear white almost all the time, with lavender and violet ribbons. i shall have a white muslin with three skirts and a black sash to wear to parties and to public saturdays, next winter. they have public saturdays at dancing-school every three weeks. but only the parents and relations can come. alice and geraldine dance the shawl-dance with helena pomeroy, with crimson and white canton crape scarfs. they have showed me some of it at home. aunt oferr says i shall learn the _gavotte_. aunt oferr's house is splendid. the drawing-room is full of sofas, and divans, and ottomans, and a _causeuse_, a little s-shaped seat for two people. everything is covered with blue velvet, and there are blue silk curtains to the windows, and great looking-glasses between, that you can see all down into through rooms and rooms, as if there were a hundred of them. do you remember the story luclarion used to tell us of when she and her brother mark were little children and used to play that the looking-glass-things were real, and that two children lived in them, in the other room, and how we used to make believe too in the slanting chimney glass? you could make believe it here with _forty_ children. but i don't make believe much now. there is such a lot that is real, and it is all so grown up. it would seem so silly to have such plays, you know. i can't help thinking the things that come into my head though, and it seems sometimes just like a piece of a story, when i walk into the drawing-room all alone, just before company comes, with my _gros d'afrique_ on, and my puffed lace collar, and my hair tied back with long new black ribbons. it all goes through my head just how i look coming in, and how grand it is, and what the words would be in a book about it, and i seem to act a little bit, just to myself as if i were a girl in a story, and it seems to say, "and laura walked up the long drawing-room and took a book bound in crimson morocco from the white marble pier table and sat down upon the velvet ottoman in the balcony window." but what happened then it never tells. i suppose it will by and by. i am getting used to it all, though; it isn't so _awfully_ splendid as it was at first. i forgot to tell you that my new bonnet flares a great deal, and that i have white lace quilling round the face with little black dotty things in it on stems. they don't wear those close cottage bonnets now. and aunt has had my dresses made longer and my pantalettes shorter, so that they hardly show at all. she says i shall soon wear long dresses, i am getting so tall. alice wears them now, and her feet look so pretty, and she has such pretty slippers: little french purple ones, and sometimes dark green, and sometimes beautiful light gray, to go with different dresses. i don't care for anything but the slippers, but i _should_ like such ones as hers. aunt says i can't, of course, as long as i wear black, but i can have purple ones next summer to wear with my white dresses. that will be when i come to see you. i am afraid you will think this is a very _wearing_ kind of a letter, there are so many 'wears' in it. i have been reading it over so far, but i can't put in any other word. your affectionate sister, laura shiere. p.s. aunt oferr says laura shiere is such a good sounding name. it doesn't seem at all common. i am glad of it. i should hate to be common. i do not think i shall give you any more of it just here than these two letters tell. we are not going through all frank and laura's story. that with which we have especially to do lies on beyond. but it takes its roots in this, as all stories take their roots far back and underneath. two years after, laura was in homesworth for her second summer visit at the farm. it was convenient, while the oferrs were at saratoga. mrs. oferr was very much occupied now, of course, with introducing her own daughters. a year or two later, she meant to give laura a season at the springs. "all in turn, my dear, and good time," she said. the winter before, frank had been a few weeks in new york. but it tired her dreadfully, she said. she liked the theatres and the concerts, and walking out and seeing the shops. but there was "no place to get out of it into." it didn't seem as if she ever really got home and took off her things. she told laura it was like that first old letter of hers; it was just "wearing," all the time. laura laughed. "but how can you live _without_ wearing?" said she. frank stood by, wondering, while laura unpacked her trunks that morning after her second arrival at aunt oldways'. she had done now even with the simplicity of white and violet, and her wardrobe blossomed out like the flush of a summer garden. she unfolded a rose-colored muslin, with little raised embroidered spots, and threw it over the bed. "where _will_ you wear that, up here?" asked frank, in pure bewilderment. "why, i wear it to church, with my white swiss mantle," answered laura. "or taking tea, or anything. i've a black silk _visite_ for cool days. that looks nice with it. and see here,--i've a pink sunshade. they don't have them much yet, even in new york. mr. pemberton oferr brought these home from paris, for gerry and alice, and me. gerry's is blue. see! it tips back." and laura set the dashy little thing with its head on one side, and held it up coquettishly. "they used them in carriages in paris, he said, and in st. petersburg, driving out on the nevskoi prospekt." "but where are your common things?" "down at the bottom; i haven't come to them. they were put in first, because they would bear squeezing. i've two french calicoes, with pattern trimmings; and a lilac jaconet, with ruffles, open down the front." laura wore long dresses now; and open wrappers were the height of the style. laura astonished homesworth the first sunday of this visit, with her rose-colored toilet. bonnet of shirred pink silk with moss rosebuds and a little pink lace veil; the pink muslin, full-skirted over two starched petticoats; even her pink belt had gay little borders of tiny buds and leaves, and her fan had a pink tassel. "they're the things i wear; why shouldn't i?" she said to frank's remonstrance. "but up here!" said frank. "it would seem nicer to wear something--stiller." so it would; a few years afterward laura herself would have seen that it was more elegant; though laura shiere was always rather given to doing the utmost--in apparel--that the occasion tolerated. fashions grew stiller in years after. but this june sunday, somewhere in the last thirties or the first forties, she went into the village church like an aurora, and the village long remembered the resplendence. frank had on a white cambric dress, with a real rose in the bosom, cool and fresh, with large green leaves; and her "cottage straw" was trimmed with white lutestring, crossed over the crown. "do you feel any better?" asked aunt oldways of laura, when they came home to the country tea-dinner. "better--how?" asked laura, in surprise. "after all that 'wear' and _stare_," said aunt oldways, quietly. aunt oldways might have been astonished, but she was by no means awestruck, evidently; and aunt oldways generally spoke her mind. somehow, with laura shiere, pink was pinker, and ribbons were more rustling than with most people. upon some quiet unconscious folks, silk makes no spread, and color little show; with laura every gleam told, every fibre asserted itself. it was the live aurora, bristling and tingling to its farthest electric point. she did not toss or flaunt, either; she had learned better of signor pirotti how to carry herself; but she was in conscious _rapport_ with every thing and stitch she had about her. some persons only put clothes on to their bodies; others really seem to contrive to put them on to their souls. laura shiere came up to homesworth three years later, with something more wonderful than a pink embossed muslin:--she had a lover. mrs. oferr and her daughters were on their way to the mountains; laura was to be left with the oldways. grant ledwith accompanied them all thus far on their way; then he had to go back to boston. "i can't think of anything but that pink sunshade she used to carry round canted all to one side over her shoulder," said aunt oldways, looking after them down the dusty road the morning that he went away. laura, in her white dress and her straw hat and her silly little bronze-and-blue-silk slippers printing the roadside gravel, leaning on grant ledwith's arm, seemed only to have gained a fresh, graceful adjunct to set off her own pretty goings and comings with, and to heighten the outside interest of that little point of eternity that she called her life. mr. ledwith was not so much a man who had won a woman, as laura was a girl who had "got a beau." she had sixteen tucked and trimmed white skirts, too, she told frank; she should have eight more before she was married; people wore ever so many skirts now, at a time. she had been to a party a little while ago where she wore _seven_. there were deep french embroidery bands around some of these white skirts; those were beautiful for morning dresses. geraldine oferr was married last winter; laura had been her bridesmaid; gerry had a white brocade from paris, and a point-lace veil. she had three dozen of everything, right through. they had gone to housekeeping up town, in west sixteenth street. frank would have to come to new york next winter, or in the spring, to be _her_ bridesmaid; then she would see; then--who knew! frank was only sixteen, and she lived away up here in homesworth among the hills; she had not "seen," but she had her own little secret, for all that; something she neither told nor thought, yet which was there; and it came across her with a queer little thrill from the hidden, unlooked-at place below thought, that "who" _didn't_ know. laura waited a year for grant ledwith's salary to be raised to marrying point; he was in a wholesale woolen house in boston; he was a handsome fellow, with gentlemanly and taking address,--capital, this, for a young salesman; and they put his pay up to two thousand dollars within that twelvemonth. upon this, in the spring, they married; took a house in filbert street, down by the river, and set up their little gods. these were: a sprinkle of black walnut and brocatelle in the drawing-room, a sheffield-plate tea-service, and a crimson-and-giltedged dinner set that mrs. oferr gave them; twilled turkey-red curtains, that looked like thibet, in the best chamber; and the twenty-four white skirts and the silk dresses, and whatever corresponded to them on the bride-groom's part, in their wardrobes. all that was left of laura's money, and all that was given them by grant ledwith's father, and mr. titus oldways' astounding present of three hundred dollars, without note or comment,--the first reminder they had had of him since edward shiere's funeral, "and goodness knew how he heard anything now," aunt oferr said,--had gone to this outfit. but they were well set up and started in the world; so everybody said, and so they, taking the world into their young, confident hands for a plaything, not knowing it for the perilous loaded shell it is, thought, merrily, themselves. up in homesworth people did not have to wait for two thousand dollar salaries. they would not get them if they did. oliver ripwinkley, the minister's son, finished his medical studies and city hospital practice that year, and came back, as he had always said he should do, to settle down for a country doctor. old doctor parrish, the parson's friend of fifty years, with no child of his own, kept the place for oliver, and hung up his old-fashioned saddle-bags in the garret the very day the young man came home. he was there to be "called in," however, and with this backing, and the perforce of there being nobody else, young doctor ripwinkley had ten patients within the first week; thereby opportunity for shewing himself in the eyes of ten families as a young man who "appeared to know pretty well what he was about." so that when he gave further proof of the same, by asking, within the week that followed, the prettiest girl in homesworth, frances shiere, to come and begin the world with him at mile hill village, nobody, not even frank herself, was astonished. she bought three new gowns, a shawl, a black silk mantle, and a straw bonnet. she made six each of every pretty white garment that a woman wears; and one bright mellow evening in september, they took their first tea in the brown-carpeted, white-shaded little corner room in the old "rankin house;" a bigger place than they really wanted yet, and not all to be used at first; but rented "reasonable," central, sunshiny, and convenient; a place that they hoped they should buy sometime; facing on the broad sidegreen of the village street, and running back, with its field and meadow belongings, away to the foot of great, gray, sheltering mile hill. and the vast, solemn globe, heedless of what lit here or there upon its breadth, or took up this or that life in its little freckling cities, or between the imperceptible foldings of its hills,--only carrying way-passengers for the centuries,--went plunging on its track, around and around, and swept them all, a score of times, through its summer and its winter solstices. iv. afterwards is a long time. old mr. marmaduke wharne had come down from outledge, in the mountains, on his way home to new york. he had stopped in boston to attend to some affairs of his own,--if one can call them so, since marmaduke wharne never had any "own" affairs that did not chiefly concern, to their advantage, somebody else,--in which his friend mr. titus oldways was interested, not personally, but wharne fashion. now, reader, you know something about mr. titus oldways, which up to this moment, only god, and marmaduke wharne, and rachel froke, who kept mr. oldways' house, and wore a friend's drab dress and white cap, and said "titus," and "marmaduke" to the two old gentlemen, and "thee" and "thou" to everybody,--have ever known. in a general way and relation, i mean; separate persons knew particular things; but each separate person thought the particular thing he knew to be a whimsical exception. mr. oldways did not belong to any church: but he had an english prayer-book under his bible on his study table, and baxter and fenelon and ã  kempis and "wesley's hymns," and swedenborg's "heaven and hell" and "arcana celestia," and lowell's "sir launfal," and dickens's "christmas carol," all on the same set of shelves,--that held, he told marmaduke, his religion; or as much of it as he could get together. and he had this woman, who was a friend, and who walked by the inner light, and in outer charity, if ever a woman did, to keep his house. "for," said he, "the blessed truth is, that the word of god is in the world. alive in it. when you know that, and wherever you can get hold of his souls, then and there you've got your religion,--a piece at a time. to prove and sort your pieces, and to straighten the tangle you might otherwise get into, there's _this_," and he laid his hand down on the four gospels, bound in white morocco, with a silver cross upon the cover,--a volume that no earthly creature, again, knew of, save titus and marmaduke and rachel froke, who laid it into a drawer when she swept and dusted, and placed it between the crimson folds of its quilted silken wrapper when she had finished, burnishing the silver cross gently with a scrap of chamois leather cut from a clean piece every time. there was nothing else delicate and exquisite in all the plain and grim establishment; and the crimson wrapper was comfortably worn, and nobody would notice it, lying on the table there, with an almanac, a directory, the big, open worcester's dictionary, and the scattered pamphlets and newspapers of the day. out in the world, titus oldways went about with visor down. he gave to no fairs nor public charities; "let them get all they could that way, it wasn't his way," he said to rachel froke. the world thought he gave nothing, either of purse or life. there was a plan they had together,--he and marmaduke wharne,--this girls' story-book will not hold the details nor the idea of it,--about a farm they owned, and people working it that could go nowhere else to work anything; and a mill-privilege that might be utilized and expanded, to make--not money so much as safe and honest human life by way of making money; and they sat and talked this plan over, and settled its arrangements, in the days that marmaduke wharne was staying on in boston, waiting for his other friend, miss craydocke, who had taken the river road down from outledge, and so come round by z----, where she was staying a few days with the goldthwaites and the inglesides. miss craydocke had a share or two in the farm and in the mill. and now, titus oldways wanted to know of marmaduke wharne what he was to do for afterwards. it was a question that had puzzled and troubled him. afterwards. "while i live," he said, "i will do what i can, and _as_ i can. i will hand over my doing, and the wherewith, to no society or corporation. i'll pay no salaries nor circumlocutions. neither will i--afterwards. and how is my money going to work on?" "_your_ money?" "well,--god's money." "how did it work when it came to you?" mr. oldways was silent. "he chose to send it to you. he made it in the order of things that it should come to you. you began, yourself, to work for money. you did not understand, then, that the money would be from god and was for him." "he made me understand." "yes. he looked out for that part of it too. he can look out for it again. his word shall not return unto him void." "he has given me this, though, to pass on; and i will not put it into a machine. i want to give some living soul a body for its living. dead charities are dead. it's of no use to will it to you, marmaduke; i'm as likely to stay on, perhaps, as you are." "and the youngest life might drop, the day after your own. you can't take it out of god's hand." "i must either let it go by law, or will it--here and there. i know enough whom it would help; but i want to invest, not spend it; to invest it in a life--or lives--that will carry it on from where i leave it. how shall i know?" "he giveth it a body as it pleaseth him," quoted marmaduke wharne, thoughtfully. "i am english, you know, oldways; i can't help reverencing the claims of next of kin. unless one is plainly shown otherwise, it seems the appointment. how can we set aside his ways until he clearly points us out his own exception?" "my 'next' are two women whom i don't know, my niece's children. she died thirty years ago." "perhaps you ought to know them." "i know _about_ them; i've kept the run; but i've held clear of family. they didn't need me, and i had no right to put it into their heads they did, unless i fully meant"-he broke off. "they're like everybody else, wharne; neither better nor worse, i dare say; but the world is full of just such women. how do i know this money would be well in their hands--even for themselves?" "find out." "one of 'em was brought up by an oferr woman!" the tone in which he _commonized_ the name to a satiric general term, is not to be written down, and needed not to be interpreted. "the other is well enough," he went on, "and contented enough. a doctor's widow, with a little property, a farm and two children,--her older ones died very young,--up in new hampshire. i might spoil _her_; and the other,--well, you see as i said, i _don't know_." "find out," said marmaduke wharne, again. "people are not found out till they are tried." "try 'em!" mr. oldways had been sitting with his head bent, thoughtfully, his eyes looking down, his hands on the two stiff, old-fashioned arms of his chair. at this last spondaic response from marmaduke, he lifted his eyes and eyebrows,--not his head,--and raised himself slightly with his two hands pressing on the chair arms; the keen glance and the half-movement were impulsively toward his friend. "eh?" said he. "try 'em," repeated marmaduke wharne. "give god's way a chance." mr. oldways, seated back in his chair again, looked at him intently; made a little vibration, as it were, with his body, that moved his head up and down almost imperceptibly, with a kind of gradual assenting apprehension, and kept utterly silent. so, their talk being palpably over for this time, marmaduke wharne got up presently to go. they nodded at each other, friendlily, as he looked back from the door. left alone, mr. titus oldways turned in his swivel-chair, around to his desk beside which he was sitting. "next of kin?" he repeated to himself. "god's way?--well! afterwards is a long time. a man must give it up somewhere. everything escheats to the king at last." and he took a pen in his hand and wrote a letter. v. how the news came to homesworth. "i wish i lived in the city, and had a best friend," said hazel ripwinkley to diana, as they sat together on the long, red, sloping kitchen roof under the arches of the willow-tree, hemming towels for their afternoon "stent." they did this because their mother sat on the shed roof under the fir, when she was a child, and had told them of it. imagination is so much greater than fact, that these children, who had now all that little frank shiere had dreamed of with the tar smell and the gravel stones and the one tree,--who might run free in the wide woods and up the breezy hillsides,--liked best of all to get out on the kitchen roof and play "old times," and go back into their mother's dream. "i wish i lived in a block of houses, and could see across the corner into my best friend's room when she got up in the morning!" "and could have that party!" said diana. "think of the clean, smooth streets, with red sidewalks, and people living all along, door after door! i like things set in rows, and people having places, like the desks at school. why, you've got to go way round sand hill to get to elizabeth ann dorridon's. i should like to go up steps, and ring bells!" "i don't know," said diana, slowly. "i think birds that build little nests about anywhere in the cunning, separate places, in the woods, or among the bushes, have the best time." "birds, dine! it ain't birds, it's people! what has that to do with it?" "i mean i think nests are better than martin-boxes." "let's go in and get her to tell us that story. she's in the round room." the round room was a half ellipse, running in against the curve of the staircase. it was a bit of a place, with the window at one end, and the bow at the other. it had been doctor ripwinkley's office, and mrs. ripwinkley sat there with her work on summer afternoons. the door opened out, close at the front, upon a great flat stone in an angle, where was also entrance into the hall by the house-door, at the right hand. the door of the office stood open, and across the stone one could look down, between a range of lilac bushes and the parlor windows, through a green door-yard into the street. "now, mother frank, tell us about the party!" they called her "mother frank" when they wished to be particularly coaxing. they had taken up their father's name for her, with their own prefix, when they were very little ones, before he went away and left nobody to call her frank, every day, any more. "that same little old story? won't you ever be tired of it,--you great girls?" asked the mother; for she had told it to them ever since they were six and eight years old. "yes! no, never!" said the children. for how _should_ they outgrow it? it was a sunny little bit out of their mother's own child-life. we shall go back to smaller things, one day, maybe, and find them yet more beautiful. it is the _going_ back, together. "the same old way?" "yes; the very same old way." "we had little open-work straw hats and muslin pelisses,--your aunt laura and i,"--began mrs. ripwinkley, as she had begun all those scores of times before. "mother put them on for us,--she dressed us just alike, always,--and told us to take each other's hands, and go up brier and down hickory streets, and stop at all the houses that she named, and that we knew; and we were to give her love and compliments, and ask the mothers in each house,--mrs. dayton, and mrs. holridge (she lived up the long steps), and mrs. waldow, and the rest of them, to let caroline and grace and fanny and susan, and the rest of _them_, come at four o'clock, to spend the afternoon and take tea, if it was convenient." "o, mother!" said hazel, "you didn't say that when you _asked_ people, you know." "o, no!" said mrs. ripwinkley. "that was when we went to stop a little while ourselves, without being asked. well, it was to please to let them come. and all the ladies were at home, because it was only ten o'clock; and they all sent their love and compliments, and they were much obliged, and the little girls would be very happy. "it was a warm june day; up brier street was a steep walk; down hickory we were glad to keep on the shady side, and thought it was nice that mrs. bemys and mrs. waldow lived there. the strings of our hats were very moist and clinging when we got home, and laura had a blue mark under her chin from the green ribbon. "mother was in her room, in her white dimity morning gown, with little bows up the front, the ends trimmed with cambric edging. she took off our hats and our pelisses,--the tight little sleeves came off wrong side out,--sponged our faces with cool water, and brushed out laura's curls. that was the only difference between us. i hadn't any curls, and my hair had to be kept cropped. then she went to her upper bureau drawer and took out two little paper boxes. "'something has come for blanche and clorinda, since you have been gone,' she said, smiling. 'i suppose you have been shopping?' we took the paper boxes, laughing back at her with a happy understanding. we were used to these little plays of mother's, and she couldn't really surprise us with her kindnesses. we went and sat down in the window-seat, and opened them as deliberately and in as grown-up a way as we could. inside them were two little lace pelerines lined with rose-colored silk. the boxes had a faint smell of musk. the things were so much better for coming in boxes! mother knew that. "well, we dressed our dolls, and it was a great long sunshiny forenoon. mother and luclarion had done something in the kitchen, and there was a smell of sweet baking in the house. every now and then we sniffed, and looked at each other, and at mother, and laughed. after dinner we had on our white french calicoes with blue sprigs, and mother said she should take a little nap, and we might go into the parlor and be ready for our company. she always let us receive our own company ourselves at first. and exactly at four o'clock the door-bell rang, and they began to come. "caroline and fanny dayton had on white cambric dresses, and green kid slippers. that was being very much dressed, indeed. lucy waldow wore a pink lawn, and grace holridge a buff french print. susan bemys said her little sister couldn't come because they couldn't find her best shoes. her mother thought she had thrown them out of the window. "when they all got there we began to play 'lady fair;' and we had just got all the 'lady fairs,' one after another, into our ring, and were dancing and singing up and down and round and round, when the door opened and mother walked in. "we always thought our mother was the prettiest of any of the girls' mothers. she had such bright shining hair, and she put it up with shell combs into such little curly puffs. and she never seemed fussy or old, but she came in among us with such a beautiful, smiling way, as if she knew beforehand that it was all right, and there was no danger of any mischief, or that we shouldn't behave well, but she only wanted to see the good time. that day she had on a white muslin dress with little purple flowers on it, and a bow of purple ribbon right in the side of her hair. she had a little piece of fine work in her hand, and after she had spoken to all the little girls and asked them how their mothers were, she went and sat down in one of the front windows, and made little scollops and eyelets. i remember her long ivory stiletto, with a loop of green ribbon through the head of it, and the sharp, tiny, big-bowed scissors that lay in her lap, and the bright, tapering silver thimble on her finger. "pretty soon the door opened again, softly; a tray appeared, with hannah behind it. on the tray were little glass saucers with confectionery in them; old-fashioned confectionery,--gibraltars, and colored caraways, and cockles with mottoes. we were in the middle of 'so says the grand mufti,' and grace holridge was the grand mufti. hannah went up to her first, as she stood there alone, and grace took a saucer and held it up before the row of us, and said, '_thus_ says the grand mufti!' and then she bit a red gibraltar, and everybody laughed. she did it so quickly and so prettily, putting it right into the play. it was good of her not to say, '_so_ says the grand mufti.' at least we thought so then, though susan bemys said it would have been funnier. "we had a great many plays in those days, and it took a long afternoon to get through with them. we had not begun to wonder what we should do next, when tea time came, and we went down into the basement room. it wasn't tea, though; it was milk in little clear, pink mugs, some that mother only had out for our parties, and cold water in crimped-edge glasses, and little biscuits, and sponge-cakes, and small round pound-cakes frosted. these were what had smelt so good in the morning. "we stood round the table; there was not room for all of us to sit, and mother helped us, and hannah passed things round. susan bemys took cake three times, and lucy waldow opened her eyes wide, and fanny dayton touched me softly under the table. "after tea mother played and sung some little songs to us; and then she played the 'fisher's hornpipe' and 'money musk,' and we danced a little contra-dance. the girls did not all know cotillons, and some of them had not begun to go to dancing-school. father came home and had his tea after we had done ours, and then he came up into the parlor and watched us dancing. mr. dayton came in, too. at about half past eight some of the other fathers called, and some of the mothers sent their girls, and everybody was fetched away. it was nine o'clock when laura and i went to bed, and we couldn't go to sleep until after the clock struck ten, for thinking and saying what a beautiful time we had had, and anticipating how the girls would talk it all over next day at school. that," said mrs. ripwinkley, when she had finished, "was the kind of a party we used to have in boston when i was a little girl. i don't know what the little girls have now." "boston!" said luclarion, catching the last words as she came in, with her pink cape bonnet on, from the homesworth variety and finding store, and post-office. "you'll talk them children off to boston, finally, mrs. ripwinkley! nothing ever tugs so at one end, but there's something tugging at the other; and there's never a hint nor a hearing to anybody, that something more doesn't turn up concerning it. here's a letter, mrs. ripwinkley!" mrs. ripwinkley took it with some surprise. it was not her sister's handwriting nor mr. ledwith's, on the cover; and she rarely had a letter from them that was posted in boston, now. they had been living at a place out of town for several years. mrs. ledwith knew better than to give her letters to her husband for posting. they got lost in his big wallet, and stayed there till they grew old. who should write to mrs. ripwinkley, after all these years, from boston? she looked up at luclarion, and smiled. "it didn't take a solomon," said she, pointing to the postmark. "no, nor yet a black smooch, with only four letters plain, on an invelup. 'taint that, it's the drift of things. those girls have got boston in their minds as hard and fast as they've got heaven; and i mistrust mightily they'll get there first somehow!" the girls were out of hearing, as she said this; they had got their story, and gone back to their red roof and their willow tree. "why, luclarion!" exclaimed mrs. ripwinkley, as she drew out and unfolded the letter sheet. "it's from uncle titus oldways." "then he ain't dead," remarked luclarion, and went away into the kitchen. "my dear frances,--i am seventy-eight years old. it is time i got acquainted with some of my relations. i've had other work to do in the world heretofore (at least i thought i had), and so, i believe, have they. but i have a wish now to get you and your sister to come and live nearer to me, that we may find out whether we really are anything to each other or not. it seems natural, i suppose, that we might be; but kinship doesn't all run in the veins. "i do not ask you to do this with reference to any possible intentions of mine that might concern you after my death; my wish is to do what is right by you, in return for your consenting to my pleasure in the matter, while i am alive. it will cost you more to live in boston than where you do now, and i have no business to expect you to break up and come to a new home unless i can make it an object to you in some way. you can do some things for your children here that you could not do in homesworth. i will give you two thousand dollars a year to live on, and secure the same to you if i die. i have a house here in aspen street, not far from where i live myself, which i will give to either of you that it may suit. that you can settle between you when you come. it is rather a large house, and mrs. ledwith's family is larger, i think, than yours. the estate is worth ten thousand dollars, and i will give the same sum to the one who prefers, to put into a house elsewhere. i wish you to reckon this as all you are ever to expect from me, except the regard i am willing to believe i may come to have for you. i shall look to hear from you by the end of the week. "i remain, yours truly, "titus oldways." "luclarion!" cried mrs. ripwinkley, with excitement, "come here and help me think!" "only four days to make my mind up in," she said again, when luclarion had read the letter through. luclarion folded it and gave it back. "it won't take god four days to think," she answered quietly; "and you can ask _him_ in four minutes. you and i can talk afterwards." and luclarion got up and went away a second time into the kitchen. that night, after diana and hazel were gone to bed, their mother and luclarion grapp had some last words about it, sitting by the white-scoured kitchen table, where luclarion had just done mixing bread and covered it away for rising. mrs. ripwinkley was apt to come out and talk things over at this time of the kneading. she could get more from luclarion then than at any other opportunity. perhaps that was because miss grapp could not walk off from the bread-trough; or it might be that there was some sympathy between the mixing of her flour and yeast into a sweet and lively perfection, and the bringing of her mental leaven wholesomely to bear. "it looks as if it were meant, luclarion," said mrs. ripwinkley, at last. "and just think what it will be for the children." "i guess it's meant fast enough," replied luclarion. "but as for what it will be for the children,--why, that's according to what you all make of it. and that's the stump." luclarion grapp was fifty-four years old; but her views of life were precisely the same that they had been at twenty-eight. vi. and. there is a piece of z----, just over the river, that they call "and." it began among the school-girls; barbara holabird had christened it, with the shrewdness and mischief of fourteen years old. she said the "and-so-forths" lived there. it was a little supplementary neighborhood; an after-growth, coming up with the railroad improvements, when they got a freight station established on that side for the east z---mills. "after z----, what should it be but 'and?'" barbara holabird wanted to know. the people who lived there called it east square; but what difference did that make? it was two miles boston-ward from z---centre, where the down trains stopped first; that was five minutes gained in the time between it and the city. land was cheap at first, and sure to come up in value; so there were some streets laid out at right angles, and a lot of houses put up after a pattern, as if they had all been turned out of blanc-mange moulds, and there was "east square." then people began by-and-by to build for themselves, and a little variety and a good deal of ambition came in. they had got to french roofs now; this was just before the day of the multitudinous little paper collar-boxes with beveled covers, that are set down everywhere now, and look as if they could be lifted up by the chimneys, any time, and be carried off with a thumb and finger. two and a half story houses, mansarded, looked grand; and the east square people thought nothing slight of themselves, though the "old places" and the real z---families were all over on west hill. mrs. megilp boarded in and for the summer. "since oswald had been in business she couldn't go far from the cars, you know; and oswald had a boat on the river, and he and glossy enjoyed that so much. besides, she had friends in z----, which made it pleasant; and she was tired, for her part, of crowds and fashion. all she wanted was a quiet country place. she knew the goldthwaites and the haddens; she had met them one year at jefferson." mrs. megilp had found out that she could get larger rooms in and than she could have at the mountains or the sea-shore, and at half the price; but this she did not mention. yet there was nothing shabby in it, except her carefully _not_ mentioning it. mrs. megilp was mrs. grant ledwith's chief intimate and counselor. she was a good deal the elder; that was why it was mutually advantageous. grant ledwith was one of the out-in-the-world, up-to-the-times men of the day; the day in which everything is going, and everybody that is in active life has, somehow or other, all that is going. grant ledwith got a good salary, an inflated currency salary; and he spent it all. his daughters were growing up, and they were stylish and pretty; mrs. megilp took a great interest in agatha and florence ledwith, and was always urging their mother to "do them justice." "agatha and florence were girls who had a right to every advantage." mrs. megilp was almost old enough to be laura ledwith's mother; she had great experience, and knowledge of the world; and she sat behind laura's conscience and drove it tandem with her inclination. per contra, it was nice for mrs. megilp, who was a widow, and whose income did not stretch with the elasticity of the times, to have friends who lived like the ledwiths, and who always made her welcome; it was a good thing for glossy to be so fond of agatha and florence, and to have them so fond of her. "she needed young society," her mother said. one reason that glossy megilp needed young society might be in the fact that she herself was twenty-six. mrs. megilp had advised the ledwiths to buy a house in z----. "it was just far enough not to be suburban, but to have a society of its own; and there _was_ excellent society in z----, everybody knew. boston was hard work, nowadays; the distances were getting to be so great." up to the west and south ends,--the material distances,--she meant to be understood to say; but there was an inner sense to mrs. megilp's utterances, also. "one might as well be quite out of town; and then it was always something, even in such city connection as one might care to keep up, to hail from a well-recognized social independency; to belong to z---was a standing, always. it wasn't like going to forest dell, or lakegrove, or bellair; cheap little got-up places with fancy names, that were strung out on the railroads like french gilt beads on a chain." but for all that, mrs. ledwith had only got into "and;" and mrs. megilp knew it. laura did not realize it much; she had bowing and speaking acquaintance with the haddens and the hendees, and even with the marchbankses, over on west hill; and the goldthwaites and the holabirds, down in the town, she knew very well. she did not care to come much nearer; she did not want to be bound by any very stringent and exclusive social limits; it was a bother to keep up to all the demands of such a small, old-established set. mrs. hendee would not notice, far less be impressed by the advent of her new-style brussels carpet with a border, or her full, fresh, nottingham lace curtains, or the new covering of her drawing-room set with cuir-colored terry. mrs. tom friske and mrs. philgry, down here at east square, would run in, and appreciate, and admire, and talk it all over, and go away perhaps breaking the tenth commandment amiably in their hearts. mrs. ledwith's nerves had extended since we saw her as a girl; they did not then go beyond the floating ends of her blue or rose-colored ribbons, or, at furthest, the tip of her jaunty laced sunshade; now they ramified,--for life still grows in some direction,--to her chairs, and her china, and her curtains, and her ruffled pillow-shams. also, savingly, to her children's "suits," and party dresses, and pic-nic hats, and double button gloves. savingly; for there is a leaven of grace in mother-care, even though it be expended upon these. her friend, mrs. inchdeepe, in helvellyn park, with whom she dined when she went shopping in boston, had _nothing_ but her modern improvements and her furniture. "my house is my life," she used to say, going round with a canton crape duster, touching tenderly carvings and inlayings and gildings. mrs. megilp was spending the day with laura ledwith; glossy was gone to town, and thence down to the sea-shore, with some friends. mrs. megilp spent a good many days with laura. she had large, bright rooms at her boarding-house, but then she had very gristly veal pies and thin tapioca puddings for dinner; and mrs. megilp's constitution required something more generous. she was apt to happen in at this season, when laura had potted pigeons. a little bird told her; a dozen little birds, i mean, with their legs tied together in a bunch; for she could see the market wagon from her window, when it turned up mr. ledwith's avenue. laura had always the claret pitcher on her dinner table, too; and claret and water, well-sugared, went deliciously with the savory stew. they were up-stairs now, in laura's chamber; the bed and sofa were covered with silk and millinery; laura was looking over the girls' "fall things;" there was a smell of sweet marjoram and thyme and cloves, and general richness coming up from the kitchen; there was a bland sense of the goodness of providence in mrs. megilp's--no, not heart, for her heart was not very hungry; but in her eyes and nostrils. she was advising mrs. ledwith to take desire and helena's two green silks and make them over into one for helena. "you can get two whole back breadths then, by piecing it up under the sash; and you _can't_ have all those gores again; they are quite done with. everybody puts in whole breadths now. there's just as much difference in the _way_ of goring a skirt, as there is between gores and straight selvages." "they do hang well, though; they have such a nice slope." "yes,--but the stripes and the seams! those tell the story six rods off; and then there _must_ be sashes, or postillions, or something; they don't make anything without them; there isn't any finish to a round waist unless you have something behind." "they wore belts last year, and i bought those expensive gilt buckles. i'm sure they used to look sweetly. but there! a fashion doesn't last nowadays while you're putting a thing on and walking out of the house!" "and don't put in more than three plaits," pursued mrs. megilp, intent on the fate of the green silks. "everything is gathered; you see that is what requires the sashes; round waists and gathers have a queer look without." "if you once begin to alter, you've got to make all over," said mrs. ledwith, a little fractiously, putting the scissors in with unwilling fingers. she knew there was a good four days' work before her, and she was quick with her needle, too. "never mind; the making over doesn't cost anything; you turn off work so easily; and then you've got a really stylish thing." "but with all the ripping and remodelling, i don't get time to turn round, myself, and _live_! it is all fall work, and spring work, and summer work and winter work. one drive rushes pell-mell right over another. there isn't time enough to make things and have them; the good of them, i mean." "the girls get it; we have to live in our children," said mrs. megilp, self-renouncingly. "i can never rest until glossy is provided with everything; and you know, laura, i _am_ obliged to contrive." mrs. megilp and her daughter glaucia spent about a thousand dollars a year, between them, on their dress. in these days, this is a limited allowance--for the megilps. but mrs. megilp was a woman of strict pecuniary principle; the other fifteen hundred must pay all the rest; she submitted cheerfully to the divine allotment, and punctually made the two ends meet. she will have this to show, when the lord of these servants cometh and reckoneth with them, and that man who has been also in narrow circumstances, brings his nicely kept talent out of his napkin. desire ledwith, a girl of sixteen, spoke suddenly from a corner where she sat with a book,-"i do wonder who '_they_' are, mamma!" "who?" said mrs. ledwith, half rising from her chair, and letting some breadths of silk slide down upon the floor from her lap, as she glanced anxiously from the window down the avenue. she did not want any company this morning. "not that, mamma; i don't mean anybody coming. the 'theys' that wear, and don't wear, things; the theys you have to be just like, and keep ripping and piecing for." "you absurd child!" exclaimed mrs. ledwith, pettishly. "to make me spill a whole lapful of work for that! they? why, everybody, of course." "everybody complains of them, though. jean friske says her mother is all discouraged and worn out. there isn't a thing they had last year that won't have to be made over this, because they put in a breadth more behind, and they only gore side seams. and they don't wear black capes or cloth sacks any more with all kinds of dresses; you must have suits, clear through. it seems to me 'they' is a nuisance. and if it's everybody, we must be part of it. why doesn't somebody stop?" "desire, i wish you'd put away your book, and help, instead of asking silly questions. you can't make the world over, with 'why don'ts?'" "i'll _rip_," said desire, with a slight emphasis; putting her book down, and coming over for a skirt and a pair of scissors. "but you know i'm no good at putting together again. and about making the world over, i don't know but that might be as easy as making over all its clothes, i'd as lief try, of the two." desire was never cross or disagreeable; she was only "impracticable," her mother said. "and besides that, she didn't know what she really did want. she was born hungry and asking, with those sharp little eyes, and her mouth always open while she was a baby. 'it was a sign,' the nurse said, when she was three weeks old. and then the other sign,--that she should have to be called 'desire!'" mrs. megilp--for mrs. megilp had been in office as long ago as that--had suggested ways of getting over or around the difficulty, when aunt desire had stipulated to have the baby named for her, and had made certain persuasive conditions. "there's the pretty french turn you might give it,--'desirã©e.' only one more 'e,' and an accent. that is so sweet, and graceful, and distinguished!" "but aunt desire won't have the name twisted. it is to be real, plain desire, or not at all." mrs. megilp had shrugged her shoulders. "well, of course it can be that, to christen by, and marry by, and be buried by. but between whiles,--people pick up names,--you'll see!" mrs. megilp began to call her "daisy" when she was two years old. nobody could help what mrs. megilp took a fancy to call her by way of endearment, of course; and daisy she was growing to be in the family, when one day, at seven years old, she heard mrs. megilp say to her mother,-"i don't see but that you've all got your _desire_, after all. the old lady is satisfied; and away up there in hanover, what can it signify to her? the child is 'daisy,' practically, now, as long as she lives." the sharp, eager little gray eyes, so close together in the high, delicate head, glanced up quickly at speaker and hearer. "what old lady, mamma, away up in hanover?" "your aunt desire, daisy, whom you were named for. she lives in hanover. you are to go and see her there, this summer." "will she call me daisy?" the little difficulty suggested in this question had singularly never occurred to mrs. ledwith before. miss desire ledwith never came down to boston; there was no danger at home. "no. she is old-fashioned, and doesn't like pet names. she will call you desire. that is your name, you know." "would it signify if she thought you called me daisy?" asked the child frowning half absently over her doll, whose arm she was struggling to force into rather a tight sleeve of her own manufacture. "well, perhaps she might not exactly understand. people always went by their names when she was a child, and now hardly anybody does. she was very particular about having you called for her, and you _are_, you know. i always write 'desire ledwith' in all your books, and--well, i always _shall_ write it so, and so will you. but you can be daisy when we make much of you here at home, just as florence is flossie." "no, i can't," said the little girl, very decidedly, getting up and dropping her doll. "aunt desire, away up in hanover, is thinking all the time that there is a little desire ledwith growing up down here. i don't mean to have her cheated. i'm going to went by my name, as she did. don't call me daisy any more, all of you; for i shan't come!" the gray eyes sparkled; the whole little face scintillated, as it were. desire ledwith had a keen, charged little face; and when something quick and strong shone through it, it was as if somewhere behind it there had been struck fire. she was true to that through all the years after; going to school with mabels and ethels and graces and ediths,--not a girl she knew but had a pretty modern name,--and they all wondering at that stiff little "desire" of hers that she would go by. when she was twelve years old, the old lady up in hanover had died, and left her a gold watch, large and old-fashioned, which she could only keep on a stand in her room,--a good solid silver tea-set, and all her spoons, and twenty-five shares in the hanover bank. mrs. megilp called her daisy, with gentle inadvertence, one day after that. desire lifted her eyes slowly at her, with no other reply in her face, or else. "you might please your mother now, i think," said mrs. megilp. "there is no old lady to be troubled by it." "a promise isn't ever dead, mrs. megilp," said desire, briefly. "i shall keep our words." "after all," mrs. megilp said privately to the mother, "there is something quietly aristocratic in an old, plain, family name. i don't know that it isn't good taste in the child. everybody understands that it was a condition, and an inheritance." mrs. megilp had taken care of that. she was watchful for the small impressions she could make in behalf of her particular friends. she carried about with her a little social circumference in which all was preã«minently as it should be. but,--as i would say if you could not see it for yourself--this is a digression. we will go back again. "if it were any use!" said desire, shaking out the deep plaits as she unfastened them from the band. "but you're only a piece of everybody after all. you haven't anything really new or particular to yourself, when you've done. and it takes up so much time. last year, this was so pretty! _isn't_ anything actually pretty in itself, or can't they settle what it is? i should think they had been at it long enough." "fashions never were so graceful as they are this minute," said mrs. megilp. "of course it is art, like everything else, and progress. the world is getting educated to a higher refinement in it, every day. why, it's duty, child!" she continued, exaltedly. "think what the world would be if nobody cared. we ought to make life beautiful. it's meant to be. there's not only no virtue in ugliness, but almost no virtue _with_ it, i think. people are more polite and good-natured when they are well dressed and comfortable." "_that's_ dress, too, though," said desire, sententiously. "you've got to stay at home four days, and rip, and be tired, and cross, and tried-on-to, and have no chance to do anything else, before you can put it all on and go out and be good-natured and bland, and help put the beautiful face on the world, _one_ day. i don't believe it's political economy." "everybody doesn't have to do it for themselves. really, when i hear people blamed for dress and elegance,--why, the very ones who have the most of it are those who sacrifice the least time to it. they just go and order what they want, and there's the end of it. when it comes home, they put it on, and it might as well be a flounced silk as a plain calico." "but we _do_ have to think, mrs. megilp. and work and worry. and then we _can't_ turn right round in the things we know every stitch of and have bothered over from beginning to end, and just be lilies of the field!" "a great many people do have to wash their own dishes, and sweep, and scour; but that is no reason it ought not to be done. i always thought it was rather a pity that was said, _just so_," mrs. megilp proceeded, with a mild deprecation of the scripture. "there _is_ toiling and spinning; and will be to the end of time, for some of us." "there's cauliflower brought for dinner, mrs. ledwith," said christina, the parlor girl, coming in. "and hannah says it won't go with the pigeons. will she put it on the ice for to-morrow?" "i suppose so," said mrs. ledwith, absently, considering a breadth that had a little hitch in it. "though what we shall have to-morrow i'm sure i don't know," she added, rousing up. "i wish mr. ledwith wouldn't send home the first thing he sees, without any reference." "and here's the milkman's bill, and a letter," continued christina, laying them down on a chair beside her mistress, and then departing. great things come into life so easily, when they do come, right alongside of milk-bills and cabbages! and yet one may wait so long sometimes for anything to happen _but_ cabbages! the letter was in a very broad, thick envelope, and sealed with wax. mrs. ledwith looked at it curiously before she opened it. she did not receive many letters. she had very little time for correspondence. it was addressed to "mrs. laura ledwith." that was odd and unusual, too. mrs. megilp glanced at her over the tortoise-shell rims of her eye-glasses, but sat very quiet, lest she should delay the opening. she would like to know what could be in that very business-like looking despatch, and laura would be sure to tell her. it must be something pretty positive, one way or another; it was no common-place negative communication. laura might have had property left her. mrs. megilp always thought of possibilities like that. when laura ledwith had unfolded the large commercial sheet, and glanced down the open lines of square, upright characters, whose purport could be taken in at sight, like print, she turned very red with a sudden excitement. then all the color dropped away, and there was nothing in her face but blank, pale, intense surprise. "it is a most _won_derful thing!" said she, at last, slowly; and her breath came like a gasp with her words. "my great-uncle, mr. oldways." she spoke those four words as if from them mrs. megilp could understand everything. mrs. megilp thought she did. "ah! gone?" she asked, pathetically. "gone! no, indeed!" said mrs. ledwith. "he wrote the letter. he wants me to _come_; me, and all of us,--to boston, to live; and to get acquainted with him." "my dear," said mrs. megilp, with the promptness and benignity of a christian apostle, "it's your duty to go." "and he offers me a house, and two thousand dollars a year." "my dear," said mrs. megilp, "it is _emphatically_ your duty to go." all at once something strange came over laura ledwith. she crumpled the letter tight in her hands with a clutch of quick excitement, and began to choke with a little sob, and to laugh at the same time. "don't give way!" cried mrs. megilp, coming to her and giving her a little shake and a slap. "if you do once you will again, and you're _not_ hystericky!" "he's sent for frank, too. frank and i will be together again in dear old boston! but--we can't be children and sit on the shed any more; and--it _isn't_ dear old boston, either!" and then laura gave right up, and had a good cry for five minutes. after that she felt better, and asked mrs. megilp how she thought a house in spiller street would do. but she couldn't rip any more of those breadths that morning. agatha and florence came in from some calls at the goldthwaites and the haddens, and the news was told, and they had their bonnets to take off, and the dinner-bell rang, and the smell of the spicy pigeon-stew came up the stairs, all together. and they went down, talking fast; and one said "house," and another "carpets," and another "music and german;" and desire, trailing a breadth of green silk in her hand that she had never let go since the letter was read, cried out, "oratorios!" and nobody quite knew what they were going down stairs for, or had presence of mind to realize the pigeons, or help each other or themselves properly, when they got there! except mrs. megilp, who was polite and hospitable to them all, and picked two birds in the most composed and elegant manner. when the dessert was put upon the table, and christina, confusedly enlightened as to the family excitement, and excessively curious, had gone away into the kitchen, mrs. ledwith said to mrs. megilp,-"i'm not sure i should fancy spiller street, after all; it's a sort of a corner. westmoreland street or helvellyn park might be nice. i know people down that way,--mrs. inchdeepe." "mrs. inchdeepe isn't exactly 'people,'" said mrs. megilp, in a quiet way that implied more than grammar. "don't get into 'and' in boston, laura!--with such an addition to your income, and what your uncle gives you toward a house, i don't see why you might not think of republic avenue." "we shall have plenty of thinking to do about everything," said laura. "mamma," said agatha, insinuatingly, "i'm thinking, already; about that rose-pink paper for my room. i'm glad now i didn't have it here." agatha had been restless for white lace, and rose-pink, and a brussels carpet ever since her friend zarah thoole had come home from europe and furnished a morning-room. all this time mr. grant ledwith, quite unconscious of the impending changes with which his family were so far advanced in imagination, was busy among bales and samples in devonshire street. it got to be an old story by the time the seven o'clock train was in, and he reached home. it was almost as if it had all happened a year ago, and they had been waiting for him to come home from australia. there was so much to explain to him that it was really hard to make him understand, and to bring him up to the point from which they could go on together. vii. waking up. the ledwiths took apartments in boston for a month. they packed away the furniture they wanted to keep for upper rooms, in the attics of their house at z----. they had an auction of all the furniture of their drawing-room, dining-room, library, and first floor of sleeping-rooms. then they were to let their house. meanwhile, one was to be fixed upon and fitted up in boston. in all this mrs. megilp advised, invaluably. "it's of no use to move things," she said. "three removes are as bad as a fire; and nothing ever fits in to new places. old wine and new bottles, you know! clear all off with a country auction. everybody comes, and they all fight for everything. things bring more than their original cost. then you've nothing to do but order according to your taste." mr. oldways had invited both his nieces to his own house on their arrival. but here again mrs. megilp advised,--so judiciously. "there are too many of you; it would be a positive infliction. and then you'll have all your running about and planning and calculating to do, and the good old gentleman would think he had pulled half boston down about his ears. your sister can go there; it would be only generous and thoughtful to give way to her. there are only three of them, and they are strange, you know, to every thing, and wouldn't know which way to turn. i can put you in the way of rooms at the bellevue, exactly the thing, for a hundred and fifty a month. no servants, you see; meals at the restaurant, and very good, too. the wedringtons are to give them up unexpectedly; going to europe; poor mrs. wedrington is so out of health. and about the house; don't decide in a hurry; see what your uncle says, and your sister. it's very likely she'll prefer the aspen street house; and it _would_ be out of the way for you. still it is not to be _refused_, you know; of course it is very desirable in many respects; roomy, old-fashioned, and a garden. i think your sister will like those things; they're what she has been used to. if she does, why it's all comfortably settled, and nobody refuses. it is so ungracious to appear to object; a gift horse, you know." "not to be refused; only by no means to be taken; masterly inactivity till somebody else is hooked; and then somebody else is to be grateful for the preference. i wish mrs. megilp wouldn't shine things up so; and that mother wouldn't go to her to black all her boots!" desire said this in secret, indignant discomfort, to helena, the fourth in the family, her chum-sister. helena did very well to talk to; she heard anything; then she pranced round the room and chaffed the canary. "chee! chee! chee! chiddle, iddle, iddle, iddle, e-e-ee! where do you keep all your noise and your breath? you're great, aren't you? you do that to spite people that have to work up one note at a time. you don't take it in away down under your belt, do you? you're not particular about that. you don't know much, after all. you don't know _how_ you do it. you aren't learning of madame caroletti. and you haven't learned two quarters, any way. you were only just born last spring. set up! tr-r-r-r-e-e-ee! i can do that myself. i don't believe you've got an octave in you. poh!" mrs. ripwinkley came down from the country with a bonnet on that had a crown, and with not a particle of a chignon. when she was married, twenty-five years before, she wore a french twist,--her hair turned up in waves from her neck as prettily as it did away from her forehead,--and two thick coiled loops were knotted and fastened gracefully at the top. she had kept on twisting her hair so, all these years; and the rippling folds turned naturally under her fingers into their places. the color was bright still, and it had not thinned. over her brows it parted richly, with no fuzz or crimp; but a sweet natural wreathing look that made her face young. mrs. ledwith had done hers over slate-pencils till she had burned it off; and now tied on a friz, that came low down, for fashion's sake, and left visible only a little bunch of puckers between her eyebrows and the crowsfeet at the corners. the back of her head was weighted down by an immense excrescence in a bag. behind her ears were bare places. mrs. ledwith began to look old-young. and a woman cannot get into a worse stage of looks than that. still, she was a showy woman--a good exponent of the reigning style; and she was handsome--she and her millinery--of an evening, or in the street. when i began that last paragraph i meant to tell you what else mrs. ripwinkley brought with her, down out of the country and the old times; but hair takes up a deal of room. she brought down all her dear old furniture. that is, it came after her in boxes, when she had made up her mind to take the aspen street house. "why, that's the sofa oliver used to lie down on when he came home tired from his patients, and that's the rocking-chair i nursed my babies in; and this is the old oak table we've sat round three times a day, the family of us growing and thinning, as the time went on, all through these years. it's like a communion table, now, laura. of course such things had to come." this was what she answered, when laura ejaculated her amazement at her having brought "old homesworth truck" to boston. "you see it isn't the walls that make the home; we can go away from them and not break our hearts, so long as our own goes with us. the little things that we have used, and that have grown around us with our living,--they are all of living that we can handle and hold on to; and if i went to spitzbergen, i should take as many of them as i could." the aspen street house just suited mrs. ripwinkley, and diana, and hazel. in the first place, it was wooden; built side to the street, so that you went up a little paved walk, in a shade of trees, to get to the door; and then the yard, on the right hand side as you came in, was laid out in narrow walks between borders of blossoming plants. there were vines against the brick end of the next building,--creepers and morning-glories, and white and scarlet runners; and a little martin-box was set upon a pole in the still, farther corner. the rooms of the house were low, but large; and some of the windows had twelve-paned sashes,--twenty-four to a window. mrs. ripwinkley was charmed with these also. they were like the windows at mile hill. mrs. ledwith, although greatly relieved by her sister's prompt decision for the house which she did _not_ want, felt it in her conscience to remonstrate a little. "you have just come down from the mountains, frank, after your twenty-five years' sleep; you've seen nothing by and by you will think differently. this house is fearfully old-fashioned, _fearfully_; and it's away down here on the wrong side of the hill. you can never get up over summit street from here." "we are used to hills, and walking." "but i mean--that isn't all. there are other things you won't be able to get over. you'll never shake off aspen street dust,--you nor the children." "i don't think it is dusty. it is quiet, and sheltered, and clean. i like it ever so much," said mrs. ripwinkley. "o, dear, you don't understand in the least! it's wicked to let you go on so! you poor, dear, simple little old soul!" "never mind," said mrs. megilp. "it's all well enough for the present. it pleases the old gentleman, you know; and after all he's done, he ought to be pleased. one of you should certainly be in his neighborhood. _he_ has been here from time immemorial; and any place grows respectable by staying in it long enough--from _choice_. nobody will wonder at mrs. ripwinkley's coming here at his request. and when she _does_ move, you see, she will know exactly what she is about." "i almost doubt if she ever _will_ know what she is about," said laura. "in that case,--well,"--said mrs. megilp, and stopped, because it really was not in the least needful to say more. mrs. megilp felt it judicious, for many reasons, that mrs. ripwinkley should he hidden away for awhile, to get that mountain sleep out of her eyes, if it should prove possible; just as we rub old metal with oil and put it by till the rust comes off. the ledwiths decided upon a house in shubarton place that would not seem quite like taking old uncle titus's money and rushing away with it as far as city limits would allow; and laura really did wish to have the comfort of her sister's society, in a cozy way, of mornings, up in her room; that was her chief idea about it. there were a good many times and things in which she scarcely expected much companionship from frank. she would not have said even to herself, that frank was rusty; and she would do her faithful and good-natured best to rub her up; but there was an instinct with her of the congruous and the incongruous; and she would not do her bath-brick polishing out on the public promenade. they began by going together to the carpet stores and the paper warehouses; but they ended in detailing themselves for separate work; their ideas clashed ridiculously, and perpetually confused each other. frank remembered loyally her old brown sofa and chairs; she would not have gay colors to put them out of countenance; for even if she re-covered them, she said they should have the same old homey complexion. so she chose a fair, soft buff, with a pattern of brown leaves, for her parlor paper; mrs. ledwith, meanwhile, plunging headlong into glories of crimson and garnet and gold. agatha had her blush pink, in panels, with heart-of-rose borders, set on with delicate gilt beadings; you would have thought she was going to put herself up, in a fancy-box, like a french _mouchoir_ or a _bonbon_. "why _don't_ you put your old brown things all together in an up-stairs room, and call it mile hill? you could keep it for old times' sake, and sit there mornings; the house is big enough; and then have furniture like other people's in the parlor?" "you see it wouldn't be _me_." said mrs. ripwinkley, simply. "they keep saying it 'looks,' and 'it looks,'" said diana to her mother, at home. "why must everything _look_ somehow?" "and every_body_, too," said hazel. "why, when we meet any one in the street that agatha and florence know, the minute they have gone by they say, 'she didn't look well to-day,' or, 'how pretty she did look in that new hat!' and after the great party they went to at that miss hitchler's, they never told a word about it except how girls 'looked.' i wonder what they _did_, or where the good time was. seems to me people ain't living,--they are only just looking; or _is_ this the same old boston that you told about, and where are the real folks, mother?" "we shall find them," said mrs. ripwinkley, cheerily; "and the real of these, too, when the outsides are settled. in the meantime, we'll make our house say, and not look. say something true, of course. things won't say anything else, you see; if you try to make them, they don't speak out; they only stand in a dumb show and make faces." "that's looking!" said hazel. "now i know." "how those children do grow!" said mrs. ripwinkley, as they went off together. "two months ago they were sitting out on the kitchen roof, and coming to me to hear the old stories!" "transplantin'," said luclarion. "that's done it." at twelve and fourteen, hazel and diana could be simple as birds,--simpler yet, as human children waiting for all things,--in their country life and their little dreams of the world. two months' contact with people and things in a great city had started the life that was in them, so that it showed what manner of growth it was to be of. and little hazel ripwinkley had got hold already of the small end of a very large problem. but she could not make it out that this was the same old boston that her mother had told about, or where the nice neighbors were that would be likely to have little tea-parties for their children. viii. eavesdropping in aspen street. some of the old builders,--not the _very_ old ones, for they built nothing but rope-walks down behind the hill,--but some of those who began to go northwest from the state house to live, made a pleasant group of streets down there on the level stretching away to the river, and called them by fresh, fragrant, country-suggesting names. names of trees and fields and gardens, fruits and blossoms; and they built houses with gardens around them. in between the blocks were deep, shady places; and the smell of flowers was tossed back and forth by summer winds between the walls. some nice old people stayed on there, and a few of their descendants stay on there still, though they are built in closely now, for the most part, and coarse, common things have much intruded, and summit street overshadows them with its palaces. here and there a wooden house, set back a little, like this of the ripwinkleys in aspen street, gives you a feeling of boston in the far back times, as you go by; and here and there, if you could get into the life of the neighborhood, you might perhaps find a household keeping itself almost untouched with change, though there has been such a rush and surge for years up and over into the newer and prouder places. at any rate, titus oldways lived here in greenley street; and he owned the aspen street house, and another over in meadow place, and another in field court. he meant to stretch his control over them as long as he could, and keep them for families; therefore he valued them at such rates as they would bring for dwellings; he would not sell or lease them for any kind of "improvements;" he would not have their little door-yards choked up, or their larger garden spaces destroyed, while he could help it. round in orchard street lived miss craydocke. she was away again, now, staying a little while with the josselyns in new york. uncle titus told mrs. ripwinkley that when miss craydocke came back it would be a neighborhood, and they could go round; now it was only back and forth between them and him and rachel froke. there were other people, too, but they would be longer finding them out. "you'll know miss craydocke as soon as you see her; she is one of those you always seem to have seen before." now uncle titus would not have said this to everybody; not even if everybody had been his niece, and had come to live beside him. orchard street is wide and sunny and pleasant; the river air comes over it and makes it sweet; and miss craydocke's is a big, generous house, of which she only uses a very little part herself, because she lets the rest to nice people who want pleasant rooms and can't afford to pay much rent; an old gentleman who has had a hard time in the world, but has kept himself a gentleman through it all, and his little cheery old lady-wife who puts her round glasses on and stitches away at fine women's under-garments and flannel embroideries, to keep things even, have the two very best rooms; and a clergyman's widow, who copies for lawyers, and writes little stories for children, has another; and two orphan sisters who keep school have another; and miss craydocke calls her house the beehive, and buzzes up and down in it, and out and in, on little "seeing-to" errands of care and kindness all day long, as never any queen-bee did in any beehive before, but in a way that makes her more truly queen than any sitting in the middle cell of state to be fed on royal jelly. behind the beehive, is a garden, as there should be; great patches of lily-of-the valley grow there that miss craydocke ties up bunches from in the spring and gives away to little children, and carries into all the sick rooms she knows of, and the poor places. i always think of those lilies of the valley when i think of miss craydocke. it seems somehow as if they were blooming about her all the year through; and so they are, perhaps, invisibly. the other flowers come in their season; the crocuses have been done with first of all; the gay tulips and the snowballs have made the children glad when they stopped at the gate and got them, going to school. miss craydocke is always out in her garden at school-time. by and by there are the tall white lilies, standing cool and serene in the july heats; then miss craydocke is away at the mountains, pressing ferns and drying grasses for winter parlors; but there is somebody on duty at the garden dispensary always, and there are flower-pensioners who know they may come in and take the gracious toll. late in the autumn, the nasturtiums and verbenas and marigolds are bright; and the asters quill themselves into the biggest globes they can, of white and purple and rose, as if it were to make the last glory the best, and to do the very utmost of the year. then the chrysanthemums go into the house and bloom there for christmas-time. there is nothing else like miss craydocke's house and garden, i do believe, in all the city of the three hills. it is none too big for her, left alone with it, the last of her family; the world is none too big for her; she is glad to know it is all there. she has a use for everything as fast as it comes, and a work to do for everybody, as fast as she finds them out. and everybody,--almost,--catches it as she goes along, and around her there is always springing up a busy and a spreading crystallizing of shining and blessed elements. the world is none too big for her, or for any such, of course, because,--it has been told why better than i can tell it,--because "ten times one is always ten." it was a gray, gusty morning. it had not set in to rain continuously; but the wind wrung handfuls of drops suddenly from the clouds, and flung them against the panes and into the wayfarers' faces. over in the house opposite the ripwinkley's, at the second story windows, sat two busy young persons. hazel, sitting at her window, in "mother's room," where each had a corner, could see across; and had got into the way of innocent watching. up in homesworth, she had used to watch the robins in the elm-trees; here, there was human life, in little human nests, all about her. "it's the same thing, mother," she would say, "isn't it, now? don't you remember in that book of the 'new england housekeeper,' that you used to have, what the woman said about the human nature of the beans? it's in beans, and birds, and bird's nests; and folks, and folks' nests. it don't make much difference. it's just snugness, and getting along. and it's so nice to see!" hazel put her elbows up on the window-sill, and looked straight over into that opposite room, undisguisedly. the young man, in one window, said to his sister in the other, at the same moment,-"our company's come! there's that bright little girl again!" and the sister said, "well, it's pretty much all the company we can take in! she brings her own seat and her own window; and she doesn't interrupt. it's just the kind for us, kentie!" "she's writing,--copying something,--music, it looks like; see it there, set up against the shutter. she always goes out with a music roll in her hand. i wonder whether she gives or takes?" said diana, stopping on her way to her own seat to look out over hazel's shoulder. "both, i guess," said mrs. ripwinkley. "most people do. why don't you put your flowers in the window, hazel?" "why, so i will!" they were a great bunch of snowy white and deep crimson asters, with green ivy leaves, in a tall gray glass vase. rachel froke had just brought them in from miss craydocke's garden. "they're looking, mother! only i do think it's half too bad! that girl seems as if she would almost reach across after them. perhaps they came from the country, and haven't had any flowers." "thee might take them over some," said mrs. froke, simply. "o, i shouldn't dare! there are other people in the house, and i don't know their names, or anything. i wish i could, though." "i can," said rachel froke. "thee'll grow tall enough to step over pebbles one of these days. never mind; i'll fetch thee more to-morrow; and thee'll let the vase go for a while? likely they've nothing better than a tumbler." rachel froke went down the stairs, and out along the paved walk, into the street. she stopped an instant on the curb-stone before she crossed, and looked up at those second story windows. hazel watched her. she held up the vase slightly with one hand, nodding her little gray bonnet kindly, and beckoned with the other. the young girl started from her seat. in another minute hazel saw them together in the doorway. there was a blush and a smile, and an eager brightness in the face, and a quick speaking thanks, that one could read without hearing, from the parted lips, on the one side, and the quiet, unflutterable gray bonnet calmly horizontal on the other; and then the door was shut, and rachel froke was crossing the damp pavement again. "i'm so glad aspen street is narrow!" said hazel. "i should hate to be way off out of sight of people. what did you say to her, mrs. froke?" she asked, as the friend reentered. hazel could by no means take the awful liberty of "rachel." "i said the young girl, hazel ripwinkley, being from the country, knew how good flowers were to strangers in the town, and that she thought they might be strange, and might like some." hazel flushed all up. at that same instant, a gentle nod and smile came across from window to window, and she flushed more, till the tears sprung with the shy, glad excitement, as she returned it and then shrunk away. "and she said, 'thank her, with dorris kincaid's love,'" proceeded rachel froke. "o, _mother_!" exclaimed hazel. "and you did it all, right off so, mrs. froke. i don't see how grown up people dare, and know how!" up the stairs ran quick feet in little clattering heeled boots. desire ledwith, with a purple waterproof on, came in. "i couldn't stay at home to-day," she said, "i wanted to be where it was all-togetherish. it never is at our house. now it's set up, they don't do anything with it." "that's because it '_looks_'--so elegant," said hazel, catching herself up in dismay. "it's because it's the crust, i think," said desire. "puff paste, like an oyster patty; and they haven't got anything cooked yet for the middle. i wonder when they will. i had a call yesterday, all to myself," she went on, with a sudden change of tone and topic. "agatha was hopping and i wouldn't tell her what i said, or how i behaved. that new parlor girl of ours thinks we're all or any of us 'miss ledwith,' mamma included, and so she let him in. he had on lavender pantaloons and a waxed moustache." "the rain is just pouring down!" said diana, at the garden window. "yes; i'm caught. that's what i meant," said desire. "you've got to keep me all day, now. how will you get home, mrs. froke? or won't you have to stay, too?" "thee may call me rachel, desire ledwith, if thee pleases. i like it better. i am no mistress. and for getting home, it is but just round the corner. but there is no need yet. i came for an hour, to sit here with friend frances. and my hour is not yet up." "i'm glad of that, for there is something i want you to tell me. i haven't quite got at it myself, yet; so as to ask, i mean. wait a minute!" and she put her elbows up on her knees, and held her thumbs against her ears, and her fingers across her forehead; sitting squarely opposite the window to which she had drawn up her chair beside diane, and looking intently at the driving streams that rushed and ran down against the glass. "i was sitting in the bay-window at home, when it began this morning; that made me think. all the world dripping wet, and i just put there dry and safe in the middle of the storm, shut up behind those great clear panes and tight sashes. how they did have to contrive, and work, before there were such places made for people! what if they had got into their first scratchy little houses, and sat behind the logs as we do behind glass windows and thought, as i was thinking, how nice it was just to be covered up from the rain? is it all finished now? hasn't anybody got to contrive anything more? and who's going to do it--and everything. and what are we good for,--just _we_,--to come and expect it all, modern-improved! i don't think much of our place among things, do you, mrs. froke?--there, i believe that's it, as near as i can!'" "why does thee ask me, desire?" "i don't know. i don't know any whys or what fors. 'behold we know not anything,'--tennyson and i! but you seem so--pacified--i suppose i thought you must have settled most things in your mind." "every builder--every little joiner--did his piece,--thought his thought out, i think likely. there's no little groove or moulding or fitting or finish, but is a bit of somebody's living; and life grows, going on. we've all got our piece to do," said rachel. "i asked mrs. mig," desire pursued, "and she said some people's part was to buy and employ and encourage; and that spending money helps all the world; and then she put another cushion to her back, and went on tatting." "perhaps it does--in spite of the world," said rachel froke, quietly. "but i guess nobody is to sit by and _only_ encourage; god has given out no such portion as that, i do believe. we can encourage each other, and every one do his own piece too." "i didn't really suppose mrs. mig knew," said desire, demurely. "she never began at the bottom of anything. she only finishes off. she buys pattern worsted work, and fills it in. that's what she's doing now, when she don't tat; a great bunch of white lilies, grounding it with olive. it's lovely; but i'd rather have made the lilies. she'll give it to mother, and then glossy will come and spend the winter with us. mrs. mig is going to nassau with a sick friend; she's awfully useful--for little overseeings and general touchings up, after all the hard part is done. mrs. mig's sick friends always have nurses and waiting maids--mrs. f---rachel! do you know, i haven't got any piece!" "no, i don't know; nor does thee either, yet," said rachel froke. * * * * * "it's all such bosh!" said kenneth kincaid, flinging down a handful of papers. "i've no right, i solemnly think, to help such stuff out into the world! a man can't take hold anywhere, it seems, without smutting his fingers!" kenneth kincaid was correcting proof for a publisher. what he had to work on this morning was the first chapters of a flimsy novel. "it isn't even confectionery," said he. "it's terra alba and cochineal. and when it comes to the sensation, it will be benzine for whiskey. real things are bad enough, for the most part, in this world; but when it comes to sham fictions and adulterated poisons, dorris, i'd rather help bake bread, if it were an honest loaf, or make strong shoes for laboring men!" "you don't always get things like that," said dorris. "and you know you're not responsible. why will you torment yourself so?" "i was so determined not to do anything but genuine work; work that the world wanted; and to have it come down to this!" "only for a time, while you are waiting." "yes; people must eat while they are waiting; that's the--devil of it! i'm not swearing, dorris, dear; it came truly into my head, that minute, about the temptation in the wilderness." kenneth's voice was reverent, saying this; and there was an earnest thought in his face. "you'll never like anything heartily but your sunday work." "that's what keeps me here. my week-day work might be wanted somewhere else. and perhaps i ought to go. there's sunday work everywhere." "if you've found one half, hold on to it;" said dorris. "the other can't be far off." "i suppose there are a score or two of young architects in this city, waiting for a name or a chance to make one, as i am. if it isn't here for all of them, somebody has got to quit." "and somebody has got to hold on," repeated dorris. "you are morbid, kent, about this 'work of the world.'" "it's overdone, everywhere. fifth wheels trying to hitch on to every coach. i'd rather be the one wheel of a barrow." "the lord is wheelwright, and builder," said dorris, very simply. "you _are_ a wheel, and he has made you; he'll find an axle for you and put you on; and you shall go about his business, so that you shall wonder to remember that you were ever leaning up against a wall. do you know, kentie, life seems to me like the game we used to play at home in the twilight. when we shut our eyes and let each other lead us, until we did not know where we were going, or in what place we should come out. i should not care to walk up a broad path with my eyes wide open, now. i'd rather feel the leading. to-morrow always makes a turn. it's beautiful! people don't know, who _never_ shut their eyes!" kenneth had taken up a newspaper. "the pretenses at doing! the dodges and go-betweens that make a sham work between every two real ones! there's hardly a true business carried on, and if there is, you don't know where or which. look at the advertisements. why, they cheat with their very tops and faces! see this man who puts in big capitals: 'lost! $5,000! $1,000 reward!' and then tells you, in small type, that five thousand dollars are lost every year by breaking glass and china, that his cement will mend! what business has he to cry 'wolf!' to the hindrance of the next man who may have a real wolf to catch? and what business has the printer, whom the next man will pay to advertise his loss, to help on a lie like this beforehand? i'm only twenty-six years old, dorris, and i'm getting ashamed of the world!" "don't grow hard, kenneth. 'the son of man came not to condemn the world, but to save it.' let's each try to save our little piece!" we are listening across the street, you see; between the windows in the rain; it is strange what chords one catches that do not catch each other, and were never planned to be played together,--by the _players_. kenneth kincaid's father robert had been a ship-builder. when shipping went down in the whirlpool of 1857, robert kincaid's building had gone; and afterward he had died leaving his children little beside their education, which he thanked god was secured, and a good repute that belonged to their name, but was easily forgotten in the crowd of young and forward ones, and in the strife and scramble of a new business growth. between college and technical studies kenneth had been to the war. after that he had a chance to make a fortune in wall street. his father's brother, james, offered to take him in with him to buy and sell stocks and gold, to watch the market, to touch little unseen springs, to put the difference into his own pocket every time the tide of value shifted, or could be made to seem to shift. he might have been one of james r. kincaid and company. he would have none of it. he told his uncle plainly that he wanted real work; that he had not come back from fighting to--well, there he stopped, for he could not fling the truth in his uncle's face; he said there were things he meant to finish learning, and would try to do; and if nobody wanted them of him he would learn something else that was needed. so with what was left to his share from his father's little remnant of property, he had two years at the technological school, and here he was in boston waiting. you can see what he meant by real work, and how deep his theories and distinctions lay. you can see that it might be a hard thing for one young man, here or there, to take up the world on these terms now, in this year of our lord eighteen hundred and sixty-nine. over the way desire ledwith was beginning again, after a pause in which we have made our little chassã©e. "i know a girl," she said, "who has got a studio. and she talks about art, and she knows styles, and who has done what, and she runs about to see pictures, and she copies things, and she has little plaster legs and toes and things hanging round everywhere. she thinks it is something great; but it's only mig, after all. everything is. florence migs into music. and i won't mig, if i never do anything. i'm come here this morning to darn stockings." and she pulled out of her big waterproof pocket a bundle of stockings and a great white ball of darning cotton and a wooden egg. "there is always one thing that is real," said mrs. ripwinkley, gently, "and that shows the way surely to all the rest." "i know what you mean," said desire, "of course; but they've mixed that all up too, like everything else, so that you don't know where it is. glossy megilp has a velvet prayer-book, and she blacks her eyelashes and goes to church. we've all been baptized, and we've learned the lord's prayer, and we're all christians. what is there more about it? i wish, sometimes, they had let it all alone. i think they vaccinated us with religion, aunt frank, for fear we should take it the natural way." "thee is restless," said rachel froke, tying on her gray cloak. "and to make us so is oftentimes the first thing the lord does for us. it was the first thing he did for the world. then he said, 'let there be light!' in the meantime, thee is right; just darn thy stockings." and rachel went. they had a nice morning, after that, "leaving frets alone," as diana said. diana ripwinkley was happy in things just as they were. if the sun shone, she rejoiced in the glory; if the rain fell, it shut her in sweetly to the heart of home, and the outside world grew fragrant for her breathing. there was never anything in her day that she could spare out of it, and there were no holes in the hours either. "whether she was most bird or bee, it was hard to tell," her mother said of her; from the time she used to sweep and dust her garret baby-house along the big beams in the old house at homesworth, and make little cheeses, and set them to press in wooden pill-boxes from which she had punched the bottoms out, till now, that she began to take upon herself the daily freshening of the new parlors in aspen street, and had long lessons of geometry to learn, whose dry demonstrations she set to odd little improvised recitatives of music, and chanted over while she ran up and down putting away clean linen for her mother, that luclarion brought up from the wash. as for hazel, she was only another variation upon the same sweet nature. there was more of outgo and enterprise with her. diana made the thing or the place pleasant that she was in or doing. hazel sought out new and blessed inventions. "there was always something coming to the child that wouldn't ever have come to no one else," luclarion said. "and besides that, she was a real 'witch hazel;' she could tell where the springs were, and what's more, where they warn't." luclarion grapp would never have pleaded guilty to "dropping into poetry" in any light whatsoever; but what she meant by this was not exactly according to the letter, as one may easily see. ix. hazel's inspiration. what was the use of "looking," unless things were looked at? mrs. ledwith found at the end of the winter that she ought to give a party. not a general one; mrs. ledwith always said "not a general one," as if it were an exception, whereas she knew better than ever to undertake a general party; her list would be _too_ general, and heterogeneous. it would simply be a physical, as well as a social, impossibility. she knew quantities of people separately and very cordially, in her easy have-a-good-time-when-you-can style, that she could by no means mix, or even gather together. she picked up acquaintances on summer journeys, she accepted civilities wherever she might be, she asked everybody to her house who took a fancy to her, or would admire her establishment, and if she had had a spring cleaning or a new carpeting, or a furbishing up in any way, the next thing was always to light up and play it off,--to try it on to somebody. what were houses for? and there was always somebody who ought to be paid attention to; somebody staying with a friend, or a couple just engaged, or if nothing else, it was her turn to have the sewing-society; and so her rooms got aired. of course she had to air them now! the drawing-room, with its apricot and coffee-brown furnishings, was lovely in the evening, and the crimson and garnet in the dining-room was rich and cozy, and set off brilliantly her show of silver and cut-glass; and then, there was the new, real, sea-green china. so the party was had. there were some people in town from new york; she invited them and about a hundred more. the house lit up beautifully; the only pity was that mrs. ledwith could not wear her favorite and most becoming colors, buff and chestnut, because she had taken that family of tints for her furniture; but she found a lovely shade of violet that would hold by gas-light, and she wore black fayal lace with it, and white roses upon her hair. mrs. treweek was enchanted with the brown and apricot drawing-room, and wondered where on earth they had got that particular shade, for "my dear! she had ransacked paris for hangings in just that perfect, soft, ripe color that she had in her mind and never could hit upon." mrs. macmichael had pushed the grapes back upon her plate to examine the pattern of the bit of china, and had said how lovely the coloring was, with the purple and pale green of the fruit. and these things, and a few more like them, were the residuum of the whole, and laura ledwith was satisfied. afterward, "while they were in the way of it," florence had a little _musicale_; and the first season in shubarton place was over. it turned out, however, as it did in the old rhyme,--they shod the horse, and shod the mare, and let the little colt go bare. helena was disgusted because she could not have a "german." "we shall have to be careful, now that we have fairly settled down," said laura to her sister; "for every bit of grant's salary will have been taken up with this winter's expenses. but one wants to begin right, and after that one can go on moderately. i'm good at contriving, frank; only give me something to contrive with." "isn't it a responsibility," frank ventured, "to think what we shall contrive _for_?" "of course," returned mrs. ledwith, glibly. "and my first duty is to my children. i don't mean to encourage them to reckless extravagance; as mrs. megilp says, there's always a limit; but it's one's duty to make life beautiful, and one can't do too much for home. i want my children to be satisfied with theirs, and i want to cultivate their tastes and accustom them to society. i can't do _everything_ for them; they will dress on three hundred a year apiece, agatha and florence; and i can assure you it needs management to accomplish that, in these days!" mrs. ripwinkley laughed, gently. "it would require management with us to get rid of that, upon ourselves." "o, my dear, don't i tell you continually, you haven't waked up yet? just rub your eyes a while longer,--or let the girls do it for you,--and you'll see! why, i know of girls,--girls whose mothers have limited incomes, too,--who have been kept plain, actually _plain_, all their school days, but who must have now six and eight hundred a year to go into society with. and really i wouldn't undertake it for less, myself, if i expected to keep up with everything. but i must treat mine all alike, and we must be contented with what we have. there's helena, now, crazy for a young party; but i couldn't think of it. young parties are ten times worse than old ones; there's really no _end_ to the expense, with the german, and everything. helena will have to wait; and yet,--of course, if i could, it is desirable, almost necessary; acquaintances begin in the school-room,--society, indeed; and a great deal would depend upon it. the truth is, you're no sooner born, now-a-days, than you have to begin to keep up; or else--you're dropped out." "o, laura! do you remember the dear little parties our mother used to make for us? from four till half-past eight, with games, and tea at six, and the fathers looking in?" "and cockles, and mottoes, and printed cambric dresses, and milk and water! where are the children, do you suppose, you dear old frau van winkle, that would come to such a party now?" "children must be born simple, as they were then. there's nothing my girls would like better, even at their age, than to help at just such a party. it is a dream of theirs. why shouldn't somebody do it, just to show how good it is?" "you can lead a horse to water, you know, frank, but you can't make him drink. and the colts are forty times worse. i believe you might get some of the mothers together for an ancient tea-drink, just in the name of old association; but the _babies_ would all turn up their new-fashioned little noses." "o, dear!" sighed frau van winkle. "i wish i knew people!" "by the time you do, you'll know the reason why, and be like all the rest." hazel ripwinkley went to mrs. hilman's school, with her cousin helena. that was because the school was a thoroughly good one; the best her mother could learn of; not because it was kept in parlors in dorset street, and there were girls there who came from palaces west of the common, in the grand avenues and the abc streets; nor did hazel wear her best gray and black velvet suit for every day, though the rich colored poplins with their over-skirts and sashes, and the gay ribbons for hair and neck made the long green baize covered tables look like gardenplots with beds of bloom, and quite extinguished with their brilliancy the quiet, one skirted brown merino that she brushed and folded every night, and put on with fresh linen cuffs and collar every morning. "it is an idiosyncrasy of aunt frances," helena explained, with the grandest phrase she could pick out of her "synonymes," to cow down those who "wondered." privately, helena held long lamentations with hazel, going to and fro, about the party that she could not have. "i'm actually ashamed to go to school. there isn't a girl there, who can pretend to have anything, that hasn't had some kind of a company this winter. i've been to them all, and i feel real mean,--sneaky. what's 'next year?' mamma puts me off with that. poh? next year they'll all begin again. you can't skip birthdays." "i'll tell you what!" said hazel, suddenly, inspired by much the same idea that had occurred to mrs. ripwinkley; "i mean to ask my mother to let _me_ have a party!" "you! down in aspen street! don't, for pity's sake, hazel!" "i don't believe but what it could be done over again!" said hazel, irrelevantly, intent upon her own thought. "it couldn't be done _once_! for gracious grandmother's sake, don't think of it!" cried the little world-woman of thirteen. "it's gracious grandmother's sake that made me think of it," said hazel, laughing. "the way she used to do." "why don't you ask them to help you hunt up old noah, and all get back into the ark, pigeons and all?" "well, i guess they had pretty nice times there, any how; and if another big rain comes, perhaps they'll have to!" hazel did not intend her full meaning; but there is many a faint, small prophecy hid under a clover-leaf. hazel did not let go things; her little witch-wand, once pointed, held its divining angle with the might of magic until somebody broke ground. "it's awful!" helena declared to her mother and sisters, with tears of consternation. "and she wants me to go round with her and carry 'compliments!' it'll never be got over,--never! i wish i could go away to boarding-school!" for mrs. ripwinkley had made up her unsophisticated mind to try this thing; to put this grain of a pure, potent salt, right into the seethe and glitter of little boston, and find out what it would decompose or precipitate. for was not she a mother, testing the world's chalice for her children? what did she care for the hiss and the bubble, if they came? she was wider awake than mrs. ledwith knew; perhaps they who come down from the mountain heights of long seclusion can measure the world's paces and changes better than they who have been hurried in the midst of them, on and on, or round and round. worst of all, old uncle titus took it up. it was funny,--or it would have been funny, reader, if anybody but you and i and rachel froke knew exactly how,--to watch uncle titus as he kept his quiet eye on all these things,--the things that he had set going,--and read their revelations; sheltered, disguised, under a character that the world had chosen to put upon him, like haroun alraschid in the merchant's cloak. they took their tea with him,--the two families,--every sunday night. agatha ledwith "filled him in" a pair of slippers that very first christmas; he sat there in the corner with his old leather ones on, when they came, and left them, for the most part, to their own mutual entertainment, until the tea was ready. it was a sort of family exchange; all the plans and topics came up, particularly on the ledwith side, for mrs. ripwinkley was a good listener, and laura a good talker; and the fun,--that you and i and rachel froke could guess,--yes, and a good deal of unsuspected earnest, also,--was all there behind the old gentleman's "christian age," as over brief mentions of sermons, or words about books, or little brevities of family inquiries and household news, broke small floods of excitement like water over pebbles, as laura and her daughters discussed and argued volubly the matching and the flouncing of a silk, or the new flowering and higher pitching of a bonnet,--since "they are wearing everything all on the top, you know, and mine looks terribly meek;" or else descanted diffusely on the unaccountableness of the somebodies not having called, or the bother and forwardness of the some-other-bodies who had, and the eighty-three visits that were left on the list to be paid, and "never being able to take a day to sit down for anything." "what is it all for?" mrs. ripwinkley would ask, over again, the same old burden of the world's weariness falling upon her from her sister's life, and making her feel as if it were her business to clear it away somehow. "why, to live!" mrs. ledwith would reply. "you've got it all to do, you see." "but i don't really see, laura, where the living comes in." laura opens her eyes. "_slang_?" says she. "where did you get hold of that?" "is it slang? i'm sure i don't know. i mean it." "well, you _are_ the funniest! you don't _catch_ anything. even a by-word must come first-hand from you, and mean something!" "it seems to me such a hard-working, getting-ready-to-be, and then not being. there's no place left for it,--because it's all place." "gracious me, frank! if you are going to sift everything so, and get back of everything! i can't live in metaphysics: i have to live in the things themselves, amongst other people." "but isn't it scene and costume, a good deal of it, without the play? it may be that i don't understand, because i have not got into the heart of your city life; but what comes of the parties, for instance? the grand question, beforehand, is about wearing, and then there's a retrospection of what was worn, and how people looked. it seems to be all surface. i should think they might almost send in their best gowns, or perhaps a photograph,--if photographs ever were becoming,--as they do visiting cards." "aunt frank," said desire, "i don't believe the 'heart of city life' is in the parties, or the parlors. i believe there's a great lot of us knocking round amongst the dry goods and the furniture that never get any further. people must be _living_, somewhere, _behind_ the fixings. but there are so many people, nowadays, that have never quite got fixed!" "you might live all your days here," said mrs. ledwith to her sister, passing over desire, "and never get into the heart of it, for that matter, unless you were born into it. i don't care so much, for my part. i know plenty of nice people, and i like to have things nice about me, and to have a pleasant time, and to let my children enjoy themselves. the 'heart,' if the truth was known, is a dreadful still place. i'm satisfied." uncle titus's paper was folded across the middle; just then he reversed the lower half; that brought the printing upside down; but he went on reading all the same. "_i_'m going to have a real party," said hazel, "a real, gracious-grandmother party; just such as you and mother had, aunt laura, when you were little." her aunt laura laughed good-naturedly. "i guess you'll have to go round and knock up the grandmothers to come to it, then," said she. "you'd better make it a fancy dress affair at once, and then it will be accounted for." "no; i'm going round to invite; and they are to come at four, and take tea at six; and they're just to wear their afternoon dresses; and miss craydocke is coming at any rate; and she knows all the old plays, and lots of new ones; and she is going to show how." "i'm coming, too," said uncle titus, over his newspaper, with his eyes over his glasses. "that's good," said hazel, simply, least surprised of any of the conclave. "and you'll have to play the muffin man. 'o, don't you know,'"--she began to sing, and danced two little steps toward mr. oldways. "o, i forgot it was sunday!" she said, suddenly stopping. "not much wonder," said uncle titus. "and not much matter. _your_ sunday's good enough." and then he turned his paper right side up; but, before he began really to read again, he swung half round toward them in his swivel-chair, and said,-"leave the sugar-plums to me, hazel; i'll come early and bring 'em in my pocket." "it's the first thing he's taken the slightest notice of, or interest in, that any one of us has been doing," said agatha ledwith, with a spice of momentary indignation, as they walked along bridgeley street to take the car. for uncle titus had not come to the ledwith party. "he never went visiting, and he hadn't any best coat," he told laura, in verbal reply to the invitation that had come written on a square satin sheet, once folded, in an envelope with a big monogram. "it's of no consequence," said mrs. ledwith, "any way. only a child's play." "but it will be, mother; you don't know," said helena. "she's going right in everywhere, with that ridiculous little invitation; to the ashburnes and the geoffreys, and all! she hasn't the least idea of any difference; and just think what the girls will say, and how they will stare, and laugh! i wish she wasn't my cousin!" "helena!" mrs. ledwith spoke with real displeasure; for she was good-natured and affectionate in her way; and her worldly ambitions were rather wide than high, as we have seen. "well, i can't help it; you don't know, mother," helena repeated. "it's horrid to go to school with all those stiffies, that don't care a snap for you, and only laugh." "laughing is vulgar," said agatha. if any indirect question were ever thrown upon the family position, agatha immediately began expounding the ethics of high breeding, as one who had attained. "it is only half-way people who laugh," she said. "ada geoffrey and lilian ashburne never laugh--_at_ anybody--i am sure." "no, they don't; not right out. they're awfully polite. but you can feel it, underneath. they have a way of keeping so still, when you know they would laugh if they did anything." "well, they'll neither laugh nor keep still, about this. you need not be concerned. they'll just not go, and that will be the end of it." agatha ledwith was mistaken. she had been mistaken about two things to-night. the other was when she had said that this was the first time uncle oldways had noticed or been interested in anything they did. x. cockles and crambo. hazel ripwinkley put on her nankeen sack and skirt, and her little round, brown straw hat. for may had come, and almost gone, and it was a day of early summer warmth. hazel's dress was not a "suit;" it had been made and worn two summers before suits were thought of; yet it suited very well, as people's things are apt to do, after all, who do not trouble themselves about minutiã¦ of fashion, and so get no particular antediluvian marks upon them that show when the flood subsides. her mother knew some things that hazel did not. mrs. ripwinkley, if she had been asleep for five and twenty years, had lost none of her perceptive faculties in the trance. but she did not hamper her child with any doubts; she let her go on her simple way, under the shield of her simplicity, to test this world that she had come into, for herself. hazel had written down her little list of the girls' names that she would like to ask; and mrs. ripwinkley looked at it with a smile. there was ada geoffrey, the banker's daughter, and lilian ashburne, the professor's,--heiresses each, of double lines of birth and wealth. she could remember how, in her childhood, the old names sounded, with the respect that was in men's tones when they were spoken; and underneath were lois james and katie kilburnie, children of a printer and a hatter. they had all been chosen for their purely personal qualities. a child, let alone, chooses as an angel chooses. it remained to be seen how they would come together. at the very head, in large, fair letters, was,- "miss craydocke." down at the bottom, she had just added,- "mr. kincaid and dorris." "for, if i have _some_ grown folks, mother, perhaps i ought to have _other_ grown folks,--'to keep the balance true.' besides, mr. kincaid and dorris always like the _little_ nice times." from the day when dorris kincaid had come over with the gray glass vase and her repeated thanks, when the flowers had done their ministry and faded, there had been little simple courtesies, each way, between the opposite houses; and once kenneth and his sister had taken tea with the ripwinkleys, and they had played "crambo" and "consequences" in the evening. the real little game of "consequences," of which this present friendliness was a link, was going on all the time, though they did not stop to read the lines as they folded them down, and "what the world said" was not one of the items in their scheme of it at all. it would have been something worth while to have followed hazel as she went her rounds, asking quietly at each house to see mrs. this or that, "as she had a message;" and being shown, like a little representative of an almost extinct period, up into the parlor, or the dressing-room of each lady, and giving her quaint errand. "i am hazel ripwinkley," she would say, "and my mother sends her compliments, and would like to have lilian,"--or whoever else,--"come at four o'clock to-day, and spend the afternoon and take tea. i'm to have a little party such as she used to have, and nobody is to be much dressed up, and we are only to play games." "why, that is charming!" cried mrs. ashburne; for the feeling of her own sweet early days, and the old b---square house, came over her as she heard the words. "it is lilian's music afternoon; but never mind; give my kind compliments to your mother, and she will be very happy to come." and mrs. ashburne stooped down and kissed hazel, when she went away. she stood in the deep carved stone entrance-way to mrs. geoffrey's house, in the same fearless, red riding hood fashion, just as she would have waited in any little country porch up in homesworth, where she had need indeed to knock. not a whit dismayed was she either, when the tall manservant opened to her, and admitted her into the square, high, marble-paved hall, out of which great doors were set wide into rooms rich and quiet with noble adorning and soft shading,--where pictures made such a magic upon the walls, and books were piled from floor to ceiling; and where her little figure was lost as she went in, and she hesitated to take a seat anywhere, lest she should be quite hidden in some great arm-chair or sofa corner, and mrs. geoffrey should not see her when she came down. so, as the lady entered, there she was, upright and waiting, on her two feet, in her nankeen dress, just within the library doors, with her face turned toward the staircase. "i am hazel ripwinkley," she began; as if she had said, i am pease-blossom or mustard-seed; "i go to school with ada." and went on, then, with her compliments and her party. and at the end she said, very simply,-"miss craydocke is coming, and she knows the games." "miss craydocke, of orchard street? and where do you live?" "in aspen street, close by, in uncle oldways' house. we haven't lived there very long,--only this winter; before that we always lived in homesworth." "and homesworth is in the country? don't you miss that?" "yes; but aspen street isn't very bad; we've got a garden. besides, we like streets and neighbors." then she added,--for her little witch-stick felt spiritually the quality of what she spoke to,--"wouldn't mr. geoffrey come for ada in the evening?" "i haven't the least doubt he would!" said mrs. geoffrey, her face all alive with exquisite and kindly amusement, and catching the spirit of the thing from the inimitable simplicity before her, such as never, she did believe, had walked into anybody's house before, in this place and generation, and was no more to be snubbed than a flower or a breeze or an angel. it was a piece of witch hazel's witchery, or inspiration, that she named miss craydocke; for miss craydocke was an old, dear friend of mrs. geoffrey's, in that "heart of things" behind the fashions, where the kingdom is growing up. but of course hazel could not have known that; something in the lady's face just made her think of the same thing in miss craydocke's, and so she spoke, forgetting to explain, nor wondering in the very least, when she was met with knowledge. it was all divining, though, from the beginning to the end. that was what took her into these homes, rather than to a score of other places up and down the self-same streets, where, if she had got in at all, she would have met strange, lofty stares, and freezing "thank you's," and "engagements." "i've found the real folks, mother, and they're all coming!" she cried, joyfully, running in where mrs. ripwinkley was setting little vases and baskets about on shelf and table, between the white, plain, muslin draperies of the long parlor windows. in vases and baskets were sweet may flowers; bunches of deep-hued, rich-scented violets, stars of blue and white periwinkle, and miss craydocke's lilies of the valley in their tall, cool leaves; each kind gathered by itself in clusters and handfuls. inside the wide, open fireplace, behind the high brass fender and the shining andirons, was a "chimney flower pot," country fashion, of green lilac boughs,--not blossoms,--and woodbine sprays, and crimson and white tulips. the room was fair and fragrant, and the windows were wide open upon vines and grass. "it looks like you, mother, just as mrs. geoffrey's house looks like her. houses ought to look like people, i think." "there's your surprise, children. we shouldn't be doing it right without a surprise, you know." and the surprise was not dolls' pelerines, but books. "little women" was one, which sent diana and hazel off for a delicious two hours' read up in their own room until dinner. after dinner, miss craydocke came, in her purple and white striped mohair and her white lace neckerchief; and at three o'clock uncle titus walked in, with his coat pockets so bulgy and rustling and odorous of peppermint and sassafras, that it was no use to pretend to wait and be unconscious, but a pure mercy to unload him so that he might be able to sit down. nobody knows to this day where he got them; he must have ordered them somewhere, one would think, long enough before to have special moulds and implements made; but there were large, beautiful cockles,--not of the old flour-paste sort, but of clear, sparkling sugar, rose-color, and amber, and white, with little slips of tinted paper tucked within, and these printed delicately with pretty rhymes and couplets, from real poets; things to be truly treasured, yet simple, for children's apprehension, and fancy, and fun. and there were "salem gibraltars," such as we only get out of essex county now and then, for a big charitable fair, when salem and everywhere else gets its spirit up to send its best and most especial; and there were toys and devices in sugar--flowers and animals, hats, bonnets, and boots, apples, and cucumbers,--such as diana and hazel, and even desire and helena had never seen before. "it isn't quite fair," said good miss craydocke. "we were to go back to the old, simple fashions of things; and here you are beginning over again already with sumptuous inventions. it's the very way it came about before, till it was all spoilt." "no," said uncle titus, stoutly. "it's only 'old _and_ new,'--the very selfsame good old notions brought to a little modern perfection. they're not french flummery, either; and there's not a drop of gin, or a flavor of prussic acid, or any other abominable chemical, in one of those contrivances. they're as innocent as they look; good honest mint and spice and checkerberry and lemon and rose. i know the man that made 'em!" helena ledwith began to think that the first person, singular or plural, might have a good time; but that awful third! helena's "they" was as potent and tremendous as her mother's. "it's nice," she said to hazel; "but they don't have inch things. i never saw them at a party. and they don't play games; they always dance. and it's broad, hot daylight; and--you haven't asked a single boy!" "why, i don't know any! only jimmy scarup; and i guess he'd rather play ball, and break windows!" "jimmy scarup!" and helena turned away, hopeless of hazel's comprehending. but "they" came; and "they" turned right into "we." it was not a party; it was something altogether fresh and new; the house was a new, beautiful place; it was like the country. and aspen street, when you got down there, was so still and shady and sweet smelling and pleasant. they experienced the delight of finding out something. miss craydocke and hazel set them at it,--their good time; they had planned it all out, and there was no stiff, shy waiting. they began, right off, with the "muffin man." hazel danced up to desire:- "o, _do_ you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man? o, _do_ you know the muffin man that lives in drury lane?" "o, yes, i know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man, o, yes, i know the muffin man that lives in drury lane." and so they danced off together:- "two of us know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man, two of us know the muffin man that lives in drury lane." and then they besieged miss craydocke; and then the three met ada geoffrey, just as she had come in and spoken to diana and mrs. ripwinkley; and ada had caught the refrain, and responded instantly; and _four_ of them knew the muffin man. "i know they'll think it's common and queer, and they'll laugh to-morrow," whispered helena to diana, as hazel drew the lengthening string to dorris kincaid's corner and caught her up; but the next minute they were around helena in her turn, and they were laughing already, with pure glee; and five faces bent toward her, and five voices sang,- "o, _don't_ you know the muffin man?" and helena had to sing back that she did; and then the six made a perfect snarl around mrs. ripwinkley herself, and drew her in; and then they all swept off and came down across the room upon mr. oldways, who muttered, under the singing, "seven women! well, the bible says so, and i suppose it's come!" and then he held out both hands, while his hard face unbent in every wrinkle, with a smile that overflowed through all their furrowed channels, up to his very eyes; like some sparkling water that must find its level; and there were eight that knew the muffin man. so nine, and ten, and up to fifteen; and then, as their line broke away into fragments, still breathless with fun, miss craydocke said,--her eyes brimming over with laughing tears, that always came when she was gay,-"there, now! we all know the 'muffin man;' therefore it follows, mathematically, i believe, that we must all know each other. i think we'll try a sitting-down game next. i'll give you all something. desire, you can tell them what to do with it, and miss ashburne shall predict me consequences." so they had the "presentation game;" and the gifts, and the dispositions, and the consequences, when the whispers were over, and they were all declared aloud, were such hits and jumbles of sense and nonsense as were almost too queer to have been believed. "miss craydocke gave me a butter firkin," said mrs. ripwinkley. "i was to put it in the parlor and plant vanilla beans in it; and the consequence would be that birnam wood would come to dunsinane." "she gave me a wax doll," said helena. "i was to buy it a pair of high-heeled boots and a chignon; and the consequence would be that she would have to stand on her head." "she gave me," said mr. oldways, "an iron spoon. i was to deal out sugar-plums with it; and the consequence would be that you would all go home." "she gave me," said lois james, "woman's rights. i shouldn't know what to do with them; and the consequence would be a terrible mortification to all my friends." "she gave me," said hazel, "a real good time. i was to pass it round; and the consequence would be an earthquake." then they had "scandal;" a whisper, repeated rapidly from ear to ear. it began with, "luclarion is in the kitchen making tea-biscuits;" and it ended with the horrible announcement that there were "two hundred gallons of hot pitch ready, and that everybody was to be tipped into it." "characters," and "twenty questions," and "how, when, and where," followed; and then they were ready for a run again, and they played "boston," in which mr. oldways, being "sceattle," was continually being left out, whereupon he declared at last, that he didn't believe there was any place for him, or even that he was down anywhere on the map, and it wasn't fair, and he was going to secede; and that broke up the play; for the groat fun of all the games had come to be miss craydocke and uncle titus, as it always is the great fun to the young ones when the elders join in,--the older and the soberer, the better sport; there is always something in the "fathers looking on;" that is the way i think it is among them who always do behold the face of the father in heaven,--smiling upon their smiles, glowing upon their gladness. in the tea-room, it was all even more delightful yet; it was further out into the garden, shaded at the back by the deep leafiness of grape-vines, and a trellis work with arches in it that ran up at the side, and would be gay by and by with scarlet runners, and morning-glories, and nasturtiums, that were shooting up strong and swift already, from the neatly weeded beds. inside, was the tall old semicircular sideboard, with gingerbread grooves carved all over it; and the real brass "dogs," with heads on their fore-paws, were lying in the fire-place, under the lilac boughs; and the square, plain table stood in the midst, with its glossy white cloth that touched the floor at the corners, and on it were the identical pink mugs, and a tall glass pitcher of milk, and plates of the thinnest and sweetest bread and butter, and early strawberries in a white basket lined with leaves, and the traditional round frosted cakes upon a silver plate with a network rim. and luclarion and mrs. ripwinkley waited upon them all, and it was still no party, to be compared or thought of with any salad and ice-pudding and germania-band affair, such as they had had all winter; but something utterly fresh and new and by itself,--place, and entertainment, and people, and all. after tea, they went out into the garden; and there, under the shady horse-chestnuts, was a swing; and there were balls with which hazel showed them how to play "class;" tossing in turn against the high brick wall, and taking their places up and down, according to the number of their catches. it was only miss craydocke's "thread the needle" that got them in again; and after that, she showed them another simple old dancing game, the "winding circle," from which they were all merrily and mysteriously untwisting themselves with miss craydocke's bright little thin face and her fluttering cap ribbons, and her spry little trot leading them successfully off, when the door opened, and the grand mr. geoffrey walked in; the man who could manage state street, and who had stood at the right hand of governor and president, with his clear brain, and big purse, and generous hand, through the years of the long, terrible war; the man whom it was something for great people to get to their dinners, or to have walk late into an evening drawing-room and dignify an occasion for the last half hour. mrs. ripwinkley was just simply glad to see him; so she was to see kenneth kincaid, who came a few minutes after, just as luclarion brought the tray of sweetmeats in, which mrs. ripwinkley had so far innovated upon the gracious-grandmother plan as to have after tea, instead of before. the beautiful cockles and their rhymes got their heads all together around the large table, for the eating and the reading. mr. geoffrey and uncle titus sat talking european politics together, a little aside. the sugar-plums lasted a good while, with the chatter over them; and then, before they quite knew what it was all for, they had got slips of paper and lead pencils before them, and there was to be a round of "crambo" to wind up. "o, i don't know how!" and "i never can!" were the first words, as they always are, when it was explained to the uninitiated; but miss craydocke assured them that "everybody could;" and hazel said that "nobody expected real poetry; it needn't be more than two lines, and those might be blank verse, if they were _very_ hard, but jingles were better;" and so the questions and the wards were written and folded, and the papers were shuffled and opened amid outcries of, "o, this is awful!" "_what_ a word to get in!" "why, they haven't the least thing to do with each other!" "that's the beauty of it," said miss craydocke, unrelentingly; "to _make_ them have; and it is funny how much things do have to do with each other when they once happen to come across." then there were knit brows, and desperate scratchings, and such silence that mr. geoffrey and uncle titus stopped short on the alabama question, and looked round to see what the matter was. kenneth kincaid had been modestly listening to the older gentlemen, and now and then venturing to inquire or remark something, with an intelligence that attracted mr. geoffrey; and presently it came out that he had been south with the army; and then mr. geoffrey asked questions of him, and they got upon reconstruction business, and comparing facts and exchanging conclusions, quite as if one was not a mere youth with only his eyes and his brains and his conscience to help him in his first grapple with the world in the tangle and crisis at which he found it, and the other a grave, practiced, keen-judging man, the counsellor of national leaders. after all, they had no business to bring the great, troublesome, heavy-weighted world into a child's party. i wish man never would; though it did not happen badly, as it all turned out, that they did a little of it in this instance. if they had thought of it, "crambo" was good for them too, for a change; and presently they did think of it; for dorris called out in distress, real or pretended, from the table,-"kentie, here's something you must really take off my hands! i haven't the least idea what to do with it." and then came a cry from hazel,-"no fair! we're all just as badly off, and there isn't one of us that has got a brother to turn to. here's another for mr. kincaid." "there are plenty more. come, mr. oldways, mr. geoffrey, won't you try 'crambo?' there's a good deal in it, as there is in most nonsense." "we'll come and see what it is," said mr. geoffrey; and so the chairs were drawn up, and the gray, grave heads looked on over the young ones. "why, hazel's got through!" said lois, scratching violently at her paper, and obliterating three obstinate lines. "o, i didn't bother, you see! i just stuck the word right in, like a pin into a pincushion, and let it go. there wasn't anything else to do with it." "i've got to make my pincushion," said dorris. "i should think you had! look at her! she's writing her paper all over! o, my gracious, she must have done it before!" "mother and mr. geoffrey are doing heaps, too! we shall have to publish a book," said diana, biting the end of her pencil, and taking it easy. diana hardly ever got the rhymes made in time; but then she always admired everybody's else, which was a good thing for somebody to be at leisure to do. "uncle oldways and lilian are folding up," said hazel. "five minutes more," said miss craydocke, keeping the time with her watch before her. "hush!" when the five minutes were rapped out, there were seven papers to be read. people who had not finished this time might go on when the others took fresh questions. hazel began reading, because she had been ready first. "'what is the difference between sponge-cake and doughnuts?' 'hallelujah.'" "airiness, lightness, and insipidity; twistiness, spiciness, and solidity. hallelujah! i've got through! that is the best that i can do!'" there was a shout at hazel's pinsticking. "now, uncle titus! you finished next." "my question is a very comprehensive one," said uncle titus, "with a very concise and suggestive word. 'how wags the world?' 'slambang.'" "'the world wags on with lies and slang; with show and vanity, pride and inanity, greed and insanity, and a great slambang!'" "that's only _one_ verse," said miss craydocke. "there's another; but he didn't write it down." uncle titus laughed, and tossed his crambo on the table. "it's true, so far, anyway," said he. "_so far_ is hardly ever quite true," said miss craydocke lilian ashburne had to answer the question whether she had ever read "young's night thoughts;" and her word was "comet." "'pray might i be allowed a pun, to help me through with just this one? i've tried to read young's thoughts of night, but never yet could come it, quite.'" "o, o, o! that's just like lilian, with her soft little 'prays' and 'allow me's,' and her little pussy-cat ways of sliding through tight places, just touching her whiskers!" "it's quite fair," said lilian, smiling, "to slide through if you can." "now, mr. geoffrey." and mr. geoffrey read,-"'what is your favorite color?' 'one-hoss.'" "'do you mean, my friend, for a one-hoss shay, or the horse himself,--black, roan, or bay? in truth, i think i can hardly say; i believe, for a nag, "i bet on the gray." "'for a shay, i would rather not have yellow, or any outright, staring color, that makes the crowd look after a fellow, and the little _gamins_ hoot and bellow. "'do you mean for ribbons? or gowns? or eyes? or flowers? or gems? or in sunset skies? for many questions, as many replies, drops of a rainbow take rainbow dyes. "'the world is full, and the world is bright; each thing to its nature parts the light; and each for its own to the perfect sight wears that which is comely, and sweet, and right.'" "o, mr. geoffrey! that's lovely!" cried the girl voices, all around him. and ada made a pair of great eyes at her father, and said,-"what an awful humbug you have been, papa! to have kept the other side up with care all your life! who ever suspected _that_ of you?" diana and hazel were not taken so much by surprise, their mother had improvised little nursery jingles for them all their baby days, and had played crambo with them since; so they were very confident with their "now, mother:" and looked calmly for something creditable. "'what is your favorite name?'" read mrs. ripwinkley. "and the word is 'stuff.'" "'when i was a little child, looking very meek and mild, i liked grand, heroic names,- of warriors, or stately dames: zenobia, and cleopatra; (no rhyme for that this side sumatra;) wallace, and helen mar,--clotilda, berengaria, and brunhilda; maximilian; alexandra; hector, juno, and cassandra; charlemagne and britomarte, washington and bonaparte; victoria and guinevere, and lady clara vere de vere. --shall i go on with all this stuff, or do you think it is enough? i cannot tell you what dear name i love the best; i play a game; and tender earnest doth belong to quiet speech, not silly song.'" "that's just like mother; i should have stopped as soon as i'd got the 'stuff' in; but she always shapes off with a little morriowl," said hazel. "now, desire!" desire frantically scribbled a long line at the end of what she had written; below, that is, a great black morass of scratches that represented significantly the "slough of despond" she had got into over the winding up, and then gave,-"'which way would you rather travel,--north or south?' 'goosey-gander.'" "'o, goosey-gander! if i might wander, it should be toward the sun; the blessed south should fill my mouth with ripeness just begun. for bleak hills, bare, with stunted, spare, and scrubby, piney trees, her gardens rare, and vineyards fair, and her rose-scented breeze. for fearful blast, skies overcast, and sudden blare and scare long, stormless moons, and placid noons, and--all sorts of comfortablenesses,--there!'" "that makes me think of father's horse running away with him once," said helena, "when he had to head him right up against a brick wall, and knock everything all to smash before he could stop!" "anybody else?" "miss kincaid, i think," said mr. geoffrey. he had been watching dorris's face through the play, flashing and smiling with the excitement of her rhyming, and the slender, nervous fingers twisting tremulously the penciled slip while she had listened to the others. "if it isn't all rubbed out," said dorris, coloring and laughing to find how badly she had been treating her own effusion. "you see it _was_ rather an awful question,--'what do you want most?' and the word is, 'thirteen.'" she caught her breath a little quickly as she began:- "'between yourself, dear, myself, and the post, there are the thirteen things that i want the most. i want to be, sometimes, a little stronger; i want the days to be a little longer; i'd like to have a few less things to do; i'd better like to better do the few: i want--and this might almost lead my wishes,- a bigger place to keep my mops and dishes. i want a horse; i want a little buggy, to ride in when the days grow hot and muggy; i want a garden; and,--perhaps it's funny,- but now and then i want a little money. i want an easy way to do my hair; i want an extra dress or two to wear; i want more patience; and when all is given, i think i want to die and go to heaven!'" "i never saw such bright people in all my life!" said ada geoffrey, when the outcry of applause for dorris had subsided, and they began to rise to go. "but the _worst_ of all is papa! i'll never get over it of you, see if i do! such a cheat! why, it's like playing dumb all your life, and then just speaking up suddenly in a quiet way, some day, as if it was nothing particular, and nobody cared!" with hazel's little divining-rod, mrs. ripwinkley had reached out, testing the world for her, to see what some of it might be really made of. mrs. geoffrey, from her side, had reached out in turn, also, into this fresh and simple opportunity, to see what might be there worth while. "how was it, aleck?" she asked of her husband, as they sat together in her dressing-room, while she brushed out her beautiful hair. "brightest people i have been among for a long time--and nicest," said the banker, concisely. "a real, fresh little home, with a mother in it. good place for ada to go, and good girls for her to know; like the ones i fell in love with a hundred years ago." "that rhymed oracle,--to say nothing of the _fraction_ of a compliment,--ought to settle it," said mrs. geoffrey, laughing. "rhymes have been the order of the evening. i expect to talk in verse for a week at least." and then he told her about the "crambo." a week after, mrs. ledwith was astonished to find, lying on the mantel in her sister's room, a card that had been sent up the day before,- "mrs. alexander h. geoffrey." xi. more witch-work. hazel was asked to the geoffreys' to dinner. before this, she and diana had both been asked to take tea, and spend an evening, but this was hazel's little especial "invite," as she called it, because she and ada were writing a dialogue together for a composition at school. the geoffreys dined at the good old-fashioned hour of half past two, except when they had formal dinner company; and hazel was to come right home from school with ada, and stay and spend the afternoon. "what intimacy!" florence ledwith had exclaimed, when she heard of it. "but it isn't at all on the grand style side; people like the geoffreys do such things quite apart from their regular connection; it is a sort of 'behind the scenes;'" said glossy megilp, who was standing at florence's dressing-glass, touching up the little heap of "friz" across her forehead. "where's my poker?" she asked, suddenly, breaking off from the geoffrey subject, and rummaging in a dressing box, intent upon tutoring some little obstinate loop of hair that would be _too_ frizzy. "i should think a 'blower' might be a good thing to add to your tools, glossy," said desire. "you have brush, poker, and tongs, now, to say nothing of coal-hod," she added, glancing at the little open japanned box that held some kind of black powder which had to do with the shadow of glossy's eyelashes upon occasion, and the emphasis upon the delicate line of her brows. "no secret," said glossy, magnanimously. "there it is! it is no greater sin than violet powder, or false tails, for that matter; and the little gap in my left eyebrow was never deliberately designed. it was a 'lapsus naturã¦;' i only follow out the hint, and complete the intention. something _is_ left to ourselves; as the child said about the lord curling her hair for her when she was a baby and letting her do it herself after she grew big enough. what are our artistic perceptions given to us for, unless we're to make the best of ourselves in the first place?" "but it isn't all eyebrows," said desire, half aloud. "of course not," said glossy megilp. "twice a day i have to do myself up somehow, and why shouldn't it be as well as i can? other things come in their turn, and i do them." "but, you see, the friz and the fix has to be, anyhow, whether or no. everything isn't done, whether or no. i guess it's the 'first place,' that's the matter." "i think you have a very theoretical mind, des, and a slightly obscure style. you can't be satisfied till everything is all mapped out, and organized, and justified, and you get into horrible snarls trying to do it. if i were you, i would take things a little more as they come." "i can't," said desire. "they come hind side before and upside down." "well, if everybody is upside down, there's a view of it that makes it all right side up, isn't there? it seems to be an established fact that we must dress and undress, and that the first duty of the day is to get up and put on our clothes. we aren't ready for much until we do. and one person's dressing may require one thing, and another's another. some people have a cork leg to put on, and some people have false teeth; and they wouldn't any of them come hobbling or mumbling out without them, unless there was a fire or an earthquake, i suppose." glossy megilp's arguments and analogies perplexed desire, always. they sometimes silenced her; but they did not always answer her. she went back to what they had been discussing before. "to 'lay down the shubbel and the hoe,'--here's your poker, under the table-flounce, glossy,--and to 'take up the fiddle and the bow,' again,--i think it's real nice and beautiful for hazel--" "to 'go where the good darkies go'?" "yes. it's the _good_ of her that's got her in. and i believe you and florence both would give your best boots to be there too, if it _is_ behind. behind the fixings and the fashions is where people _live_; 'dere's vat i za-ay!'" she ended, quoting herself and rip van winkle. "maybe," said florence, carelessly; "but i'd as lief be _in_ the fashion, after all. and that's where hazel ripwinkley never will get, with all her taking little novelties." meanwhile, hazel ripwinkley was deep in the delights of a great portfolio of rare engravings; prints of glorious frescoes in old churches, and designs of splendid architecture; and mrs. geoffrey, seeing her real pleasure, was sitting beside her, turning over the large sheets, and explaining them; telling her, as she gazed into the wonderful faces of the saints and the evangelists in correggio's frescoes of the church of san giovanni at parma, how the whole dome was one radiant vision of heavenly glory, with clouds and angel faces, and adoring apostles, and christ the lord high over all; and that these were but the filling in between the springing curves of the magnificent arches; describing to her the abbess's room in san paolo, with its strange, beautiful heathen picture over the mantel, of diana mounting her stag-drawn car, and its circular walls painted with trellis-work and medallioned with windows, where the heads of little laughing children, and graceful, gentle animals peeped in from among vines and flowers. mrs. geoffrey did not wonder that hazel lingered with delight over these or over the groups by raphael in the sistine chapel,--the quiet pendentives, where the waiting of the world for its salvation was typified in the dream-like, reclining forms upon the still, desert sand; or the wonderful scenes from the "creation,"--the majestic "let there be light!" and the breathing of the breath of life into man. she watched the surprise and awe with which the child beheld for the first time the daring of inspiration in the tremendous embodiment of the almighty, and waited while she could hardly take her eyes away. but when, afterward, they turned to a portfolio of architecture, and she found her eager to examine spires and arches and capitals, rich reliefs and stately facades and sculptured gates, and exclaiming with pleasure at the colored drawings of florentine ornamentation, she wondered, and questioned her,-"have you ever seen such things before? do you draw? i should hardly think you would care so much, at your age." "i like the prettiness," said hazel, simply, "and the grandness; but i don't suppose i should care so much if it wasn't for dorris and mr. kincaid. mr. kincaid draws buildings; he's an architect; only he hasn't architected much yet, because the people that build things don't know him. dorris was so glad to give him a christmas present of 'daguerreotypes de paris,' with the churches and arches and bridges and things; she got it at a sale; i wonder what they would say to all these beauties!" then mrs. geoffrey found what still more greatly enchanted her, a volume of engravings, of english home architecture; interiors of old halls, magnificent staircases, lofty libraries and galleries dim with space; exteriors, gabled, turreted and towered; long, rambling piles of manor houses, with mixed styles of many centuries. "they look as if they were brimfull of stories!" hazel cried. "o, if i could only carry it home to show to the kincaids!" "you may," said mrs. geoffrey, as simply, in her turn, as if she were lending a copy of "robinson crusoe;' never letting the child guess by a breath of hesitation the value of what she had asked. "and tell me more about these kincaids. they are friends of yours?" "yes; we've known them all winter. they live right opposite, and sit in the windows, drawing and writing. dorris keeps house up there in two rooms. the little one is her bedroom; and mr. kincaid sleeps on the big sofa. dorris makes crackle-cakes, and asks us over. she cooks with a little gas-stove. i think it is beautiful to keep house with not very much money. she goes out with a cunning white basket and buys her things; and she does all her work up in a corner on a white table, with a piece of oil-cloth on the floor; and then she comes over into her parlor, she says, and sits by the window. it's a kind of a play all the time." "and mr. kincaid?" "dorris says he might have been rich by this time, if he had gone into his uncle james's office in new york. mr. james kincaid is a broker, and buys gold. but kenneth says gold stands for work, and if he ever has any he'll buy it with work. he wants to do some real thing. don't you think that's nice of him?" "yes, i do," said mrs. geoffrey. "and dorris is that bright girl who wanted thirteen things, and rhymed them into 'crambo?' mr. geoffrey told me." "yes, ma'am; dorris can do almost anything." "i should like to see dorris, sometime. will you bring her here, hazel?" hazel's little witch-rod felt the almost impassible something in the way. "i don't know as she would be _brought_," she said. mrs. geoffrey laughed. "you have an instinct for the fine proprieties, without a bit of respect for any conventional fences," she said. "i'll _ask_ dorris." "then i'm sure she'll come," said hazel, understanding quite well and gladly the last three words, and passing over the first phrase as if it had been a greek motto, put there to be skipped. "ada has stopped practicing," said mrs. geoffrey, who had undertaken the entertainment of her little guest during her daughter's half hour of music. "she will be waiting for you now." hazel instantly jumped up. but she paused after three steps toward the door, to say gently, looking back over her shoulder with a shy glance out of her timidly clear eyes,-"perhaps,--i hope i haven't,--stayed too long!" "come back, you little hazel-sprite!" cried mrs. geoffrey; and when she got her within reach again, she put her hands one each side of the little blushing, gleaming face, and kissed it, saying,-"i don't _think_,--i'm slow, usually, in making up my mind about people, big or little,--but i don't think you can stay too long,--or come too often, dear!" "i've found another for you, aleck," she said, that night at the hair-brushing, to her husband. he always came to sit in her dressing-room, then; and it was at this quiet time that they gave each other, out of the day they had lived in their partly separate ways and duties, that which made it for each like a day lived twice, so that the years of their life counted up double. "he is a young architect, who hasn't architected much, because he doesn't know the people who build things; and he wouldn't be a gold broker with his uncle in new york, because he believes in doing money's worth in the world for the world's money. isn't he one?" "sounds like it," said mr. geoffrey. "what is his name?" "kincaid." "nephew of james r. kincaid?" said mr. geoffrey, with an interrogation that was also an exclamation. "and wouldn't go in with him! why, it was just to have picked up dollars!" "exactly," replied his wife. "that was what he objected to." "i should like to see the fellow." "don't you remember? you have seen him! the night you went for ada to the aspen street party, and got into 'crambo.' he was there; and it was his sister who wanted thirteen things. i guess they do!" "ask them here," said the banker. "i mean to," mrs. geoffrey answered. "that is, after i've seen hapsie craydocke. she knows everything. i'll go there to-morrow morning." * * * * * "'behind' is a pretty good way to get in--to some places," said desire ledwith, coming into the rose-pink room with news. "especially an omnibus. and the ripwinkleys, and the kincaids, and old miss craydocke, and for all i know, mrs. scarup and luclarion grapp are going to summit street to tea to-night. boston is topsy-turvey; holmes was a prophet; and 'brattle street and temple place are interchanging cards!' mother, we ought to get intimate with the family over the grocer's shop. who knows what would come of it? there are fairies about in disguise, i'm sure; or else it's the millennium. whichever it is, it's all right for hazel, though; she's ready. don't you feel like foolish virgins, flo and nag? i do." i am afraid it was when desire felt a little inclination to "nag" her elder sister, that she called her by that reprehensible name. agatha only looked lofty, and vouchsafed no reply; but florence said,-"there's no need of any little triumphs or mortifications. nobody crows, and nobody cries. _i_'m glad. diana's a dear, and hazel's a duck, besides being my cousins; why shouldn't i? only there _is_ a large hole for the cats, and a little hole for the kittens; and i'd as lief, myself, go in with the cats." "the marchbankses are staying there, and professor gregory. i don't know about cats," said desire, demurely. "it's a reason-why party, for all that," said agatha, carelessly, recovering her good humor. "well, when any nice people ask me, i hope there _will_ be a 'reason why.' it's the persons of consequence that make the 'reason why.'" and desire had the last word. * * * * * hazel ripwinkley was thinking neither of large holes nor little ones,--cats nor kittens; she was saying to luclarion, sitting in her shady down-stairs room behind the kitchen, that looked out into the green yard corner, "how nicely things came out, after all!" "they seemed so hobblety at first, when i went up there and saw all those beautiful books, and pictures, and people living amongst them every day, and the poor kincaids not getting the least bit of a stretch out of their corner, ever. i'll tell you what i thought, luclarion;" and here she almost whispered, "i truly did. i thought god was making a mistake." luclarion put out her lips into a round, deprecating pucker, at that, and drew in her breath,-"oo--sh!" "well, i mean it seemed as if there was a mistake somewhere; and that i'd no business, at any rate, with what they wanted so. i couldn't get over it until i asked for those pictures; and mother said it was such a bold thing to do!" "it was bold," said luclarion; "but it wasn't forrud. it was gi'n you, and it hit right. that was looked out for." "it's a stumpy world," said luclarion grapp to mrs. ripwinkley, afterward; "but some folks step right over their stumps athout scarcely knowin' when!" xii. crumbs. desire ledwith was, at this epoch, a perplexity and a worry,--even a positive terror sometimes,--to her mother. it was not a case of the hen hatching ducks, it was rather as if a hen had got a hawk in her brood. desire's demurs and questions,--her dissatisfactions, sittings and contempts,--threatened now and then to swoop down upon the family life and comfort with destroying talons. "she'll be an awful, strong-minded, radical, progressive, overturning woman," laura said, in despair, to her friend mrs. megilp. "and greenley street, and aspen street, and that everlasting miss craydocke, are making her worse. and what can i do? because there's uncle." right before desire,--not knowing the cloud of real bewilderment that was upon her young spiritual perceptions, getting their first glimpse of a tangled and conflicting and distorted world,--she drew wondering comparisons between her elder children and this odd, anxious, restless, sharp-spoken girl. "i don't understand it," she would say. "it isn't a bit like a child of mine. i always took things easy, and got the comfort of them somehow; i think the world is a pretty pleasant place to live in, and there's lots of satisfaction to be had; and agatha and florence take after me; they are nice, good-natured, contented girls; managing their allowances,--that i wish were more,--trimming their own bonnets, and enjoying themselves with their friends, girl-fashion." which was true. agatha and florence were neither fretful nor dissatisfied; they were never disrespectful, perhaps because mrs. ledwith demanded less of deferential observance than of a kind of jolly companionship from her daughters; a go-and-come easiness in and out of what they called their home, but which was rather the trimming-up and outfitting place,--a sort of holmes' hole,--where they put in spring and fall, for a thorough overhaul and rig; and at other times, in intervals or emergencies, between their various and continual social trips and cruises. they were hardly ever all-togetherish, as desire had said, if they ever were, it was over house cleaning and millinery; when the ordering was complete,--when the wardrobes were finished,--then the world was let in, or they let themselves out, and--"looked." "desire is different," said mrs. ledwith. "she's like grant's father, and her aunt desire,--pudgicky and queer." "well, mamma," said the child, once, driven to desperate logic for defense, "i don't see how it can be helped. if you _will_ marry into the ledwith family, you can't expect to have your children all shieres!" which, again, was very true. laura laughed at the clever sharpness of it, and was more than half proud of her bold chick-of-prey, after all. yet desire remembered that her aunt frances was a shiere, also; and she thought there might easily be two sides to the same family; why not, since there were two sides still further back, always? there was uncle titus; who knew but it was the oldways streak in him after all? desire took refuge, more and more, with miss craydocke, and rachel froke, and the ripwinkleys; she even went to luclarion with questions, to get her quaint notions of things; and she had ventured into uncle titus's study, and taken down volumes of swedenborg to pry into, while he looked at her with long keen regards over his spectacles, and she did not know that she was watched. "that young girl, desire, is restless, titus," rachel froke said to him one day. "she is feeling after something; she wants something real to do; and it appears likely to me that she will do it, if they don't take care." after that, uncle titus fixed his attention upon her yet more closely; and at this time desire stumbled upon things in a strange way among his bookshelves, and thought that rachel froke was growing less precise in her fashion of putting to rights. books were tucked in beside each other as if they had been picked up and bestowed anyhow; between "heaven and hell" and the "four leading doctrines," she found, one day, "macdonald's unspoken sermons," and there was a leaf doubled lengthwise in the chapter about the white stone and the new name. another time, a little book of poems, by the same author, was slid in, open, over the volumes of darwin and huxley, and the pages upon whose outspread faces it lay were those that bore the rhyme of the blind bartimeus:- "o jesus christ! i am deaf and blind; nothing comes through into my mind, i only am not dumb: although i see thee not, nor hear, i cry because thou mayst be near o son of mary! come!" do you think a girl of seventeen may not be feeling out into the spiritual dark,--may not be stretching helpless hands, vaguely, toward the hands that help? desire ledwith laid the book down again, with a great swelling breath coming up slowly out of her bosom, and with a warmth of tears in her earnest little eyes. and uncle titus oldways sat there among his papers, and never moved, or seemed to look, but saw it all. he never said a word to her himself; it was not uncle titus's way to talk, and few suspected him of having anything to say in such matters; but he went to friend froke and asked her,-"haven't you got any light that might shine a little for that child, rachel?" and the next sunday, in the forenoon, desire came in; came in, without knowing it, for her little light. she had left home with the family on their way to church; she was dressed in her buff silk pongee suit trimmed with golden brown bands and quillings; she had on a lovely new brown hat with tea roses in it; her gloves and boots were exquisite and many buttoned; agatha and florence could not think what was the matter when she turned back, up dorset street, saying suddenly, "i won't go, after all." and then she had walked straight over the hill and down to greenley street, and came in upon rachel, sitting alone in a quiet gray parlor that was her own, where there were ferns and ivies in the window, and a little canary, dressed in brown and gold like desire herself, swung over them in a white wire cage. when desire saw how still it was, and how rachel froke sat there with her open window and her open book, all by herself, she stopped in the doorway with a sudden feeling of intrusion, which had not occurred to her as she came. "it's just what i want to come into; but if i do, it won't be there. i've no right to spoil it. don't mind, rachel. i'll go away." she said it softly and sadly, as if she could not help it, and was turning back into the hall. "but i do mind," said rachel, speaking quickly. "thee will come in, and sit down. whatever it is thee wants, is here for thee. is it the stillness? then we will be still." "that's so easy to say. but you can't do it for me. _you_ will be still, and i shall be all in a stir. i want so to be just hushed up!" "fed, and hushed up, in somebody's arms, like a baby. i know," said rachel froke. "how does she know?" thought desire; but she only looked at her with surprised eyes, saying nothing. "hungry and restless; that's what we all are," said rachel froke, "until"-"well,--until?" demanded the strange girl, impetuously, as rachel paused. "i've been hungry ever since i was born, mother says." "until he takes us up and feeds us." "why don't he?--mrs. froke, when does he give it out? once a month, in church, they have the bread and the wine? does that do it?" "thee knows we do not hold by ordinances, we friends," said rachel. "but he gives the bread of life. not once a month, or in any place; it is his word. does thee get no word when thee goes to church? does nothing come to thee?" "i don't know; it's mixed up; the church is full of bonnets; and people settle their gowns when they come in, and shake out their hitches and puffs when they go out, and there's professional music at one end, and--i suppose it's because i'm bad, but i don't know; half the time it seems to me it's only mig at the other. something all fixed up, and patted down, and smoothed over, and salted and buttered, like the potato hills they used to make on my plate for me at dinner, when i was little. but it's soggy after all, and has an underground taste. it isn't anything that has just grown, up in the light, like the ears of corn they rubbed in their hands. breakfast is better than dinner. bread, with yeast in it, risen up new. they don't feed with bread very often." "the yeast in the bread, and the sparkle in the wine they are the life of it; they are what make the signs." "if they only gave it out fresh, and a little of it! but they keep it over, and it grows cold and tough and flat, and people sit round and pretend, but they don't eat. they've eaten other things,--all sorts of trash,--before they came. they've spoiled their appetites. mine was spoiled, to-day. i felt so new and fussy, in these brown things. so i turned round, and came here." mr. oldways' saying came back into mrs. froke's mind:-"haven't you got any light, rachel, that might shine a little for that child?" perhaps that was what the child had come for. what had the word of the spirit been to rachel froke this day? the new, fresh word, with the leaven in it? "a little of it;" that was what she wanted. rachel took up the small red bible that lay on the lightstand beside her. "i'll will give thee my first-day crumb, desire," she said. "it may taste sweet to thee." she turned to revelation, seventh chapter. "look over with me; thee will see then where the crumb is," she said; and as desire came near and looked over her upon the page, she read from the last two verses:-"they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more. "for the _tenderness_ that is in the midst of the _almightiness_ shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of water; and god shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." her voice lingered over the words she put for the "lamb" and the "throne," so that she said "tenderness" with its own very yearning inflection, and "almightiness" with a strong fullness, glad in that which can never fall short or be exhausted. then she softly laid over the cover, and sat perfectly still. it was the quaker silence that falls upon them in their assemblies, leaving each heart to itself and that which the spirit has given. desire was hushed all through; something living and real had thrilled into her thought; her restlessness quieted suddenly under it, as mary stood quiet before the message of the angel. when she did speak again, after a time, as rachel froke broke the motionless pause by laying the book gently back again upon the table, it was to say,-"why don't they preach like that, and leave the rest to preach itself? a sermon means a word; why don't they just say the word, and let it go?" the friend made no reply. "i never could--quite--like that about the 'lamb,' before," said desire, hesitatingly. "it seemed,--i don't know,--putting him _down_, somehow; making him tame; taking the grandness away that made the gentleness any good. but,--'tenderness;' that is beautiful! does it mean so in the other place? about taking away the sins,--do you think?" "'the tenderness of god--the compassion--that taketh away the sins of the world?'" mrs. froke repeated, half inquiringly. "jesus christ, god's heart of love toward man? i think it is so. i think, child, thee has got thy crumb also, to-day." but not all yet. pretty soon, they heard the front door open, and uncle titus come in. another step was behind his; and kenneth kincaid's voice was speaking, about some book he had called to take. desire's face flushed, and her manner grew suddenly flurried. "i must go," she said, starting up; yet when she got to the door, she paused and delayed. the voices were talking on, in the study; somehow, desire had last words also, to say to mrs. froke. she was partly shy about going past that open door, and partly afraid they might not notice her if she did. back in her girlish thought was a secret suggestion that she was pushing at all the time with a certain self-scorn and denial, that it might happen that she and kenneth kincaid would go out at the same moment; if so, he would walk up the street with her, and kenneth kincaid was one of the few persons whom desire ledwith thoroughly believed in and liked. "there was no mig about him," she said. it is hazardous when a girl of seventeen makes one of her rare exceptions in her estimate of character in favor of a man of six and twenty. yet desire ledwith hated "nonsense;" she wouldn't have anybody sending her bouquets as they did to agatha and florence; she had an utter contempt for lavender pantaloons and waxed moustaches; but for kenneth kincaid, with his honest, clear look at life, and his high strong purpose, to say friendly things,--tell her a little now and then of how the world looked to him and what it demanded,--this lifted her up; this made it seem worth while to speak and to hear. so she was very glad when uncle titus saw her go down the hall, after she had made up her mind that that way lay her straight path, and that things contrived were not things worth happening,--and spoke out her name, so that she had to stop, and turn to the open doorway and reply; and kenneth kincaid came over and held out his hand to her. he had two books in the other,--a volume of bunsen and a copy of "guild court,"--and he was just ready to go. "not been to church to-day?" said uncle titus to desire. "i've been--to friend's meeting," the girl answered. "get anything by that?" he asked, gruffly, letting the shag down over his eyes that behind it beamed softly. "yes; a morsel," replied desire. "all i wanted." "all you wanted? well, that's a sunday-full!" "yes, sir, i think it is," said she. when they got out upon the sidewalk, kenneth kincaid asked, "was it one of the morsels that may be shared, miss desire? some crumbs multiply by dividing, you know." "it was only a verse out of the bible, with a new word in it." "a new word? well, i think bible verses often have that. i suppose it was what they were made for." desire's glance at him had a question in it. "made to look different at different times, as everything does that has life in it. isn't that true? clouds, trees, faces,--do they ever look twice the same?" "yes," said desire, thinking especially of the faces. "i think they do, or ought to. but they may look _more_." "i didn't say _contradictory_. to look more, there must be a difference; a fresh aspect. and that is what the world is full of; and the world is the word of god." "the world?" said desire, who had been taught in a dried up, mechanical sort of way, that the bible is the word of god; and practically left to infer that, that point once settled, it might be safely shut, up between its covers and not much meddled with, certainly not over freely interpreted. "yes. what god had to say. in the beginning was the word, and the word was god. without him was not anything made that was made." desire's face brightened. she knew those words by heart. they were the first sunday-school lesson she ever committed to memory, out of the new testament; "down to 'grace and truth,'" as she recollected. what a jumble of repetitions it had been to her, then! sentences so much alike that she could not remember them apart, or which way they came. all at once the simple, beautiful meaning was given to her. _what god had to say._ and it took a world,--millions, of worlds,--to say it with. "and the bible, too?" she said, simply following out her own mental perception, without giving the link. it was not needed. they were upon one track. "yes; all things; and all _souls_. the world-word comes through things; the bible came through souls. and it is all the more alive, and full, and deep, and changing; like a river." "living fountains of waters! that was part of the morsel to-day," desire repeated impulsively, and then shyly explained. "and the new word?" desire shrunk into silence for a moment; she was not used to, or fond of bible quoting, or even bible talk; yet sin was hungering all the time for bible truth. mr. kincaid waited. so she repeated it presently; for desire never made a fuss; she was too really sensitive for that. "'the tenderness in the midst of the almightiness shall feed them, and shall lead them to living fountains of water.'" mr. kincaid recognized the "new word," and his face lit up. "'the lamb in the midst of the throne,'" he said. "out of the heart of god, the christ. who was there before; the intent by which all things were made. the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever; who ever liveth to make intercession for us. christ _had to be_. the word, full of grace, must be made flesh. why need people dispute about eternity and divinity, if they can only see that?--was that mrs. froke's reading?" "yes; that was rachel's sermon." "it is an illumination." they walked all up orchard street without another word. then kenneth kincaid said,--"miss desire, why won't you come and teach in the mission school?" "i teach? why, i've got everything to learn!" "but as fast as you _do_ learn; the morsels, you know. that is the way they are given out. that is the wonder of the kingdom of heaven. there is no need to go away and buy three hundred pennyworth before we begin, that every one may take a little; the bread given as the master breaks it feeds them till they are filled; and there are baskets full of fragments to gather up." kenneth kincaid's heart was in his sunday work, as his sister had said. the more gladly now, that the outward daily bread was being given. mr. geoffrey,--one of those busy men, so busy that they do promptly that which their hands find to do,--had put kenneth in the way of work. it only needed a word from him, and the surveying and laying out of some new streets and avenues down there where boston is growing so big and grand and strange, were put into his charge. kenneth was busy now, cheerily busy, from monday morning to saturday night; and restfully busy on the sunday, straightening the paths and laying out the ways for souls to walk in. he felt the harmony and the illustration between his week and his sunday, and the one strengthening the other, as all true outward work does harmonize with and show forth, and help the spiritual doing. it could not have been so with that gold work, or any little feverish hitching on to other men's business; producing nothing, advancing nothing, only standing between to snatch what might fall, or to keep a premium for passing from hand to hand. our great cities are so full,--our whole country is so overrun,--with these officious middle-men whom the world does not truly want; chiffonniers of trade, who only pick up a living out of the great press and waste and overflow; and our boys are so eager to slip in to some such easy, ready-made opportunity,--to get some crossing to sweep. what will come of it all, as the pretenses multiply? will there be always pennies for every little broom? will two, and three, and six sweeps be tolerated between side and side? by and by, i think, they will have to turn to and lay pavements. hard, honest work, and the day's pay for it; that is what we have got to go back to; that and the day's snug, patient living, which the pay achieves. then, as i say, the week shall illustrate the sunday, and the sunday shall glorify the week; and what men do and build shall stand true types, again, for the inner growth and the invisible building; so that if this outer tabernacle were dissolved, there should be seen glorious behind it, the house not made with hands,--eternal. as desire ledwith met this young kenneth kincaid from day to day, seeing him so often at her aunt ripwinkley's, where he and dorris went in and out now, almost like a son and daughter,--as she walked beside him this morning, hearing him say these things, at which the heart-longing in her burned anew toward the real and satisfying,--what wonder was it that her restlessness grasped at that in his life which was strong and full of rest; that she felt glad and proud to have him tell his thought to her; that without any silliness,--despising all silliness,--she should yet be conscious, as girls of seventeen are conscious, of something that made her day sufficient when she had so met him,--of a temptation to turn into those streets in her walks that led his way? or that she often, with her blunt truth, toward herself as well as others, and her quick contempt of sham and subterfuge, should snub herself mentally, and turn herself round as by a grasp of her own shoulders, and make herself walk off stoutly in a far and opposite direction, when, without due need and excuse, she caught herself out in these things? what wonder that this stood in her way, for very pleasantness, when kenneth asked her to come and teach in the school? that she was ashamed to let herself do a thing--even a good thing, that her life needed,--when there was this conscious charm in the asking; this secret thought--that she should walk up home with him every sunday! she remembered agatha and florence, and she imagined, perhaps, more than they would really have thought of it at home; and so as they turned into shubarton place,--for he had kept on all the way along bridgeley and up dorset street with her,--she checked her steps suddenly as they came near the door, and said brusquely,-"no, mr. kincaid; i can't come to the mission. i might learn a, and teach them that; but how do i know i shall ever learn b, myself?" he had left his question, as their talk went on, meaning to ask it again before they separated. he thought it was prevailing with her, and that the help that comes of helping others would reach her need; it was for her sake he asked it; he was disappointed at the sudden, almost trivial turn she gave it. "you have taken up another analogy, miss desire," he said. "we were talking about crumbs and feeding. the five loaves and the five thousand. 'why reason ye because ye have no bread? how is it that ye do not understand?'" kenneth quoted these words naturally, pleasantly; as he might quote anything that had been spoken to them both out of a love and authority they both recognized, a little while ago. but desire was suddenly sharp and fractious. if it had not touched some deep, live place in her, she would not have minded so much. it was partly, too, the coming toward home. she had got away out of the pure, clear spaces where such things seemed to be fit and unstrained, into the edge of her earth atmosphere again, where, falling, they took fire. presently she would be in that ridiculous pink room, and glossy megilp would be chattering about "those lovely purple poppies with the black grass," that she had been lamenting all the morning she had not bought for her chip hat, instead of the pomegranate flowers. and agatha would be on the bed, in her cashmere sack, reading miss braddon. "it would sound nice to tell them she was going down to the mission school to give out crumbs!" besides, i suppose that persons of a certain temperament never utter a more ungracious "no," than when they are longing all the time to say "yes." so she turned round on the lower step to kenneth, when he had asked that grave, sweet question of the lord's, and said perversely,-"i thought you did not believe in any brokering kind of business. it's all there,--for everybody. why should i set up to fetch and carry?" she did not look in his face as she said it; she was not audacious enough to do that; she poked with the stick of her sunshade between the uneven bricks of the sidewalk, keeping her eyes down, as if she watched for some truth she expected to pry up. but she only wedged the stick in so that she could not get it out; and kenneth kincaid making her absolutely no answer at all, she had to stand there, growing red and ashamed, held fast by her own silly trap. "take care; you will break it," said kenneth, quietly, as she gave it a twist and a wrench. and he put out his hand, and took it from hers, and drew gently upward in the line in which she had thrust it in. "you were bearing off at an angle. it wanted a straight pull." "i never pull straight at anything. i always get into a crook, somehow. you didn't answer me, mr. kincaid. i didn't mean to be rude--or wicked. i didn't mean--" "what you said. i know that; and it's no use to answer what people don't mean. that makes the crookedest crook of all." "but i think i did mean it partly; only not contrarimindedly. i do mean that i have no business--yet awhile. it would only be--migging at gospel!" and with this remarkable application of her favorite illustrative expression, she made a friendly but abrupt motion of leave-taking, and went into the house. up into her own room, in the third story, where the old furniture was, and no "fadging,"--and sat down, bonnet, gloves, sunshade, and all, in her little cane rocking-chair by the window. helena was down in the pink room, listening with charmed ears to the grown up young-ladyisms of her elder sisters and glossy megilp. desire sat still until the dinner-bell rang, forgetful of her dress, forgetful of all but one thought that she spoke out as she rose at last at the summons to take off her things in a hurry,-"i wonder,--i _wonder_--if i shall ever live anything all straight out!" xiii. pieces of worlds. mr. dickens never put a truer thought into any book, than he put at the beginning of "little dorrit." that, from over land and sea, from hundreds, thousands of miles away, are coming the people with whom we are to have to do in our lives; and that, "what is set to us to do to them, and what is set for them to do to us, will all be done." not only from far places in this earth, over land and sea,--but from out the eternities, before and after,--from which souls are born, and into which they die,--all the lines of life are moving continually which are to meet and join, and bend, and cross our own. but it is only with a little piece of this world, as far as we can see it in this short and simple story, that we have now to do. rosamond holabird was coming down to boston. with all her pretty, fresh, delicate, high-lady ways, with her beautiful looks, and her sweet readiness for true things and noble living, she was coming, for a few days only,--the cooperative housekeeping was going on at westover, and she could not be spared long,--right in among them here in aspen street, and shubarton place, and orchard street, and harrisburg square, where mrs. scherman lived whom she was going to stay with. but a few days may be a great deal. rosamond holabird was coming for far more than she knew. among other things she was coming to get a lesson; a lesson right on in a course she was just now learning; a lesson of next things, and best things, and real folks. you see how it happened,--where the links were; miss craydocke, and sin scherman, and leslie goldthwaite, were dear friends, made to each other one summer among the mountains. leslie had had sin and miss craydocke up at z----, and rosamond and leslie were friends, also. mrs. frank scherman had a pretty house in harrisburg square. she had not much time for paying fashionable calls, or party-going, or party-giving. as to the last, she did not think frank had money enough yet to "circumfuse," she said, in that way. but she had six lovely little harlequin cups on a side-shelf in her china closet, and six different-patterned breakfast plates, with colored borders to match the cups; rose, and brown, and gray, and vermilion, and green, and blue. these were all the real china she had, and were for frank and herself and the friends whom she made welcome,--and who might come four at once,--for day and night. she delighted in "little stays;" in girls who would go into the nursery with her, and see sinsie in her bath; or into the kitchen, and help her mix up "little delectabilities to surprise frank with;" only the trouble had got to be now, that the surprise occurred when the delectabilities did not. frank had got demoralized, and expected them. she rejoiced to have miss craydocke drop in of a morning and come right up stairs, with her little petticoats and things to work on; and she and frank returned these visits in a social, cosy way, after sinsie was in her crib for the night. frank's boots never went on with a struggle for a walk down to orchard street; but they were terribly impossible for continuation avenue. so it had come about long ago, though i have not had a corner to mention it in, that they "knew the muffin man," in an aspen street sense; and were no strangers to the charm of mrs. ripwinkley's "evenings." there was always an "evening" in the "mile hill house," as the little family and friendly coterie had come to call it. rosamond and leslie had been down together for a week once, at the schermans; and this time rosamond was coming alone. she had business in boston for a day or two, and had written to ask asenath "if she might." there were things to buy for barbara, who was going to be married in a "navy hurry," besides an especial matter that had determined her just at this time to come. and asenath answered, "that the scarlet and gray, and green and blue were pining and fading on the shelf; and four days would be the very least to give them all a turn and treat them fairly; for such things had their delicate susceptibilities, as hans andersen had taught us to know, and might starve and suffer,--why not? being made of protoplasm, same as anybody." rosamond's especial errand to the city was one that just a little set her up, innocently, in her mind. she had not wholly got the better,--when it interfered with no good-will or generous dealing,--of a certain little instinctive reverence for imposing outsides and grand ways of daily doing; and she was somewhat complacent at the idea of having to go,--with kindly and needful information,--to madam mucklegrand, in spreadsplendid park. madam mucklegrand was a well-born boston lady, who had gone to europe in her early youth, and married a scottish gentleman with a sir before his name. consequently, she was quite entitled to be called "my lady;" and some people who liked the opportunity of touching their republican tongues to the salt of european dignitaries, addressed her so; but, for the most part, she assumed and received simply the style of "madam." a queen may be called "madam," you know. it covers an indefinite greatness. but when she spoke of her late,--very long ago,--husband, she always named him as "sir archibald." madam mucklegrand's daughter wanted a wet-nurse for her little baby. up in z----, there was a poor woman whose husband, a young brakeman on the railroad, had been suddenly killed three months ago, before her child was born. there was a sister here in boston, who could take care of it for her if she could go to be foster-mother to some rich little baby, who was yet so poor as this--to need one. so rosamond holabird, who was especially interested for mrs. jopson, had written to asenath, and had an advertisement put in the "transcript," referring to mrs. scherman for information. and the mucklegrand carriage had rolled up, the next day, to the house in harrisburg square. they wanted to see the woman, of course, and to hear all about her,--more than mrs. scherman was quite able to tell; therefore when she sent a little note up to z----, by the evening mail, rosamond replied with her "might she come?" she brought jane jopson and the baby down with her, left them over night at mrs. ginnever's, in sheafe street, and was to go for them next morning and take them up to spreadsplendid park. she had sent a graceful, polite little note to madam mucklegrand, dated "westover, z----," and signed, "rosamond holabird," offering to do this, that there might not be the danger of jane's losing the chance in the meanwhile. it was certainly to accomplish the good deed that rosamond cared the most; but it was also certainly something to accomplish it in that very high quarter. it lent a piquancy to the occasion. she came down to breakfast very nicely and discriminatingly dressed, with the elegant quietness of a lady who knew what was simply appropriate to such an errand and the early hour, but who meant to be recognized as the lady in every unmistakable touch; and there was a carriage ordered for her at half past nine. sin scherman was a cute little matron; she discerned the dash of subdued importance in rosamond's air; and she thought it very likely, in the boston nature of things, that it would get wholesomely and civilly toned down. just at this moment, rosamond, putting on her little straw bonnet with real lace upon it, and her simple little narrow-bordered green shawl, that was yet, as far as it went, veritable cashmere,--had a consciousness, in a still, modest way, not only of her own personal dignity as rosamond holabird, who was the same going to see madam mucklegrand, or walking over to madam pennington's, and as much in her place with one as the other; but of the dignity of westover itself, and westover ladyhood, represented by her among the palaces of boston-appendix to-day. she was only twenty, this fair and pleasant rosamond of ours, and country simple, with all her native tact and grace; and she forgot, or did not know how full of impressions a life like madam mucklegrand's might be, and how very trifling and fleeting must be any that she might chance to make. she drove away down to the north end, and took jane jopson and her baby in,--very clean and shiny, both of them,--and jane particularly nice in the little black crape bonnet that rosamond herself had made, and the plain black shawl that mrs. holabird had given her. she stood at the head of the high, broad steps, with her mind very much made up in regard to her complete and well-bred self-possession, and the manner of her quietly assured self-introduction. she had her card all ready that should explain for her; and to the servant's reply that madam mucklegrand was in, she responded by moving forward with only enough of voluntary hesitation to allow him to indicate to her the reception room, at the door of which she gave him the little pasteboard, with,-"take that to her, if you please," and so sat down, very much as if she had been in such places frequently before, which she never had. one may be quite used to the fine, free essence of gentle living, and never in all one's life have anything to do with such solid, concrete expression of it as rosamond saw here. very high, to begin with, the ceiled and paneled room was; reaching up into space as if it had really been of no consequence to the builders where they should put the cover on; and with no remotest suggestion of any reserve for further superstructure upon the same foundation. very dark, and polished, and deeply carved, and heavily ornamented were its wainscotings, and frames, and cornices; out of the new look of the streets, which it will take them yet a great while to outgrow, she had stepped at once into a grand, and mellow, and ancient stateliness. there were dim old portraits on the walls, and paintings that hinted at old mastership filled whole panels; and the tall, high-backed, wonderfully wrought oaken chairs had heraldic devices in relief upon their bars and corners; and there was a great, round mosaic table, in soft, rich, dark colors, of most precious stones; these, in turn, hidden with piles of rare engravings. the floor was of dark woods, inlaid; and sumptuous rugs were put about upon it for the feet, each one of which was wide enough to call a carpet. and nothing of it all was _new_; there was nothing in the room but some plants in a jardiniere by the window, that seemed to have a bit of yesterday's growth upon it. a great, calm, marble face of jove looked down from high up, out of the shadows. underneath sat rosamond holabird, holding on to her identity and her self-confidence. madam mucklegrand came in plainly enough dressed,--in black; you would not notice what she had on; but you would notice instantly the consummate usedness to the world and the hardening into the mould thereof that was set and furrowed upon eye and lip and brow. she sailed down upon rosamond like a frigate upon a graceful little pinnace; and brought to within a pace or two of her, continuing to stand an instant, as rosamond rose, just long enough for the shadow of a suggestion that it might not be altogether material that she should be seated again at all. but rosamond made a movement backward to her chair, and laid her hand upon its arm, and then madam mucklegrand decided to sit down. "you called about the nurse, i conclude, miss--holabird?" "yes, ma'am; i thought you had some questions you wished to ask, and that i had better come myself. i have her with me, in the carriage." "thank you," said madam mucklegrand, politely. but it was rather a _de haut en bas_ politeness; she exercised it also toward her footman. then followed inquiries about age, and health, and character. rosamond told all she knew, clearly and sufficiently, with some little sympathetic touches that she could not help, in giving her story. madam mucklegrand met her nowhere, however, on any common ground; she passed over all personal interest; instead of two women befriending a third in her need, who in turn was to give life to a little child waiting helplessly for some such ministry, it might have been the leasing of a house, or the dealing about some merchandise, that was between them. rosamond proposed, at last, to send jane jopson in. jane and her baby were had in, and had up-stairs; the physician and attending nurse pronounced upon her; she was brought down again, to go home and dispose of her child, and return. rosamond, meanwhile, had been sitting under the marble jove. there was nothing really rude in it; she was there on business; what more could she expect? but then she knew all the time, that she too was a lady, and was taking trouble to do a kind thing. it was not so that madam mucklegrand would have been treated at westover. rosamond was feeling pretty proud by the time madam mucklegrand came down stairs. "we have engaged the young woman: the doctor quite approves; she will return without delay, i hope?" as if rosamond were somehow responsible all through. "i have no doubt she will; good morning, madam." "good morning. i am, really, very much obliged. you have been of great service." rosamond turned quietly round upon the threshold. "that was what i was very anxious to be," she said, in her perfectly sweet and musical voice,--"to the poor woman." italics would indicate too coarsely the impalpable emphasis she put upon the last two words. but mrs. mucklegrand caught it. rosamond went away quite as sure of her own self-respect as ever, but very considerably cured of spreadsplendidism. this was but one phase of it, she knew; there are real folks, also, in spreadsplendid park; they are a good deal covered up, there, to be sure; but they can't help that. it is what always happens to somebody when pyramids are built. madam mucklegrand herself was, perhaps, only a good deal covered up. how lovely it was to go down into orchard street after that, and take tea with miss craydocke! how human and true it seemed,--the friendliness that shone and breathed there, among them all. how kingdom-of-heaven-like the air was, and into what pleasantness of speech it was born! and then hazel ripwinkley came over, like a little spirit from another blessed society, to tell that "the picture-book things were all ready, and that it would take everybody to help." that was rosamond's first glimpse of witch hazel, who found her out instantly,--the real, holabirdy part of her,--and set her down at once among her "folks." it was bright and cheery in mrs. ripwinkley's parlor; you could hardly tell whence the cheeriness radiated, either. the bright german lamp was cheery, in the middle of the round table; the table was cheery, covered with glossy linen cut into large, square book-sheets laid in piles, and with gay pictures of all kinds, brightly colored; and the scissors,--or scissorses,--there were ever so many shining pairs of them,--and the little mucilage bottles, and the very scrap-baskets,--all looked cozy and comfortable, and as if people were going to have a real good time among them, somehow. and the somehow was in making great beautiful, everlasting picture-books for the little orphans in miss craydocke's home,--the home, that is, out of several blessed and similar ones that she was especially interested in, and where hazel and diana had been with her until they knew all the little waifs by sight and name and heart, and had their especial chosen property among them, as they used to have among the chickens and the little yellow ducks at homesworth farm. mrs. ripwinkley was cheery; it might be a question whether all the light did not come from her first, in some way, and perhaps it did; but then hazel was luminous, and she fluttered about with quick, happy motions, till like a little glancing taper she had shone upon and lit up everybody and everything; and dorris was sunny with clear content, and kenneth was blithe, and desire was scintillant, as she always was either with snaps or smiles; and here came in beaming miss craydocke, and gay asenath and her handsome husband; and our rosa mundi; there,--how can you tell? it was all round; and it was more every minute. there were cutters and pasters and stitchers and binders and every part was beautiful work, and nobody could tell which was pleasantest. cutting out was nice, of course; who doesn't like cutting out pictures? some were done beforehand, but there were as many left as there would be time for. and pasting, on the fine, smooth linen, making it glow out with charming groups and tints of flowers and birds and children in gay clothes,--that was delightful; and the stitchers had the pleasure of combining and arranging it all; and the binders,--mrs. ripwinkley and miss craydocke,--finished all off with the pretty ribbons and the gray covers, and theirs being the completing touch, thought _they_ had the best of it. "but i don't think finishing is best, mother," said hazel, who was diligently snipping in and out around rose leaves or baby faces, as it happened. "i think beginning is always beautiful. i never want to end off,--anything nice, i mean." "well, we don't end off this," said diana. "there's the giving, next." "and then their little laughs and oo's," said hazel. "and their delight day after day; and the comfort of them in their little sicknesses," said miss craydocke. "and the stories that have got to be told about every picture," said dorris. "no; nothing really nice does end; it goes on and on," said mrs. ripwinkley. "of course!" said hazel, triumphantly, turning on the drummond light of her child-faith. "we're forever and ever people, you know!" "please paste some more flowers, mr. kincaid," said rosamond, who sat next him, stitching. "i want to make an all-flower book of this. no,--not roses; i've a whole page already; this great white lily, i think. that's beautiful!" "wouldn't it do to put in this laurel bush next, with the bird's nest in it?" "o, those lovely pink and white laurels! yes. where did you get such pictures, miss hazel?" "o, everybody gave them to us, all summer, ever since we began. mrs. geoffrey gave those flowers; and mother painted some. she did that laurel. but don't call me miss hazel, please; it seems to send me off into a corner." rosamond answered by a little irresistible caress; leaning her head down to hazel, on her other side, until her cheek touched the child's bright curls, quickly and softly. there was magnetism between those two. ah, the magnetism ran round! "for a child's picture-book, mrs. ripwinkley?" said mrs. scherman, reaching over for the laurel picture. "aren't these almost too exquisite? they would like a big scarlet poppy just as well,--perhaps better. or a clump of cat-o'-nine-tails," she added, whimsically. "there _is_ a clump of cat-o'-nine-tails," said mrs. ripwinkley. "i remember how i used to delight in them as a child,--the real ones." "pictures are to _tell_ things," said desire, in her brief way. "these little city refugees _must_ see them, somehow," said rosamond, gently. "i understand. they will never get up on the mountains, maybe, where the laurels grow, or into the shady swamps among the flags and the cat-o'-nine-tails. you have _picked out_ pictures to give them, mrs. ripwinkley." kenneth kincaid's scissors stopped a moment, as he looked at rosamond, pausing also over the placing of her leaves. desire saw that from the other side; she saw how beautiful and gracious this girl was--this rosamond holabird; and there was a strange little twinge in her heart, as she felt, suddenly, that let there be ever so much that was true and kindly, or even tender, in her, it could never come up in her eyes or play upon her lips like that she could never say it out sweetly and in due place everything was a spasm with her; and nobody would ever look at her just as kenneth kincaid looked at rosamond then. she said to herself, with her harsh, unsparing honesty, that it must be a "hitch inside;" a cramp or an awkwardness born in her, that set her eyes, peering and sharp, so near together, and put that knot into her brows instead of their widening placidly, like rosamond's, and made her jerky in her speech. it was no use; she couldn't look and behave, because she couldn't _be_; she must just go boggling and kinking on, and--losing everything, she supposed. the smiles went down, under a swift, bitter little cloud, and the hard twist came into her face with the inward pinching she was giving herself; and all at once there crackled out one of her sharp, strange questions; for it was true that she could not do otherwise; everything was sudden and crepitant with her. "why need all the good be done up in batches, i wonder? why can't it be spread round, a little more even? there must have been a good deal left out somewhere, to make it come in a heap, so, upon you, miss craydocke!" hazel looked up. "i know what desire means," she said. "it seemed just so to me, _one_ way. why oughtn't there to be _little_ homes, done-by-hand homes, for all these little children, instead of--well--machining them all up together?" and hazel laughed at her own conceit. "it's nice; but then--it isn't just the way. if we were all brought up like that we shouldn't know, you see!" "you wouldn't want to be brought up in a platoon, hazel?" said kenneth kincaid. "no; neither should i." "i think it was better," said hazel, "to have my turn of being a little child, all to myself; _the_ little child, i mean, with the rest of the folks bigger. to make much of me, you know. i shouldn't want to have missed that. i shouldn't like to be _loved_ in a platoon." "nobody is meant to be," said miss craydocke. "then why--" began asenath scherman, and stopped. "why what, dear?" "revelations," replied sin, laconically. "there are loads of people there, all dressed alike, you know; and--well--it's platoony, i think, rather! and down here, such a world-full; and the sky--full of worlds. there doesn't seem to be much notion of one at a time, in the general plan of things." "ah, but we've got the key to all that," said miss craydocke. "'the very hairs of your head are all numbered.' it may be impossible with us, you know, but not with him." "miss hapsie! you always did put me down, just when i thought i was smart," said sin scherman. asenath loved to say "miss hapsie," now and then, to her friend, ever since she had found out what she called her "squee little name." "but the little children, miss craydocke," said mrs. ripwinkley. "it seems to me desire has got a right thought about it." mrs. ripwinkley and hazel always struck the same note. the same delicate instinct moved them both. hazel "knew what desire meant;" her mother did not let it be lost sight of that it was desire who had led the way in this thought of the children; so that the abrupt beginning--the little flash out of the cloud--was quite forgotten presently, in the tone of hearty understanding and genuine interest with which the talk went on; and it was as if all that was generous and mindfully suggestive in it had first and truly come from her. they unfolded herself for her--these friendly ones--as she could not do; out of her bluntness grew a graciousness that lay softly over it; the cloud itself melted away and floated off; and desire began to sparkle again more lambently. for she was not one of the kind to be meanly or enviously "put out." "it seemed to me there must be a great many spare little corners somewhere, for all these spare little children," she said, "and that, lumped up together so, there was something they did not get." "that is precisely the thing," said miss craydocke, emphatically. "i wonder, sometimes," she went on, tenderly, "if whenever god makes a little empty place in a home, it isn't really on purpose that it might be filled with one of these,--if people only thought." "miss craydocke," said hazel, "how did you begin your beehive?" "i!" said the good lady. "i didn't. it began itself." "well, then, how did you _let_ it begin?" "ah!" the tone was admissive, and as if she had said, "_that_ is another thing!" she could not contradict that she had let it be. "i'll tell you a queer story," she said, "of what they say they used to do, in old roman catholic times and places, when they wanted to _keep up_ a beehive that was in any danger of dwindling or growing unprofitable. i read it somewhere in a book of popular beliefs and customs about bees and other interesting animals. an old woman once went to her friend, and asked her what she did to make her hive so gainful. and this was what the old wife said; it sounds rather strange to us, but if there is anything irreverent in it, it is the word and not the meaning; 'i go,' she said, 'to the priest, and get a little round godamighty, and put it in the hive, and then all goes well; the bees thrive, and there is plenty of honey; they always come, and stay, and work, when _that_ is there." "a little round--something awful! what _did_ she mean?" asked mrs. scherman. "she meant a consecrated wafer,--the sacrament. we don't need to put the wafer in; but if we let _him_ in, you see,--just say to him it is his house, to do with as he likes,--he takes the responsibility, and brings in all the rest." nobody saw, under the knitting of desire ledwith's brows, and the close setting of her eyes, the tenderness with which they suddenly moistened, and the earnestness with which they gleamed. nobody knew how she thought to herself inwardly, in the same spasmodic fashion that she used for speech,-"they mig up their parlors with upholstery, and put rose-colored paper on their walls, and call them _their_ houses; and shut the little round awfulness and goodness out! we've all been doing it! and there's no place left for what might come in." mrs. scherman broke the hush that followed what miss hapsie said. not hastily, or impertinently; but when it seemed as if it might be a little hard to come down into the picture-books and the pleasant easiness again. "let's make a noah's ark picture-book,--you and i," she said to desire. "give us all your animals,--there's a whole natural history full over there, all painted with splendid daubs of colors; the children did that, i know, when they _were_ children. come; we'll have everything in, from an elephant to a bumble-bee!" "we did not mean to use those, mrs. scherman," said desire. "we did not think they were good enough. they are _so_ daubed up." "they're perfectly beautiful. exactly what the young ones will like. just divide round, and help. we'll wind up with the most wonderful book of all; the book they'll all cry for, and that will have to be given always, directly after the castor oil." it took them more than an hour to do that, all working hard; and a wonderful thing it was truly, when it was done. mrs. scherman and desire ledwith directed all the putting together, and the grouping was something astonishing. there were men and women,--the knowers, sin called them; she said that was what she always thought the old gentleman's name was, in the days when she first heard of him, because he knew so much; and in the backgrounds of the same sheets were their country cousins, the orangs, and the little apes. then came the elephants, and the camels, and the whales; "for why shouldn't the fishes be put in, since they must all have been swimming round sociably, if they weren't inside; and why shouldn't the big people be all kept together properly?" there were happy families of dogs and cats and lions and snakes and little humming-birds; and in the last part were all manner of bugs, down to the little lady-bugs in blazes of red and gold, and the gray fleas and mosquitoes which sin improvised with pen and ink, in a swarm at the end. "and after that, i don't believe they wanted any more," she said; and handed over the parts to miss craydocke to be tied together. for this volume had had to be made in many folds, and mrs. ripwinkley's blue ribbon would by no means stretch over the back. and by that time it was eleven o'clock, and they had worked four hours. they all jumped up in a great hurry then, and began to say good-by. "this must not be the last we are to have of you, miss holabird," said mrs. ripwinkley, laying rosamond's shawl across her shoulders. "of course not," said mrs scherman, "when you are all coming to our house to tea to-morrow night." rosamond bade the ripwinkleys good-night with a most sweet cordiality, and thanks for the pleasure she had had, and she told hazel and her mother that it was "neither beginning nor end, she believed; for it seemed to her that she had only found a little new piece of her world, and that aspen street led right out of westover in the invisible geography, she was sure." "come!" said miss craydocke, standing on the doorsteps. "it is all invisible geography out here, pretty nearly; and we've all our different ways to go, and only these two unhappy gentlemen to insist on seeing everybody home." so first the whole party went round with miss hapsie, and then kenneth and dorris, who always went home with desire, walked up hanley street with the schermans and rosamond, and so across through dane street to shubarton place. but while they were on their way, hazel ripwinkley was saying to her mother, up in her room, where they made sometimes such long good-nights,-"mother! there were some little children taken away from you before we came, you know? and now we've got this great big house, and plenty of things, more than it takes for us." "well?" "don't you think it's expected that we should do something with the corners? there's room for some real good little times for somebody. i think we ought to begin a beehive." mrs. ripwinkley kissed hazel very tenderly, and said, only,-"we can wait, and see." those are just the words that mothers so often put children off with! but mrs. ripwinkley, being one of the real folks, meant it; the very heart of it. in that little talk, they took the consecration in; they would wait and see; when people do that, with an expectation, the beehive begins. * * * * * up hanley street, the six fell into pairs. mrs. scherman and desire, dorris and mr. scherman, rosamond and kenneth kincaid. it only took from bridgeley street up to dane, to tell kenneth kincaid so much about westover, in answer to his questions, that he too thought he had found a new little piece of his world. what rosamond thought, i do not know; but a girl never gives a young man so much as she gave kenneth in that little walk without having some of the blessed consciousness that comes with giving. the sun knows it shines, i dare say; or else there is a great waste of hydrogen and other things. there was not much left for poor little desire after they parted from the schermans and turned the corner of dane street. only a little bit of a way, in which new talk could hardly begin, and just time for a pause that showed how the talk that had come to an end was missed or how, perhaps, it stayed in the mind, repeating itself, and keeping it full. nobody said anything till they had crossed b---street; and then dorris said, "how beautiful,--_real_ beautiful, rosamond holabird is!" and kenneth answered, "did you hear what she said to mrs. ripwinkley?" they were full of rosamond! desire did not speak a word. dorris had heard and said it over. it seemed to please kenneth to hear it again. "a piece of her world!" "how quickly a true person springs to what belongs to--their life!" said kenneth, using that wrong little pronoun that we shall never be able to do without. "people don't always get what belongs, though," blurted desire at last, just as they came to the long doorsteps. "some people's lives are like complementary colors, i think; they see blue, and live red!" "but the colors are only accidentally--i mean temporarily--divided; they are together in the sun; and they join somewhere--beyond." "i hate beyond!" said desire, recklessly. "good-night. thank you." and she ran up the steps. nobody knew what she meant. perhaps she hardly knew herself. they only thought that her home life was not suited to her, and that she took it hard. xiv. "sesame; and lilies." "i've got a discouragement at my stomach," said luclarion grapp. "what's the matter?" asked mrs. ripwinkley, naturally. "mrs. scarup. i've been there. there ain't any bottom to it." "well?" mrs. ripwinkley knew that luclarion had more to say, and that she waited for this monosyllable. "she's sick again. and scarup, he's gone out west, spending a hundred dollars to see whether or no there's a chance anywhere for a _smart_ man,--and that ain't he, so it's a double waste,--to make fifty. no girl; and the children all under foot, and pinkie looking miserable over the dishes." "pinkie isn't strong." "no. she's powerful weak. i just wish you'd seen that dirty settin'-room fire-place; looks as if it hadn't been touched since scarup smoked his pipe there, the night before he went off a wild-gandering. and clo'es to be ironed, and the girl cleared out, because 'she'd always been used to fust-class families.' there wasn't anything to your hand, and you couldn't tell where to begin, unless you began with a cataplasm!" luclarion had heard, by chance, of a cataclysm, and that was what she meant. "it wants--creation, over again! mrs. scarup hadn't any fit breakfast; there was burnt toast, made out of tough bread, that she'd been trying to eat; and a cup of tea, half drunk; something the matter with that, i presume. i'd have made her some gruel, if there'd been a fire; and if there'd been any kindlings, i'd have made her a fire; but there 'twas; there wasn't any bottom to it!" "you had better make the gruel here, luclarion." "that's what i come back for. but--mrs. ripwinkley!" "well?" "don't it appear to you it's a kind of a stump? i don't want to do it just for the satisfaction; though it _would_ be a satisfaction to plough everything up thorough, and then rake it over smooth; what do you think?" "what have you thought, luclarion? something, of course." "she wants a real smart girl--for two dollars a week. she can't get her, because she ain't. and i kind of felt as though i should like to put in. seemed to me it was a--but there! i haven't any right to stump _you_." "wouldn't it be rather an aggravation? i don't suppose you would mean to stay altogether?" "not unless--but don't go putting it into my head, mrs. ripwinkley. i shall feel as if i _was_. and i don't think it goes quite so far as that, yet. we ain't never stumped to more than one thing at a time. what she wants is to be straightened out. and when things once looked _my_ way, she might get a girl, you see. anyhow, 'twould encourage pinkie, and kind of set her going. pinkie likes things nice; but it's such a hoosac tunnel to undertake, that she just lets it all go, and gets off up-stairs, and sticks a ribbon in her hair. that's all she _can_ do. i s'pose 'twould take a fortnight, maybe?" "take it, luclarion," said mrs. ripwinkley, smiling. luclarion understood the smile. "i s'pose you think it's as good as took. well, perhaps it is--spoke for. but it wasn't me, you know. now what'll you do?" "go into the kitchen and make the pudding." "but then?" "we are not stumped for then, you know." "there was a colored girl here yesterday, from up in garden street, asking if there was any help wanted. i think she came in partially, to look at the flowers; the 'sturtiums _are_ splendid, and i gave her some. she was awfully dressed up,--for colors, i mean; but she looked clean and pleasant, and spoke bright. maybe she'd come, temporary. she seemed taken with things. i know where to find her, and i could go there when i got through with the gruel. mrs. scarup must have that right off." and luclarion hurried away. it was not the first time mrs. ripwinkley had lent luclarion; but miss grapp had not found a kitchen mission in boston heretofore. it was something new to bring the fashion of simple, prompt, neighborly help down intact from the hills, and apply it here to the tangle of city living, that is made up of so many separate and unrecognized struggles. when hazel came home from school, she went all the way up the garden walk, and in at the kitchen door. "that was the way she took it all," she said; "first the flowers, and then luclarion and what they had for dinner, and a drink of water; and then up-stairs, to mother." to-day she encountered in the kitchen a curious and startling apparition of change. a very dusky brown maiden, with a petticoat of flashing purple, and a jacket of crimson, and extremely puzzling hair tied up with knots of corn color, stood in possession over the stove, tending a fricassee, of which hazel recognized at once the preparation and savor as her mother's; while beside her on a cricket, munching cold biscuit and butter with round, large bites of very white little teeth, sat a small girl of five of the same color, gleaming and twinkling as nothing human ever does gleam and twinkle but a little darkie child. "where is luclarion?" asked hazel, standing still in the middle of the floor, in her astonishment. "i don't know. i'm damaris, and this one's little vash. don't go for callin' me dam, now; the boys did that in my last place, an' i left, don' yer see? i ain't goin' to be swore to, anyhow!" and damaris glittered at hazel, with her shining teeth and her quick eyes, full of fun and good humor, and enjoyed her end of the joke extremely. "have you come to _stay_?" asked hazel. "'course. i don' mostly come for to go." "what does it mean, mother?" hazel asked, hurrying up into her mother's room. and then mrs. ripwinkley explained. "but what _is_ she? black or white? she's got straight braids and curls at the back of her head, like everybody's"-"'course," said a voice in the doorway. "an' wool on top,--place where wool ought to grow,--same's everybody, too." damaris had come up, according to orders, to report a certain point in the progress of the fricassee. "they all pulls the wool over they eyes, now-days, an sticks the straight on behind. where's the difference?" mrs. ripwinkley made some haste to rise and move toward the doorway, to go down stairs, turning damaris from her position, and checking further remark. diana and hazel stayed behind, and laughed. "what fun!" they said. it was the beginning of a funny fortnight; but it is not the fun i have paused to tell you of; something more came of it in the home-life of the ripwinkleys; that which they were "waiting to see." damaris wanted a place where she could take her little sister; she was tired of leaving her "shyin' round," she said. and vash, with her round, fuzzy head, her bright eyes, her little flashing teeth, and her polished mahogany skin,--darting up and down the house "on aarons," or for mere play,--dressed in her gay little scarlet flannel shirt-waist, and black and orange striped petticoat,--was like some "splendid, queer little fire-bug," hazel said, and made a surprise and a picture wherever she came. she was "cute," too, as damaris had declared beforehand; she was a little wonder at noticing and remembering, and for all sorts of handiness that a child of five could possibly be put to. hazel dressed rag babies for her, and made her a soap-box baby-house in the corner of the kitchen, and taught her her letters; and began to think that she should hate to have her go when luclarion came back. damaris proved clever and teachable in the kitchen; and had, above all, the rare and admirable disposition to keep things scrupulously as she had found them; so that luclarion, in her afternoon trips home, was comforted greatly to find that while she was "clearing and ploughing" at mrs. scarup's, her own garden of neatness was not being turned into a howling wilderness; and she observed, as is often done so astutely, that "when you _do_ find a neat, capable, colored help, it's as good help as you can have." which you may notice is just as true without the third adjective as with. luclarion herself was having a splendid time. the first thing she did was to announce to mrs. scarup that she was out of her place for two weeks, and would like to come to her at her wages; which mrs. scarup received with some such awed and unbelieving astonishment as she might have done the coming of a legion of angels with gabriel at their head. and when one strong, generous human will, with powers of brain and body under it sufficient to some good work, comes down upon it as luclarion did upon hers, there _is_ what gabriel and his angels stand for, and no less sent of god. the second thing luclarion did was to clean that "settin'-room fire-place," to restore the pleasant brown color of its freestone hearth and jambs, to polish its rusty brasses till they shone like golden images of gods, and to lay an ornamental fire of chips and clean little sticks across the irons. then she took a wet broom and swept the carpet three times, and dusted everything with a damp duster; and then she advised mrs. scarup, whom the gruel had already cheered and strengthened, to be "helped down, and sit there in the easy-chair, for a change, and let her take her room in hand." and no doctor ever prescribed any change with better effect. there are a good many changes that might be made for people, without sending them beyond their own doors. but it isn't the doctors who always know _what_ change, or would dare to prescribe it if they did. mrs. scarup was "helped down," it seemed,--really up, rather,--into a new world. things had begun all over again. it was worth while to get well, and take courage. those brasses shone in her face like morning suns. "well, i do declare to man, miss grapp!" she exclaimed; and breath and expression failed together, and that was all she could say. up-stairs, luclarion swept and rummaged. she found the sheet and towel drawers, and made everything white and clean. she laid fresh napkins over the table and bureau tops, and set the little things--boxes, books, what not,--daintily about on them. she put a clean spread on the bed, and gathered up things for the wash she meant to have, with a recklessness that mrs. scarup herself would never have dared to use, in view of any "help" she ever expected to do it. and then, with pinkie to lend feeble assistance, luclarion turned to in the kitchen. it was a "clear treat," she told mrs. ripwinkley afterward. "things had got to that state of mussiness, that you just began at one end and worked through to the other, and every inch looked new made over after you as you went along." she put the children out into the yard on the planks, and gave them tin pans and clothes-pins to keep house with, and gingerbread for their dinner. she and pinkie had cups of tea, and mrs. scarup had her gruel, and went up to bed again; and that was another new experience, and a third stage in her treatment and recovery. when it came to the cellar, luclarion got the chore-man in; and when all was done, she looked round on the renovated home, and said within herself, "if scarup, now, will only break his neck, or get something to do, and stay away with his pipes and his boots and his contraptions!" and scarup did. he found a chance in some freight-house, and wrote that he had made up his mind to stay out there all winter; and mrs. scarup made little excursions about the house with her returning strength, and every journey was a pleasure-trip, and the only misery was that at the end of the fortnight miss grapp was going away, and then she should be "all back in the swamp again." "no, you won't," said luclarion; "pinkie's waked up, and she's going to take pride, and pick up after the children. she can do that, now; but she couldn't shoulder everything. and you'll have somebody in the kitchen. see if you don't. i've 'most a mind to say i'll stay till you do." luclarion's faith was strong; she knew, she said, that "if she was doing at her end, providence wasn't leaving off at his. things would come round." this was how they did come round. it only wanted a little sorting about. the pieces of the puzzle were all there. hazel ripwinkley settled the first little bit in the right place. she asked her mother one night, if she didn't think they might begin their beehive with a fire-fly? why couldn't they keep little vash? "and then," said diana, in her quiet way, slipping one of the big three-cornered pieces of the puzzle in, "damaris might go to mrs. scarup for her two dollars a week. she is willing to work for that, if she can get vash taken. and this would be all the same, and better." desire was with them when luclarion came in, and heard it settled. "how is it that things always fall right together for you, so? how _came_ damaris to come along?" "you just take hold of something and try," said luclarion. "you'll find there's always a working alongside. put up your sails, and the wind will fill 'em." uncle titus wanted to know "what sort of use a thing like that could be in a house?" he asked it in his very surliest fashion. if they had had any motives of fear or favor, they would have been disconcerted, and begun to think they had made a mistake. but hazel spoke up cheerily,-"why, to wait on people, uncle. she's the nicest little fetch-and-carrier you ever saw!" "humph! who wants to be waited on, here? you girls, with feet and hands of your own? your mother doesn't, i know." "well, to wait _on_, then," says hazel, boldly. "i'm making her a baby-house, and teaching her to read; and diana is knitting scarlet stockings for her, to wear this winter. we like it." "o, if you like it! that's always a reason. i only want to have people give the real one." and uncle titus walked off, so that nobody could tell whether _he_ liked it or not. nobody told him anything about the scarups. but do you suppose he didn't know? uncle titus oldways was as sharp as he was blunt. "i guess i know, mother," said hazel, a little while after this, one day, "how people write stories." "well?" asked her mother, looking up, ready to be amused with hazel's deep discovery. "if they can just begin with one thing, you see, that makes the next one. it can't help it, hardly. just as it does with us. what made me think of it was, that it seemed to me there was another little piece of our beehive story all ready to put on; and if we went and did it,--i wonder if you wouldn't, mother? it fits exactly." "let me see." "that little lame sulie at miss craydocke's home, that we like so much. nobody adopts her away, because she is lame; her legs are no use at all, you know, and she just sits all curled up in that great round chair that mrs. geoffrey gave her, and sews patchwork, and makes paper dolls. and when she drops her scissors, or her thread, somebody has to come and pick it up. she wants waiting on; she just wants a little lightning-bug, like vash, to run round for her all the time. and we don't, you see; and we've got vash! and vash--likes paper dolls." hazel completed the circle of her argument with great triumph. "an extra piece of bread to finish your too much butter," said diana. "yes. doesn't it just make out?" said hazel, abating not a jot of her triumph, and taking things literally, as nobody could do better than she, upon occasion, for all her fancy and intuition. "i wonder what uncle oldways would say to that," said diana. "he'd say 'faugh, faugh!' but he doesn't mean faugh, faugh, half the time. if he does, he doesn't stick to it. mother," she asked rather suddenly, "do you think uncle oldways feels as if we oughtn't to do--other things--with his money?" "what other things?" "why, _these_ others. vash, and sulie, perhaps. wouldn't he like it if we turned his house into a beehive?" "it isn't his house," said mrs. ripwinkley, "he has given it to me." "well,--do you feel 'obligated,' as luclarion says?' "in a certain degree,--yes. i feel bound to consider his comfort and wishes, as far as regards his enjoyment with us, and fulfilling what he reasonably looked for when he brought us here." "would that interfere?" "suppose you ask him, hazel?" "well, i could do that." "hazel wouldn't mind doing anything!" said diana, who, to tell the truth was a little afraid of uncle titus, and who dreaded of all things, being snubbed. "only," said hazel, to whom something else had just occurred, "wouldn't he think--wouldn't it be--_your_ business?" "it is all your plan, hazel. i think he would see that." "and you are willing, if he doesn't care?" "i did not quite say that. it would be a good deal to think of." "then i'll wait till you've thought," said clear-headed little hazel. "but it fits right on. i can see that. and miss craydocke said things would, after we had begun." mrs. ripwinkley took it into her thoughts, and carried it about with her for days, and considered it; asking herself questions. was it going aside in search of an undertaking that did not belong to her? was it bringing home a care, a responsibility, for which they were not fitted,--which might interfere with the things they were meant, and would be called, to do? there was room and opportunity, doubtless, for them to do something; mrs. ripwinkley had felt this; she had not waited for her child to think of it for her; she had only waited, in her new, strange sphere, for circumstances to guide the way, and for the giver of all circumstance to guide her thought. she chose, also, in the things that would affect her children's life and settle duties for them, to let them grow also to those duties, and the perception of them, with her. to this she led them, by all her training and influence; and now that in hazel, her child of quick insight and true instincts, this influence was bearing fruit and quickening to action, she respected her first impulses; she believed in them; they had weight with her, as argument in themselves. these impulses, in young, true souls, freshly responding, are, she knew, as the proof-impressions of god's spirit. yet she would think; that was her duty; she would not do a thing hastily, or unwisely. sulie praile had been a good while, now, at the home. a terrible fall, years ago, had caused a long and painful illness, and resulted in her present helplessness. but above those little idle, powerless limbs, that lay curled under the long, soft skirt she wore, like a baby's robe, were a beauty and a brightness, a quickness of all possible motion, a dexterous use of hands, and a face of gentle peace and sometimes glory, that were like a benediction on the place that she was in; like the very holy ghost in tender form like a dove, resting upon it, and abiding among them who were there. in one way, it would hardly be so much a giving as a taking, to receive her in. yet there was care to assume, the continuance of care to promise or imply; the possibility of conflicting plans in much that might be right and desirable that mrs. ripwinkley should do for her own. exactly what, if anything, it would be right to undertake in this, was matter for careful and anxious reflection. the resources of the home were not very large; there were painful cases pressing their claims continually, as fast as a little place was vacated it could be filled; was wanted, ten times over; and sulie praile had been there a good while. if somebody would only take her, as people were very ready to take--away to happy, simple, comfortable country homes, for mere childhood's sake--the round, rosy, strong, and physically perfect ones! but sulie must be lifted and tended; she must keep somebody at home to look after her; no one could be expected to adopt a child like that. yet hazel ripwinkley thought they could be; thought, in her straightforward, uncounting simplicity, that it was just the natural, obvious, beautiful thing to do, to take her home--into a real home--into pleasant family life; where things would not crowd; where she could be mothered and sistered, as girls ought to be, when there are so many nice places in the world, and not so many people in them as there might be. when there could be so much visiting, and spare rooms kept always in everybody's house, why should not somebody who needed to, just come in and stay? what were the spare places made for? "we might have sulie for this winter," said mrs. ripwinkley, at last. "they would let her come to us for that time; and it would be a change for her, and leave a place for others. then if anything made it impossible for us to do more, we should not have raised an expectation to be disappointed. and if we can and ought to do more, it will be shown us by that time more certainly." she asked miss craydocke about it, when she came home from z---that fall. she had been away a good deal lately; she had been up to z---to two weddings,--leslie goldthwaite's and barbara holabird's. now she was back again, and settled down. miss craydocke thought it a good thing wisely limited. "sulie needs to be with older girls; there is no one in the home to be companion to her; the children are almost all little. a winter here would be a blessing to her!" "but the change again, if she should have to make it?" suggested mrs. ripwinkley. "good things don't turn to bad ones because you can't have them any more. a thing you're not fit for, and never ought to have had, may; but a real good stays by; it overflows all the rest. sulie praile's life could never be so poor again, after a winter here with you, as it might be if she had never had it. if you'd like her, let her come, and don't be a bit afraid. we're only working by inches, any of us; like the camel's-hair embroiderers in china. but it gets put together; and it is beautiful, and large, and whole, somewhere." "miss craydocke always knows," said hazel. nobody said anything again, about uncle titus. a winter's plan need not be referred to him. but hazel, in her own mind, had resolved to find out what was uncle titus's, generally and theoretically; how free they were to be, beyond winter plans and visits of weeks; how much scope they might have with this money and this house, that seemed so ample to their simple wants, and what they might do with it and turn it into, if it came into their heads or hearts or consciences. so one day she went in and sat down by him in the study, after she had accomplished some household errand with rachel froke. other people approached him with more or less of strategy, afraid of the tiger in him; desire ledwith faced him courageously; only hazel came and nestled up beside him, in his very cage, as if he were no wild beast, after all. yet he pretended to growl, even at her, sometimes; it was so funny to see her look up and chirp on after it, like some little bird to whom the language of beasts was no language at all, and passed by on the air as a very big sound, but one that in no wise concerned it. "we've got sulie praile to spend the winter, uncle titus," she said. "who's sulie praile?" "the lame girl, from the home. we wanted somebody for vash to wait on, you know. she sits in a round chair, that twists, like yours; and she's--just like a lily in a vase!" hazel finished her sentence with a simile quite unexpected to herself. there was something in sulie's fair, pale, delicate face, and her upper figure, rising with its own peculiar lithe, easily swayed grace from among the gathered folds of the dress of her favorite dark green color, that reminded--if one thought of it, and hazel turned the feeling of it into a thought at just this moment--of a beautiful white flower, tenderly and commodiously planted. "well, i suppose it's worth while to have a lame girl to sit up in a round chair, and look like a lily in a vase, is it?" "uncle titus, i want to know what you think about some things." "that is just what i want to know myself, sometimes. to find out what one thinks about things, is pretty much the whole finding, isn't it?" "don't be very metaphysical, please, uncle titus. don't turn your eyes round into the back of your head. that isn't what i mean." "what do you mean?" "just plain looking." "o!" "don't you think, when there are places, all nice and ready,--and people that would like the places and haven't got 'em,--that the people ought to be put into the places?" "'the shirtless backs put into the shirts?'" "why, yes, of course. what are shirts made for?" "for some people to have thirty-six, and some not to have any," said mr. oldways. "no," said hazel. "nobody wants thirty-six, all at once. but what i mean is, rooms, and corners, and pleasant windows, and seats at the table; places where people come in visiting, and that are kept saved up. i can't bear an empty box; that is, only for just one pleasant minute, while i'm thinking what i can put into it." "where's your empty box, now?" "our house _was_ rather empty-boxy. uncle titus, do you mind how we fill it up,--because you gave it to us, you know?" "no. so long as you don't crowd yourselves out." "or you, uncle titus. we don't want to crowd you out. does it crowd you any to have sulie and vash there, and to have us 'took up' with them, as luclarion says?" how straight witch hazel went to her point! "your catechism crowds me just a little, child," said uncle titus. "i want to see you go your own way. that is what i gave you the house for. your mother knows that. did she send you here to ask me?" "no. i wanted to know. it was i that wanted to begin a kind of a beehive--like miss craydocke's. would you care if it was turned quite into a beehive, finally?" hazel evidently meant to settle the furthest peradventure, now she had begun. "ask your mother to show you the deed. 'to frances ripwinkley, her heirs and assigns,'--that's you and diana,--'for their use and behoof, forever.' i've no more to do with it." "'use, and behoof,'" said hazel, slowly. and then she turned the leaves of the great worcester that lay upon the study table, and found "behoof." "'profit,--gain,--benefit;' then that's what you meant; that we should make as much more of it as we could. that's what i think, uncle titus. i'm glad you put 'behoof in." "they always put it in, child!" "do they? well, then, they don't always work it out!" and hazel laughed. at that, mr. oldways pulled off his spectacles, looked sharp at hazel with two sharp, brown eyes,--set near together, hazel noticed for the first time, like desire's,--let the keenness turn gradually into a twinkle, suffered the muscles that had held his lips so grim to relax, and laughed too; his peculiar, up-and-down shake of a laugh, in which head and shoulders made the motions, as if he were a bottle, and there were a joke inside of him which was to be well mixed up to be thoroughly enjoyed. "go home to your mother, jade-hopper!" he said, when he had done; "and tell her i'm coming round to-night, to tea, amongst your bumble-bees and your lilies!" xv. with all one's might. let the grapes be ever so sweet, and hang in plenty ever so low, there is always a fair bunch out of reach. mrs. ledwith longed, now, to go to europe. at any rate, she was eager to have her daughters go. but, after just one year, to take what her uncle oldways had given her, in return for her settling herself near him, and _un_settle herself, and go off to the other side of the world! besides, what he had given her would not do it. that was the rub, after all. what was two thousand a year, now-a-days? nothing is anything, now-a-days. and it takes everything to do almost nothing. the ledwiths were just as much pinched now as they were before they ever heard from uncle oldways. people with unlimited powers of expansion always are pinched; it is good for them; one of the saving laws of nature that keeps things decently together. yet, in the pink room of a morning, and in the mellow-tinted drawing-room of an evening, it was getting to be the subject oftenest discussed. it was that to which they directed the combined magnetism of the family will; everything was brought to bear upon it; bridget's going away on monday morning, leaving the clothes in the tubs, the strike-price of coal, and the overcharge of the grocer; florence's music, helena's hopeless distress over french and german; even desire's listlessness and fidgets; most of all mrs. megilp's plans, which were ripening towards this long coveted end. she and glossy really thought they should go this winter. "it is a matter of economy now; everybody's going. the fargo's and the fayerwerses, and the hitherinyons have broken all up, and are going out to stay indefinitely. the fayerwerses have been saving up these four years to get away, there are so many of them, you know; the passage money counts, and the first travelling; but after you _are_ over, and have found a place to settle down in,"--then followed all the usual assertions as to cheap delights and inestimable advantages, and emancipation from all american household ills and miseries. uncle oldways came up once in a while to the house in shubarton place, and made an evening call. he seemed to take apricot-color for granted, when he got there, as much as he did the plain, old, unrelieved brown at mrs. ripwinkley's; he sat quite unconcernedly in the grand easy chair that laura wheeled out for him; indeed, it seemed as if he really, after a manner, indorsed everything by his acceptance without demur of what he found. but then one must sit down on something; and if one is offered a cup of coffee, or anything on a plate, one cannot easily protest against sea-green china. we do, and we have, and we wear, and we say, a great many things, and feel ourselves countenanced and confirmed, somehow,--perhaps excused,--because nobody appears surprised or says anything. but what should they say; and would it be at all proper that they should be surprised? if we only thought of it, and once tried it, we might perhaps find it quite as easy and encouraging, on the same principle, _not_ to have apricot rep and sea-green china. one night mr. oldways was with them when the talk turned eastwardly over the water. there were new names in the paper, of people who had gone out in the _aleppo_, and a list of americans registered at bowles brothers,' among whom were old acquaintance. "i declare, how they all keep turning up there" said mrs. ledwith. "the war doesn't seem to make much difference," said her husband. "to think how lucky the vonderbargens were, to be in paris just at the edge of the siege!" said glossy megilp. "they came back from como just in time; and poor mr. washburne had to fairly hustle them off at last. they were buying silks, and ribbons, and gloves, up to the last minute, for absolutely nothing. mrs. vonderbargen said it seemed a sin to come away and leave anything. i'm sure i don't know how they got them all home; but they did." glossy had been staying lately with the vonderbargens in new york. she stayed everywhere, and picked up everything. "you have been abroad, mrs. scherman?" said mrs. ledwith, inquiringly, to asenath, who happened to be calling, also, with her husband, and was looking at some photographs with desire. "no, ma'am," answered mrs. scherman, very promptly, not having spoken at all before in the discussion. "i do not think i wish to go. the syphon has been working too long." "the syphon?" mrs. ledwith spoke with a capital s in her mind; but was not quite sure whether what mrs. scherman meant might be a line of atlantic steamers or the sea-serpent. "yes, ma'am. the emptying back and forth. there isn't much that is foreign over there, now, nor very much that is native here. the hemispheres have got miserably mixed up. i think when i go 'strange countries for to see,' it will have to be patagonia or independent tartary." uncle oldways turned round with his great chair, so as to face asenath, and laughed one of his thorough fun digesting laughs, his keen eyes half shut with the enjoyment, and sparkling out through their cracks at her. but asenath had resumed her photographs with the sweetest and quietest unconsciousness. mrs. ledwith let her alone after that; and the talk rambled on to the schools in munich, and the miracle plays at oberammergau. "to think of _that_ invasion!" said asenath, in a low tone to desire, "and corrupting _that_ into a show, with a run of regular performances! i do believe they have pulled down the last unprofaned thing now, and trampled over it." "if we go," said mrs. megilp, "we shall join the fayerwerses, and settle down with them quietly in some nice place; and then make excursions. we shall not try to do all europe in three months; we shall choose, and take time. it is the only way really to enjoy or acquire; and the quiet times are so invaluable for the lessons and languages." mrs. megilp made up her little varnishes with the genuine gums of truth and wisdom; she put a beautiful shine even on to her limited opportunities and her enforced frugalities. "mrs. ledwith, you _ought_ to let agatha and florence go too. i would take every care of them; and the expense would be so divided--carriages, and couriers, and everything--that it would be hardly anything." "it is a great opportunity," mrs. ledwith said, and sighed. "but it is different with us from what it is with you. we must still be a family here, with nearly the same expenses. to be sure desire has done with school, and she doesn't care for gay society, and helena is a mere child yet; if it ever could"-and so it went on between the ladies, while mr. oldways and mr. ledwith and frank scherman got into war talk, and bismarck policy, and french poss--no, _im_-possibilities. "i don't think uncle oldways minded much," said mrs. ledwith to agatha, and mrs. megilp, up-stairs, after everybody had gone who was to go. "he never minds anything," said agatha. "i don't know," said mrs. megilp, slowly. "he seemed mightily pleased with what asenath scherman said." "o, she's pretty, and funny; it makes no difference what she says; people are always pleased." "we might dismiss one girl this winter," said mrs. ledwith, "and board in some cheap country place next summer. i dare say we could save it in the year's round; the difference, i mean. when you weren't actually travelling, it wouldn't cost more than to have you here,--dress and all. "they wouldn't need to have a new thing," said glossy. "those people out at z---want to buy the house. i've a great mind to coax grant to sell, and take a slice right out, and send them," said mrs. ledwith, eagerly. she was always eager to accomplish the next new thing for her children; and, to say the truth, did not much consider herself. and so far as they had ever been able, the ledwiths had always been rather easily given to "taking the slice right out." the megilps had had a little legacy of two or three thousand dollars, and were quite in earnest in their plans, this time, which had been talk with them for many years. "those poor fayerwerses!" said asenath to her husband, walking home. "going out now, after the cheap european living of a dozen years ago! the ghost always goes over on the last load. i wonder at mrs. megilp. she generally knows better." "she'll do," said frank scherman. "if the fayerwerses stick anywhere, as they probably will, she'll hitch on to the fargo's, and turn up at jerusalem. and then there are to be the ledwiths, and their 'little slice.'" "o, dear! what a mess people do make of living!" said asenath. uncle titus trudged along down dorset street with his stick under his arm. "try 'em! find 'em out!" he repeated to himself. "that's what marmaduke said. try 'em with this,--try 'em with that; a good deal, or a little; having and losing, and wanting. that's what the lord does with us all; and i begin to see he has a job of it!" the house was sold, and agatha and florence went. it made home dull for poor desire, little as she found of real companionship with her elder sisters. but then she was always looking for it, and that was something. husbands and wives, parents and children, live on upon that, through years of repeated disappointments, and never give up the expectation of that which is somewhere, and which these relations represent to them, through all their frustrated lives. that is just why. it _is_ somewhere. it turned out a hard winter, in many ways, for desire ledwith. she hated gay company, and the quiet little circle that she had become fond of at her aunt ripwinkley's was broken somewhat to them all, and more to desire than, among what had grown to be her chronic discontents, she realized or understood, by the going away for a time of kenneth kincaid. what was curious in the happening, too, he had gone up to "and" to build a church. that had come about through the marchbankses' knowledge of him, and this, you remember, through their being with the geoffreys when the kincaids were first introduced in summit street. the marchbankses and the geoffreys were cousins. a good many boston families are. mr. roger marchbanks owned a good deal of property in and. the neighborhood wanted a church; and he interested himself actively and liberally in behalf of it, and gave the land,--three lots right out of the middle of marchbanks street, that ran down to the river. dorris kept her little room, and was neighborly as heretofore; but she was busy with her music, and had little time but her evenings; and now there was nobody to walk home with desire to shubarton place, if she stayed in aspen street to tea. she came sometimes, and stayed all night; but that was dreary for helena, who never remembered to shut the piano or cover up the canary, or give the plants in the bay window their evening sprinkle, after the furnace heat had been drying them all day. kenneth kincaid came down for his sundays with dorris, and his work at the mission; a few times he called in at uncle oldways' after tea, when the family was all together; but they saw him very seldom; he gave those sunday evenings mostly to needed rest, and to quiet talk with dorris. desire might have gone to the mission this winter, easily enough, after all. agatha and florence and glossy megilp were not by to make wondering eyes, or smile significant smiles; but there was something in herself that prevented; she knew that it would be more than half to _get_, and she still thought she had so little to give! besides, kenneth kincaid had never asked her again, and she could not go to him and say she would come. desire ledwith began to have serious question of what life was ever going to be for her. she imagined, as in our early years and our first gray days we are all apt to imagine, that she had found out a good deal that it was _not_ going to be. she was not going to be beautiful, or accomplished, or even, she was afraid, agreeable; she found that such hard work with most people. she was not ever--and that conclusion rested closely upon these foregoing--to be married, and have a nice husband and a pretty house, and go down stairs and make snow-puddings and ginger-snaps of a morning, and have girls staying with her, and pleasant people in to tea; like asenath scherman. she couldn't write a book,--that, perhaps, was one of her premature decisions, since nobody knows till they try, and the books are lying all round, in leaves, waiting only to be picked up and put together,--or paint a picture; she couldn't bear parties, and clothes were a fuss, and she didn't care to go to europe. she thought she should rather like to be an old maid, if she could begin right off, and have a little cottage out of town somewhere, or some cosy rooms in the city. at least, she supposed that was what she had got to be, and if that were settled, she did not see why it might not be begun young, as well as married life. she could not endure waiting, when a thing was to be done. "aunt frances," she said one day, "i wish i had a place of my own. what is the reason i can't? a girl can go in for art, and set up a studio; or she can go to rome, and sculp, and study; she can learn elocution, and read, whether people want to be read to or not; and all that is progress and woman's rights; why can't she set up a _home_?" "because, i suppose, a house is not a home; and the beginning of a home is just what she waits for. meanwhile, if she has a father and a mother, she would not put a slight on _their_ home, or fail of her share of the duty in it." "but nobody would think i failed in my duty if i were going to be married. i'm sure mamma would think i was doing it beautifully. and i never shall be married. why can't i live something out for myself, and have a place of my own? i have got money enough to pay my rent, and i could do sewing in a genteel way, or keep a school for little children. i'd rather--take in back stairs to wash," she exclaimed vehemently, "than wait round for things, and be nothing! and i should like to begin young, while there might be some sort of fun in it. you'd like to come and take tea with me, wouldn't you, aunt frank?" "if it were all right that you should have separate teas of your own." "and if i had waffles. well, i should. i think, just now, there's nothing i should like so much as a little kitchen of my own, and a pie-board, and a biscuit-cutter, and a beautiful baking oven, and a japan tea-pot." "the pretty part. but brooms, and pails, and wash-tubs, and the back stairs?" "i specified back stairs in the first place, of my own accord. i wouldn't shirk. sometimes i think that real good old-fashioned hard work is what i do want. i should like to find the right, honest thing, and do it, aunt frank." she said it earnestly, and there were tears in her eyes. "i believe you would," said mrs. ripwinkley. "but perhaps the right, honest thing, just now, is to wait patiently, with all your might." "now, that's good," said desire, "and cute of you, too, that last piece of a sentence. if you had stopped at '_patiently_,' as people generally do! that's what exasperates; when you want to do something with all your might. it almost seems as if i could, when you put it so." "it is a 'stump,' luclarion would say." "luclarion is a saint and a philosopher. i feel better," said desire. she stayed feeling better all that afternoon; she helped sulie praile cut out little panels from her thick sheet of gray painting-board, and contrived her a small easel with her round lightstand and a book-rest; for sulie was advancing in the fine arts, from painting dollies' paper faces in cheap water colors, to copying bits of flowers and fern and moss, with oils, on gray board; and she was doing it very well, and with exquisite delight. to wait, meant something to wait for; something coming by and by; that was what comforted desire to-day, as she walked home alone in the sharp, short, winter twilight; that, and the being patient with all one's might. to be patient, is to be also strong; this she saw, newly; and desire coveted, most of all, to be strong. something to wait for. "he does not cheat," said desire, low down in her heart, to herself. for the child had faith, though she could not talk about it. something; but very likely not the thing you have seen, or dreamed of; something quite different, it may be, when it comes; and it may come by the way of losing, first, all that you have been able yet, with a vague, whispering hope, to imagine. the things we do not know! the things that are happening,--the things that are coming; rising up in the eastward of our lives below the horizon that we can yet see; it may be a star, it may be a cloud! desire ledwith could not see that out at westover, this cheery winter night, it was one of dear miss pennington's "next thursdays;" she could not see that the young architect, living away over there in the hundred-year-old house on the side of east hill, a boarder with old miss arabel waite, had been found, and appreciated, and drawn into their circle by the haddens and the penningtons and the holabirds and the inglesides; and that rosamond was showing him the pleasant things in their westover life,--her "swan's nest among the reeds," that she had told him of,--that early autumn evening, when they had walked up hanley street together. xvi. swarming. spring came on early, with heavy rains and freshets in many parts of the country. it was a busy time at z----. two things had happened there that were to give kenneth kincaid more work, and would keep him where he was all summer. just before he went to z----, there had been a great fire at west hill. all mr. roger marchbanks's beautiful place was desolate. house, conservatories, stables, lovely little vine-covered rustic buildings, exquisitely tended shrubbery,--all swept over in one night by the red flames, and left lying in blackness and ashes. for the winter, mr. marchbanks had taken his family to boston; now he was planning eagerly to rebuild. kenneth had made sketches; mr. marchbanks liked his ideas; they had talked together from time to time. now, the work was actually in hand, and kenneth was busy with drawings and specifications. down at the river, during the spring floods, a piece of the bridge had been carried away, and the dam was broken through. there were new mill buildings, too, going up, and a block of factory houses. all this business, through mr. marchbanks directly or indirectly, fell also into kenneth's hands. he wrote blithe letters to dorris; and dorris, running in and out from her little spring cleanings that hazel was helping her with, told all the letters over to the ripwinkleys. "he says i must come up there in my summer vacation and board with his dear old miss waite. think of kentie's being able to give me such a treat as that! a lane, with ferns and birches, and the woods,--_pine_ woods!--and a hill where raspberries grow, and the river!" mrs. ledwith was thinking of her summer plans at this time, also. she remembered the large four-windowed room looking out over the meadow, that mrs. megilp and glossy had at mrs. prendible's, for twelve dollars a week, in and. she could do no better than that, at country boarding, anywhere; and mr. ledwith could sleep at the house in shubarton place, getting his meals down town during the week, and come up and spend his sundays with them. a bedroom, in addition, for six dollars more, would be all they would want. the ripwinkleys were going up to homesworth by and by for a little while, and would take sulie praile with them. sulie was ecstatically happy. she had never been out of the city in all her life. she felt, she said, "as if she was going to heaven without dying." vash was to be left at mrs. scarup's with her sister. miss craydocke would be away at the mountains; all the little life that had gathered together in the aspen street neighborhood, seemed about to be broken up. uncle titus oldways never went out of town, unless on business. rachel froke stayed, and kept his house; she sat in the gray room, and thought over the summers she had had. "thee never loses anything out of thy life that has been in," she said. "summer times are like grains of musk; they keep their smell always, and flavor the shut-up places they are put away in." for you and me, reader, we are to go to z---again. i hope you like it. but before that, i must tell you what luclarion grapp has done. partly from the principle of her life, and partly from the spirit of things which she would have caught at any rate, from the ripwinkley home and the craydocke "beehive,"--for there is nothing truer than that the kingdom of heaven is like leaven,--i suppose she had been secretly thinking for a good while, that she was having too easy a time here, in her first floor kitchen and her garden bedroom; that this was not the life meant for her to live right on, without scruple or question; and so began in her own mind to expect some sort of "stump;" and even to look about for it. "it isn't as it was when mrs. ripwinkley was a widow, and poor,--that is, comparative; and it took all her and my contrivance to look after the place and keep things going, and paying, up in homesworth; there was something to buckle to, then; but now, everything is eased and flatted out, as it were; it makes me res'less, like a child put to bed in the daytime." luclarion went down to the north end with miss craydocke, on errands of mercy; she went in to the new mission, and saw the heavenly beauty of its intent, and kindled up in her soul at it; and she came home, time after time, and had thoughts of her own about these things, and the work in the world there was to do. she had cleaned up and set things going at mrs. scarup's; she learned something in doing that, beyond what she knew when she set about it; her thoughts began to shape themselves to a theory; and the theory took to itself a text and a confirmation and a command. "go down and be a neighbor to them that have fallen among thieves." luclarion came to a resolution in this time of may, when everybody was making plans and the spring-cleaning was all done. she came to mrs. ripwinkley one morning, when she was folding away winter clothes, and pinning them up in newspapers, with camphor-gum; and she said to her, without a bit of preface,--luclarion hated prefaces,-"mrs. ripwinkley, i'm going to swarm!" mrs. ripwinkley looked up in utter surprise; what else could she do? "of course 'm, when you set up a beehive, you must have expected it; it's the natural way of things; they ain't good for much unless they do. i've thought it all over; i'll stay and see you all off, first, if you want me to, and then--i'll swarm." "well," said mrs. ripwinkley, assenting in full faith, beforehand; for mrs. ripwinkley, if i need now to tell you of it, was not an ordinary woman, and did not take things in an ordinary selfish way, but grasped right hold of the inward right and truth of them, and believed in it; sometimes before she could quite see it; and she never had any doubt of luclarion grapp. "well! and now tell me all about it." "you see," said luclarion, sitting down in a chair by the window, as mrs. ripwinkley suspended her occupation and took one by the bedside, "there's places in this town that folks leave and give up. as the lord might have left and give up the world, because there was dirt and wickedness in it; only he didn't. there's places where it ain't genteel, nor yet respectable, to live; and so those places grow more disrespectable and miserable every day. they're left to themselves. what i think is, they hadn't ought to be. there's one clean spot down there now, in the very middle of the worst dirt. and it ain't bad to live in. _that's_ started. now, what i think is, that somebody ought to start another, even if its only a little one. somebody ought to just go there and _live_, and show 'em how, just as i took and showed mrs. scarup, and she's been living ever since, instead of scratching along. if some of them folks had a clean, decent neighbor to go to see,--to drink tea with, say,--and was to catch an idea of her fixings and doings, why, i believe there'd be more of 'em,--cleaned up, you know. they'd get some kind of an ambition and a hope. tain't enough for ladies--though i bless 'em in my soul for what i've seen 'em do--to come down there of a fridays, and teach and talk awhile, and then go home to summit street and republic avenue, and take up _their_ life again where they left it off, that is just as different as heaven is from 'tother place; somebody's got to come right down _out_ of heaven, and bring the life in, and live it amongst them miserable folks, as the lord jesus christ came and did! and it's borne in upon me, strong and clear, that that's what's got to be before all's righted. and so--for a little piece of it, and a little individual stump--i'm going to swarm, and settle, and see what'll come." mrs. ripwinkley was looking very intently at luclarion. her breath went and came hurriedly, and her face turned pale with the grand surprise of such a thought, such a plan and purpose, so simply and suddenly declared. her eyes were large and moist with feeling. "do you _know_, luclarion," she exclaimed at last, "do you realize what this is that you are thinking of; what a step it would be to take,--what a work it would be to even hope to begin to do? do you know how strange it is,--how almost impracticable,--that it is not even safe?" "'twasn't _safe_ for him--when he came into the world," luclarion answered. "not to say i think there's any comparison," she began again, presently, "or that i believe there's anything to be really scared of,--except dirt; and you _can_ clean a place round you, as them mission people have done. why, there ain't a house in boston nicer, or sweeter, or airier even, than that one down in arctic street, with beautiful parlors and bedrooms, and great clean galleries leading round, and skylighted,--_sky_ lighted! for you see the blue heaven is above all, and you _can_ let the skylight in, without any corruption coming in with it; and if twenty people can do that much, or a hundred,--one can do something. 'taint much, either, to undertake; only to be willing to go there, and make a clean place for yourself, and a home; and live there, instead of somewheres else that's ready made; and let it spread. and you know i've always looked forrud to some kind of a house-keep of my own, finally." "but, luclarion, i don't understand! all alone? and you couldn't use a whole house, you know. your neighbors would be _inmates_. why, it seems to me perfectly crazy!" "now, ma'am, did you ever know me to go off on a tangent, without some sort of a string to hold on to? i ain't goin' to swarm all alone! i never heard of such a thing. though if i couldn't _swarm_, and the thing was to be done, i say i'd try it. but savira golding is going to be married to sam gallilee, next month; and he's a stevedore, and his work is down round the wharves; he's class-leader in our church, and a first-rate, right-minded man, or else savira wouldn't have him; for if savira ain't a clear christian, and a doing woman, there ain't one this side of paradise. now, you see, sam gallilee makes money; he runs a gang of three hundred men. he can afford a good house, and a whole one, if he wants; but he's going in for a big one, and neighbors. they mean to live nice,--he and savira; and she has pretty, tasty ways; there'll be white curtains, and plants blooming in her windows, you may make sure; she's always had 'em in that little up-stairs dress-making room of hers; and boxes of mignonette and petunias on the ledges; and birds singing in a great summer cage swung out against the wall. she's one of the kind that reaches out, and can't be kept in; and she knows her gifts, and is willing to go and let her light shine where it will help others, and so glorify; and sam, he's willing too, and sees the beauty of it. and so,--well, that's the swarm." "and the 'little round godamighty in the middle of it,'" said mrs. ripwinkley, her face all bright and her eyes full of tears. "_ma'am_!" then mrs. ripwinkley told her miss craydocke's story. "well," said luclarion, "there's something dear and right-to-the-spot about it; but it does sound singular; and it certainly ain't a thing to say careless." * * * * * desire ledwith grew bright and excited as the summer came on, and the time drew near for going to z----. she could not help being glad; she did not stop to ask why; summer-time was reason enough, and after the weariness of the winter, the thought of z---and the woods and the river, and sweet evenings and mornings, and gardens and orchards, and road-side grass, was lovely to her. "it is so pleasant up there!" she would keep saying to dorris; and somehow she said it to dorris oftener than to anybody else. there was something fitful and impetuous in her little outbursts of satisfaction; they noticed it in her; the elder ones among them noticed it with a touch of anxiety for her. miss craydocke, especially, read the signs, matching them with something that she remembered far back in the life that had closed so peacefully, with white hairs and years of a serene content and patience, over all unrest and disappointment, for herself. she was sorry for this young girl, for whom she thought she saw an unfulfilled dream of living that should go by her like some bright cloud, just near enough to turn into a baptism of tears. she asked desire, one day, if she would not like to go with her, this summer, to the mountains. desire put by the suggestion hastily. "o, no, thank you, miss craydocke, i must stay with mamma and helena. and besides," she added, with the strict, full truth she always demanded of herself, "i _want_ to go to z----." "yes," said miss craydocke. there was something tender, like a shade of pity, in her tone. "but you would enjoy the mountains. they are full of strength and rest. one hardly understands the good the hills do one. david did, looking out into them from jerusalem. 'i will look to the hills, from whence cometh my strength.'" "some time," said desire. "some time i shall need the hills, and--be ready for them. but this summer--i want a good, gay, young time. i don't know why, except that i shall be just eighteen this year, and it seems as if, after that, i was going to be old. and i want to be with people i know. i _can_ be gay in the country; there is something to be gay about. but i can't dress and dance in the city. that is all gas-light and get-up." "i suppose," said miss craydocke, slowly, "that our faces are all set in the way we are to go. even if it is--" she stopped. she was thinking of one whose face had been set to go to jerusalem. her own words had led her to something she had not foreseen when she began. nothing of such suggestion came to desire. she was in one of her rare moods of good cheer. "i suppose so," she said, heedlessly. and then, taking up a thought of her own suddenly,--"miss craydocke! don't you think people almost always live out their names? there's sin scherman; there'll always be a little bit of mischief and original naughtiness in her,--with the harm taken out of it; and there's rosamond holabird,--they couldn't have called her anything better, if they'd waited for her to grow up; and barb _was_ sharp; and our little hazel is witchy and sweet and wild-woodsy; and luclarion,--isn't that shiny and trumpety, and doesn't she do it? and then--there's me. i shall always be stiff and hard and unsatisfied, except in little bits of summer times that won't come often. they might as well have christened me anxiety. i wonder why they didn't." "that would have been very different. there is a nobleness in desire. you will overlive the restless part," said miss craydocke. "was there ever anything restless in your life, miss craydocke? and how long did it take to overlive it? it doesn't seem as if you had ever stubbed your foot against anything; and i'm _always_ stubbing." "my dear, i have stubbed along through fifty-six years; and the years had all three hundred and sixty-five days in them. there were chances,--don't you think so?" "it looks easy to be old after it is done," said desire. "easy and comfortable. but to be eighteen, and to think of having to go on to be fifty-six; i beg your pardon,--but i wish it was over!" and she drew a deep breath, heavy with the days that were to be. "you are not to take it all at once, you know," said miss craydocke. "but i do, every now and then. i can't help it. i am sure it is the name. if they had called me 'hapsie,' like you, i should have gone along jolly, as you do, and not minded. you see you have to _hear_ it all the time; and it tunes you up to its own key. you can't feel like a dolly, or a daisy, when everybody says--de-sire!" "i don't know how i came to be called 'hapsie,'" said miss craydocke. "somebody who liked me took it up, and it seemed to get fitted on. but that wasn't when i was young." "what was it, then?" asked desire, with a movement of interest. "keren-happuch," said miss craydocke, meekly. "my father named me, and he always called me so,--the whole of it. he was a severe, old-testament man, and _his_ name was job." desire was more than half right, after all. there was a good deal of miss craydocke's story hinted in those few words and those two ancient names. "but i turned into 'miss craydocke' pretty soon, and settled down. i suppose it was very natural that i should," said the sweet old maid, serenely. xvii. questions and answers. the evening train came in through the little bend in the edge of the woods, and across the bridge over the pretty rapids, and slid to its stopping-place under the high arches of the other bridge that connected the main street of z---with its continuation through "and." there were lights twinkling in the shops, where they were making change, and weighing out tea and sugar, and measuring calico, although outside it was not yet quite dark. the train was half an hour late; there had been a stoppage at some draw or crossing near the city. mr. prendible was there, to see if his lodgers were come, and to get his evening paper; the platform was full of people. old z---acquaintances, many of them, whom desire and her mother were pleased, and helena excited to see. "there's kenneth kincaid!" she exclaimed, quite loudly, pulling desire's sleeve. "hush!" said desire, twitching away. "how can you, helena?" "he's coming,--he heard me!" cried helena, utterly impenitent. "i should think he might!" and desire walked off a little, to look among the trunks that were being tumbled from the baggage car. she had seen him all the time; he had been speaking to ruth holabird, and helping her up the steps with her parcels. mr. holabird was there with the little westover carryall that they kept now; and kenneth put her in, and then turned round in time to hear helena's exclamation and to come down again. "can i help you? i'm very glad you are come," he said, cordially. well; he might have said it to anybody. again, well; it was enough to say to anybody. why should desire feel cross? he took helena's bag; she had a budget beside; mr. prendible relieved mrs. ledwith; desire held on valiantly to her own things. kenneth walked over the bridge with them, and down the street to mr. prendible's door; there he bade them good-by and left them. it was nice to be in z----; it was very sweet here under the blossoming elms and locusts; it was nice to see kenneth kincaid again, and to think that dorris was coming by and by, and that the lanes were green and full of ferns and vines, and that there was to be a whole long summer; but there were so many people down there on the platform,--there was such a muss always; ruth holabird was a dear little thing, but there were always so many ruths about! and there was only one cross, stiff, odd, uncomfortable desire! but the very next night kenneth came down and stayed an hour; there was a new moon glistening through the delicate elm-tips, and they sat out on the piazza and breathed in such an air as they had not had in their nostrils for months and months. the faint, tender light from the golden west in which the new moon lay, showed the roof and tower of the little church, kenneth's first beautiful work; and kenneth told them how pleasant it was up at miss arabel's, and of the tame squirrels that he fed at his window, and of the shady pasture-path that led away over the brook from the very door, and up among pines and into little still nooks where dry mossy turf and warm gray rocks were sheltered in by scraggy cedars and lisping birches, so that they were like field-parlors opening in and out from each other with all sorts of little winding and climbing passages, between clumps of bayberry bushes and tall ferns; and that the girls from z---and westover made morning picnics there, since lucilla waters had grown intimate with delia waite and found it out; and that delia waite and even miss arabel carried their dressmaking down there sometimes in a big white basket, and stayed all day under the trees. they had never used to do this; they had stayed in the old back sitting room with all the litter round, and never thought of it till those girls had come and showed them how. "i think there is the best and sweetest neighborliness and most beautiful living here in z----, that i ever knew in any place," said kenneth kincaid; "except that little piece of the same thing in aspen street." kenneth had found out how rosamond holabird recognized aspen street as a piece of her world. desire hated, as he spoke, her spitefulness last night; what she had said to herself of "so many ruths;" why could not she not be pleased to come into this beautiful living and make a little part of it? she was pleased; she would be; she found it very easy when kenneth said to her in that frank intimate way,--"i wish you and your mother would come over and see what dorris will want, and help me a little about that room of hers. i told miss waite not to bother; just to let the old things stand,--i knew dorris would like them,--and anything else i would get for her myself. i mean dolly shall take a long vacation this year; from june right through to september; and its 'no end of jolly,' as those english fellows say, that you have come too!" kenneth kincaid was fresher and pleasanter and younger himself, than desire had ever seen him before; he seemed to have forgotten that hard way of looking at the world; he had found something so undeniably good in it. i am afraid desire had rather liked him for his carping, which was what he least of all deserved to be liked for. it showed how high and pure his demands were; but his praise and admissions were better; it is always better to discern good than to fret at the evil. "i shall see you every day," he said, when he shook hands at parting; "and helena, if you want a squirrel to keep in your pocket next winter, i'll begin training one for you at once." he had taken them right to himself, as if they belonged to him; he spoke as if he were very glad that he should see them every day. desire whistled over her unpacking; she could not sing, but she could whistle like a blackbird. when her father came up on saturday night, he said that her eyes were brighter and her cheeks were rounder, for the country air; she would take to growing pretty instead of strong-minded, if she didn't look out. kenneth came round on monday, after tea, to ask them to go over to miss waite's and make acquaintance. "for you see," he said, "you will have to be very intimate there, and it is time to begin. it will take one call to be introduced, and another, at least, to get up-stairs and see that beautiful breezy old room that can't be lived in in winter, but is to be a delicious sort of camping-out for dolly, all summer. it is all windows and squirrel-holes and doors that won't shut. everything comes in but the rain; but the roof is tight on that corner. even the woodbine has got tossed in through a broken upper pane, and i wouldn't have it mended on any account. there are swallows' nests in the chimneys, and wrens under the gable, and humming-birds in the honeysuckle. when dolly gets there, it will be perfect. it just wants her to take it all right into her heart and make one piece of it. _they_ don't know,--the birds and the squirrels,--it takes the human. there has to be an adam in every garden of eden." kenneth really chattered, from pure content and delight. it did not take two visits to get up-stairs. miss arabel met them heartily. she had been a shy, timid old lady, from long neglect and humble living; but lately she had "come out in society," delia said. society had come after her, and convinced her that she could make good times for it. she brought out currant wine and gave them, the first thing; and when kenneth told her that they were his and dorris's friends, and were coming next week to see about getting ready for her, she took them right round through all four of the ground rooms, to the queer corner staircase, and up into the "long west chamber," to show them what a rackety old place it was, and to see whether they supposed it could be made fit. "why it's like the romance of the forest!" said helena, delighted. "i wish _we_ had come here. don't you have ghosts, or robbers, or something, up and down those stairs, miss waite?" for she had spied a door that led directly out of the room, from beside the chimney, up into the rambling old garret, smelling of pine boards and penny-royal. "no; nothing but squirrels and bees, and sometimes a bat," answered miss arabel. "well, it doesn't want fixing. if you fix it, you will spoil it. i shall come here and sleep with dorris,--see if i don't." the floor was bare, painted a dark, marbled gray. in the middle was a great braided rug, of blue and scarlet and black. the walls were pale gray, with a queer, stencilled scroll-and-dash border of vermilion and black paint. there was an old, high bedstead, with carved frame and posts, bare of drapery; an antiquated chest of drawers; and a half-circular table with tall, plain, narrow legs, between two of the windows. there was a corner cupboard, and a cupboard over the chimney. the doors of these, and the high wainscot around the room, were stained in old-fashioned "imitation mahogany," very streaky and red. the wainscot was so heavily finished that the edge running around the room might answer for a shelf. "just curtains, and toilet covers, and a little low rocking chair," said mrs. ledwith. "that is all you want." "but the windows are so high," suggested desire. "a low chair would bury her up, away from all the pleasantness. i'll tell you what i would have, mr. kincaid. a kind of dais, right across that corner, to take in two windows; with a carpet on it, and a chair, and a little table." "just the thing!" said kenneth. "that is what i wanted you for, miss desire," he said in a pleased, gentle way, lowering his tone to her especial hearing, as he stood beside her in the window. and desire was very happy to have thought of it. helena was spurred by emulation to suggest something. "i'd have a--hammock--somewhere," she said. "good," said kenneth. "that shall be out under the great butternut." the great butternut walled in one of the windows with a wilderness of green, and the squirrels ran chattering up and down the brown branches, and peeping in all day. in the autumn, when the nuts were ripe, they would be scrambling over the roof, and in under the eaves, to hide their stores in the garret, miss arabel told them. "why doesn't everbody have an old house, and let the squirrels in?" cried helena, in a rapture. in ten days more,--the first week of june,--dorris came. well,--"that let in all the rest," helena said, and desire, may be, thought. "we shan't have it to ourselves any more." the girls could all come down and call on dorris kincaid, and they did. but desire and helena had the first of it; nobody else went right up into her room; nobody else helped her unpack and settle. and she was so delighted with all that they had done for her. the dais was large enough for two or three to sit upon at once, and it was covered with green carpet of a small, mossy pattern, and the window was open into the butternut on one side, and into the honeysuckle on the other, and it was really a bower. "i shall live ten hours in one," said dorris. "and you'll let me come and sleep with you some night, and hear the bats," said helena. the ledwiths made a good link; they had known the kincaids so well; if it had been only dorris, alone, with her brother there, the westover girls might have been shy of coming often. since kenneth had been at miss waite's, they had already grown a little less free of the beautiful woods that they had just found out and begun fairly to enjoy last autumn. but the ledwiths made a strong party; and they lived close by; there were plans continually. since leslie goldthwaite and barbara holabird were married and gone, and the roger marchbankses were burned out, and had been living in the city and travelling, the hobarts and the haddens and ruth and rosamond and pen pennington had kept less to their immediate westover neighborhood than ever; and had come down to lucilla's, and to maddy freeman's, and the inglesides, as often as they had induced them to go up to the hill. maud marchbanks and the hendees were civil and neighborly enough at home, but they did not care to "ramify." so it came to pass that they were left a good deal to themselves. olivia and adelaide, when they came up to westover, to their uncle's, wondered "that papa cared to build again; there really wasn't anything to come for; west hill was entirely changed." so it was; and a very good thing. i came across the other day, reading over mr. kingsley's "two years ago," a true word as to social needs in england, that reminded me of this that the holabirds and the penningtons and the inglesides have been doing, half unconsciously, led on from "next" to next, in z----. mr. kingsley, after describing a miss heale, and others of her class,--the middle class, with no high social opportunities, and with time upon their hands, wasted often in false dreams of life and unsatisfied expectations, "bewildering heart and brain with novels," for want of a nobler companionship, says this: "till in country villages, the ladies who interest themselves about the poor will recollect that the farmers' and tradesmens' daughters are just as much in want of their influence as the charity children and will yield a far richer return for their labor, so long will england be full of miss heales." if a kindly influence and fellowship are the duty of the aristocratic girls of england toward their "next," below, how far more false are american girls to the spirit of their country, and the blessed opportunities of republican sympathies and equalities, when they try to draw invisible lines between themselves and those whose outer station differs by but so little, and whose hearts and minds, under the like culture with their own, crave, just as they do, the best that human intercourse can give. social science has something to do, before--or at least simultaneously with--reaching down to the depths where all the wrongs and blunders and mismanagements of life have precipitated their foul residuum. a master of one of our public schools, speaking of the undue culture of the brain and imagination, in proportion to the opportunities offered socially for living out ideas thus crudely gathered, said that his brightest girls were the ones who in after years, impatient of the little life gave them to satisfy the capacities and demands aroused and developed during the brief period of school life, and fed afterwards by their own ill-judged and ill-regulated reading, were found fallen into lives of vice. have our women, old or young, who make and circumscribe the opportunities of social intercourse and enjoyment, nothing to search out here, and help, as well, or as soon as, to get their names put on committee lists, and manage these public schools themselves, which educate and stimulate up to the point of possible fierce temptation, and then have nothing more that they can do? it was a good thing for desire ledwith to grow intimate, as she did, with rosamond holabird. there were identical points of character between the two. they were both so real. "you don't want to _play_ anything," barbara holabird had said to rosamond once, in some little discussion of social appearances and pretensions. "and that's the beauty of you!" it was the beauty of desire ledwith also; only, with rosamond, her ambitions had clothed themselves with a grace and delicateness that would have their own perfect and thorough as far as it went; and with desire, the same demands of true living had chafed into an impatience with shams and a blunt disregard of and resistance to all conventionalisms. "you are a good deal alike, you two," kenneth kincaid said to them one day, in a talk they all three happened to have together. and he had told rosamond afterward that there was "something grand in desire ledwith; only grand things almost always have to grow with struggles." rosamond had told this again to desire. it was not much wonder that she began to be happier; to have a hidden comfort of feeling that perhaps the "waiting with all her might" was nearly over, and the "by and by" was blossoming for her, though the green leaves of her own shy sternness with herself folded close down about the sweetening place, and she never parted them aside to see where the fragrance came from. * * * * * they were going to have a grand, large, beautiful supper party in the woods. mrs. holabird and mrs. hobart were the matrons, and gave out the invitations. "i don't think i could possibly spend a tuesday afternoon with a little 't,'" said mrs. lewis marchbanks laughing, and tossing down poor, dear, good mrs. hobart's note upon her table. "it is _rather_ more than is to be expected!" "doctor and mrs. hautayne are here, and dakie thayne is home from west point. it will be rather a nice party." "the holabirds seem to have got everything into their own hands," said mrs. marchbanks, haughtily. "it is always a pity when people take the lead who are not exactly qualified. mrs. holabird _will_ not discriminate!' "i think the holabirds are splendid," spoke up lily, "and i don't think there's any fun in sticking up by ourselves! i can't bear to be judicious!" poor little lily marchbanks had been told a tiresome many times that she must be "judicious" in her intimacies. "you can be _pleasant_ to everybody," said mother and elder sister, with a salvo of christian benignity. but it is so hard for little children to be pleasant with fence and limitation. "where must i stop?" lily had asked in her simplicity. "when they give me a piece of their luncheon, or when they walk home from school, or when they say they will come in a little while?" but there came a message back from boston by the eleven o'clock train on the morning of the tuesday with a little "t," from mr. marchbanks himself, to say that his brother and mr. geoffrey would come up with him to dinner, and to desire that carriages might be ready afterward for the drive over to waite's grove. mrs. marchbanks marveled, but gave her orders. arthur came out early, and brought with him his friend archie mucklegrand, and these two were bound also for the merry-making. now archie mucklegrand was the identical youth of the lavender pantaloons and the waxed moustache, whom desire, as "miss ledwith," had received in state a year and a half ago. so it was an imposing cavalcade, after all, from west hill, that honored the very indiscriminate pleasure party, and came riding and driving in at about six o'clock. there were the barouche and the coupã©; for the ladies and elder gentlemen, and the two young men accompanied them on horseback. archie mucklegrand had been at west hill often before. he and arthur had just graduated at harvard, and the holabirds had had cards to their grand spread on class day. archie mucklegrand had found out what a pretty girl--and a good deal more than merely pretty--rosamond holabird was; and although he might any day go over to his big, wild highland estate, and take upon himself the glory of "sir archibald" there among the hills and moors,--and though any one of a good many pretty girls in spreadsplendid park and republic avenue might be induced, perhaps, if he tried, to go with him,--all this did not hinder him from perceiving that up here in z---was just the most bewitching companionship he had ever fallen in with, or might ever be able to choose for himself for any going or abiding; that rosamond holabird was just the brightest, and sweetest, and most to his mind of any girl that he had ever seen, and most like "the woman" that a man might dream of. i do not know that he quite said it all to himself in precisely that way; i am pretty sure that he did not, as yet; but whatever is off-hand and young-mannish and modern enough to express to one's self without "sposhiness" an admiration and a preference like that, he undoubtedly did say. at any rate after his christmas at z---with arthur, and some charade parties they had then at westover, and after class day, when everybody had been furious to get an introduction, and all the spreadsplendid girls and their mothers had been wondering who that miss holabird was and where she came from, and madam mucklegrand herself--not having the slightest recollection of her as the miss holabird of that early-morning business call, whose name she had just glanced at and dropped into an indian china scrap-jar before she went down-stairs--had asked him the same questions, and pronounced that she was "an exceedingly graceful little person, certainly,"--after all this, archie had made up his--mind, shall i say? at least his inclination, and his moustache--to pursue the acquaintance, and be as irresistible as he could. but rosamond had learned--things do so play into our lives in a benign order--just before that christmas time and those charades, in one of which archie mucklegrand had sung to her, so expressively, the "birks of aberfeldy,"--that spreadsplendid park was not, at least his corner of it,--a "piece of her world;" and she did not believe that aberfeldy would be, either, though archie's voice was beautiful, and- "bonnie lassie, will ye go?" sounded very enticing--in a charade. so she was quite calm when the marchbanks party came upon the ground, and archie mucklegrand, with white trousers and a lavender tie, and the trim, waxed moustache, looking very handsome in spite of his dapperness, found her out in the first two minutes, and attached himself to her forthwith in a most undetachable and determined manner, which was his way of being irresistible. they were in the midst of their tea and coffee when the west hill party came. miss arabel was busy at the coffee-table between the two oaks, pouring out with all her might, and creaming the fragrant cups with a rich lavishness that seemed to speak of milky mothers without number or limit of supply; and rosamond, as the most natural and hospitable thing to do, conducted the young gentleman as soon as she could to that lady, and commended him to her good offices. these were not to be resisted; and as soon as he was occupied, rosamond turned to attend to others coming up; and the groups shifting, she found herself presently a little way off, and meanwhile mrs. marchbanks and her son had reached the table and joined archie. "i say, arthur! o, mrs. marchbanks! you never got such coffee as this, i do believe! the open air has done something to it, or else the cream comes from some supernal cows! miss holabird!" rosamond turned round. "i don't see,--mrs. marchbanks ought to have some of this coffee, but where is your good woman gone?" for miss arabel had stepped round behind the oak-tree for a moment, to see about some replenishing. in her prim, plain dress, utterly innocent of style or _bias_, and her zealous ministry, good miss arabel might easily be taken for some comfortable, superior old servant; but partly from a sudden sense of fun,--mrs. marchbanks standing there in all her elegant dignity,--and partly from a jealous chivalry of friendship, rosamond would not let it pass so. "good woman? hush! she is one of our hostesses, the owner of the ground, and a dear friend of mine. here she is. miss waite, let me introduce mr. archibald mucklegrand. mrs. marchbanks will like some coffee, please." which mrs. marchbanks took with a certain look of amazement, that showed itself subtilely in a slight straightening of the lips and an expansion of the nostrils. she did not _sniff_; she was a great deal too much a lady; she was mrs. marchbanks, but if she had been mrs. higgin, and had felt just so, she would have sniffed. somebody came up close to rosamond on the other side. "that was good," said kenneth kincaid. "thank you for that, miss rosamond." "will you have some more?" asked rosamond, cunningly, pretending to misunderstand, and reaching her hand to take his empty cup. "one mustn't ask for all one would like," said kenneth, relinquishing the cup, and looking straight in her eyes. rosamond's eyes fell; she had no rejoinder ready; it was very well that she had the cup to take care of, and could turn away, for she felt a very foolish color coming up in her face. she made herself very busy among the guests. archie mucklegrand stayed by, and spoke to her every time he found a chance. at last, when people had nearly done eating and drinking, he asked her if she would not show him the path down to the river. "it must be beautiful down there under the slope," he said. she called dorris and desire, then, and oswald megilp, who was with them. he was spending a little time here at the prendibles, with his boat on the river, as he had used to do. when he could take an absolute vacation, he was going away with a pedestrian party, among the mountains. there was not much in poor oswald megilp, but desire and rosamond were kind to him now that his mother was away. as they all walked down the bank among the close evergreens, they met mr. geoffrey and mr. marchbanks, with kenneth kincaid, coming up. kenneth came last, and the two parties passed each other single file, in the narrow pathway. kenneth paused as he came close to rosamond, holding back a bough for her. "i have something very nice to tell you," he whispered, "by and by. but it is a secret, as yet. please don't stay down there very long." nobody heard the whisper but rosamond; if they could have done so, he would not have whispered. archie mucklegrand was walking rather sulkily along before; he had not cared for a party to be made up when he asked rosamond to go down to the river with him. desire and dorris had found some strange blossom among the underbrush, and were stopping for it; and oswald megilp was behind them. for a few seconds, kenneth had rosamond quite to himself. the slight delay had increased the separation between her and archie mucklegrand, for he had kept steadily on in his little huff. "i do not think we shall be long," said rosamond, glancing after him, and looking up, with her eyes bright. she was half merry with mischief, and half glad with a quieter, deeper pleasure, at kenneth's words. he would tell her something in confidence; something that he was glad of; he wanted her to know it while it was yet a secret; she had not the least guess what it could be; but it was very "nice" already. rosamond always did rather like to be told things first; to have her friends confide in and consult with her, and rely upon her sympathy; she did not stop to separate the old feeling which she was quite aware of in herself, from something new that made it especially beautiful that kenneth kincaid should so confide and rely. rosamond was likely to have more told her to-night than she quite dreamed of. "desire!" they heard mrs. ledwith's voice far back among the trees. desire answered. "i want you, dear!" "something about shawls and baskets, i suppose," said desire, turning round, perhaps a little the more readily that kenneth was beside her now, going back also. dorris and oswald megilp, finding there was a move to return, and being behind desire in the pathway, turned also, as people will who have no especial motive for going one way rather than another; and so it happened that after all rosamond and archie mucklegrand walked on down the bank to the river together, by themselves. archie's good humor returned quickly. "i am glad they are gone; it was such a fuss having so many," he said. "we shall have to go back directly; they are beginning to break up," said rosamond. and then, coming out to the opening by the water, she began to talk rather fast about the prettiness of the view, and to point out the bridge, and the mills, and the shadow of east hill upon the water, and the curve of the opposite shore, and the dip of the shrubs and their arched reflections. she seemed quite determined to have all the talk to herself. archie mucklegrand played with his stick, and twisted the end of his moustache. men never ought to allow themselves to learn that trick. it always comes back upon them when it makes them look most foolish. archie said nothing, because there was so much he wanted to say, and he did not know how to begin. he knew his mother and sister would not like it,--as long as they could help it, certainly,--therefore he had suddenly made up his mind that there should be no such interval. he could do as he pleased; was he not sir archibald? and there was his boston grandfather's property, too, of which a large share had been left outright to him; and he had been twenty-one these six months. there was nothing to hinder; and he meant to tell rosamond holabird that he liked her better than any other girl in the world. somebody else would be telling her so, if he didn't; he could see how they all came round her; perhaps it might be that tall, quiet, cheeky looking fellow,--that kincaid. he would be before him, at any rate. so he stood and twisted his moustache, and said nothing,--nothing, i mean, except mere little words of assent and echo to rosamond's chatter about the pretty view. at last,--"you are fond of scenery, miss holabird?" rosamond laughed. "o yes, i suppose i am; but we don't call this scenery. it is just pleasantness,--beauty. i don't think i quite like the word 'scenery.' it seems artificial,--got up for outside effect. and the most beautiful things do not speak from the outside, do they? i never travelled, mr. mucklegrand. i have just lived here, until i have lived _into_ things, or they into me. i rather think it is travelling, skimming about the world in a hurry, that makes people talk about 'scenery.' isn't it?" "i dare say. i don't care for skimming, myself. but i like to go to nice places, and stay long enough to get into them, as you say. i mean to go to scotland next year. i've a place there among the hills and lochs, miss rosamond." "yes. i have heard so. i should think you would wish to go and see it." "i'll tell you what i wish, miss holabird!" he said suddenly, letting go his moustache, and turning round with sufficient manfulness, and facing her. "i suppose there is a more gradual and elegant way of saying it; but i believe straightforward is as good as any. i wish you cared for me as i care for you, and then you would go with me." rosamond was utterly confounded. she had not imagined that it could be hurled at her, this fashion; she thought she could parry and put aside, if she saw anything coming. she was bewildered and breathless with the shock of it; she could only blindly, and in very foolish words, hurl it back. "o, dear, no!" she exclaimed, her face crimson. "i mean--i don't--i couldn't! i beg your pardon, mr. mucklegrand; you are very good; i am very sorry; but i wish you hadn't said so. we had better go back." "no," said archie mucklegrand, "not yet. i've said it now. i said it like a moon calf, but i mean it like a man. won't you--can't you--be my wife, rosamond? i must know that." "no, mr. mucklegrand," answered rosamond, quite steadily now and gently. "i could not be. we were never meant for each other. you will think so yourself next year,--by the time you go to scotland." "i shall never think so." of course he said that; young men always do; they mean it at the moment, and nothing can persuade them otherwise. "i told you i had lived right here, and grown into these things, and they into me," said rosamond, with a sweet slow earnestness, as if she thought out while she explained it; and so she did; for the thought and meaning of her life dawned upon her with a new perception, as she stood at this point and crisis of it in the responsibility of her young womanhood. "and these, and all the things that have influenced me, have given my life its direction; and i can see clearly that it was never meant to be your way. i do not know what it will be; but i know yours is different. it would be wrenching mine to turn it so." "but i would turn mine for you," said archie. "you couldn't. lives _grow_ together. they join beforehand, if they join at all. you like me, perhaps,--just what you see of me; but you do not know me, nor i you. if it--this--were meant, we should." "should what?" "know. be sure." "i am sure of what i told you." "and i thank you very much; but i do not--i never could--belong to you." what made rosamond so wise about knowing and belonging? she could not tell, herself; she had never thought it out before; but she seemed to see it very clearly now. she did not belong to archie mucklegrand, nor he to her; he was mistaken; their lives had no join; to make them join would be a force, a wrenching. archie mucklegrand did not care to have it put on such deep ground. he liked rosamond; he wanted her to like him; then they should be married, of coarse, and go to scotland, and have a good time; but this quiet philosophy cooled him somewhat. as they walked up the bank together, he wondered at himself a little that he did not feel worse about it. if she had been coquettish, or perverse, she might have been all the more bewitching to him. if he had thought she liked somebody else better, he might have been furiously jealous; but "her way of liking a fellow would be a slow kind of a way, after all." that was the gist of his thought about it; and i believe that to many very young men, at the age of waxed moustaches and german dancing, that "slow kind of a way" in a girl is the best possible insurance against any lasting damage that their own enthusiasm might suffer. he had not been contemptible in the offering of his love; his best had come out at that moment; if it does not come out then, somehow,--through face and tone, in some plain earnestness or simple nobleness, if not in fashion of the spoken word as very well it may not,--it must be small best that the man has in him. rosamond's simple saying of the truth, as it looked to her in that moment of sure insight, was the best help she could have given him. truth is always the best help. he did not exactly understand the wherefore, as she understood it; but the truth touched him nevertheless, in the way that he could perceive. they did not "belong" to each other. and riding down in the late train that evening, archie mucklegrand said to himself, drawing a long breath,--"it would have been an awful tough little joke, after all, telling it to the old lady!" "are you too tired to walk home?" kenneth kincaid asked of rosamond, helping her put the baskets in the carriage. dakie thayne had asked ruth the same question five minutes before, and they two had gone on already. are girls ever too tired to walk home after a picnic, when the best of the picnic is going to walk home with them? of course rosamond was not too tired; and mrs. holabird had the carryall quite to herself and her baskets. they took the river road, that was shady all the way, and sweet now with the dropping scents of evening; it was a little longer, too, i think, though that is one of the local questions that have never yet been fully decided. "how far does miss waite's ground run along the river?" asked kenneth, taking rosamond's shawl over his arm. "not far; it only just touches; it runs back and broadens toward the old turnpike. the best of it is in those woods and pastures." "so i thought. and the pastures are pretty much run out." "i suppose so. they are full of that lovely gray crackling moss." "lovely for picnics. don't you think miss waite would like to sell?" "yes, indeed, if she could. that is her dream; what she has been laying up for her old age: to turn the acres into dollars, and build or buy a little cottage, and settle down safe. it is all she has in the world, except her dressmaking." "mr. geoffrey and mr. marchbanks want to buy. they will offer her sixteen thousand dollars. that is the secret,--part of it." "o, mr. kincaid! how glad,--how _sorry_, i can't help being, too! miss waite to be so comfortable! and never to have her dear old woods to picnic in any more! i suppose they want to make streets and build it all up." "not all. i'll tell you. it is a beautiful plan. mr. geoffrey wants to build a street of twenty houses,--ten on a side,--with just a little garden plot for each, and leave the woods behind for a piece of nature for the general good,--a real union park; a place for children to play in, and grown folks to rest and walk and take tea in, if they choose; but for nobody to change or meddle with any further. and these twenty houses to be let to respectable persons of small means, at rents that will give him seven per cent, for his whole outlay. don't you see? young people, and people like miss waite herself, who don't want _much_ house-room, but who want it nice and comfortable, and will keep it so, and who _do_ want a little of god's world-room to grow in, that they can't get in the crowded town streets, where the land is selling by the foot to be all built over with human packing-cases, and where they have to pay as much for being shut up and smothered, as they will out here to live and breathe. that mr. geoffrey is a glorious man, rosamond! he is doing just this same thing in the edges of three or four other towns, buying up the land just before it gets too dear, to save for people who could not save it for themselves. he is providing for a class that nobody seems to have thought of,--the nice, narrow-pursed people, and the young beginners, who get married and take the world in the old-fashioned way." he had no idea he had called her "rosamond," till he saw the color shining up so in her face verifying the name. then it flashed out upon him as he sent his thought back through the last few sentences that he had spoken. "i beg your pardon," he said, suddenly. "but i was so full of this beautiful doing,--and i always think of you so! is there a sin in that?" rosamond colored deeper yet, and kenneth grew more bold. he had spoken it without plan; it had come of itself. "i can't help it now. i shall say it again, unless you tell me not! rosamond! i shall have these houses to build. i am getting ever so much to do. could you begin the world with me, rosamond?" rosamond did not say a word for a full minute. she only walked slowly by his side, her beautiful head inclined gently, shyly; her sweet face all one bloom, as faces never bloom but once. then she turned toward him and put out her hand. "i will begin the world with you," she said. and their world--that was begun for them before they were born--lifted up its veil and showed itself to them, bright in the eternal morning. * * * * * desire ledwith walked home all alone. she left dorris at miss waite's, and helena had teased to stay with her. mrs. ledwith had gone home among the first, taking a seat offered her in mrs. tom friske's carriage to east square; she had a headache, and was tired. desire felt the old, miserable questions coming up, tempting her. why? why was she left out,--forgotten? why was there nothing, very much, in any of this, for her? yet underneath the doubting and accusing, something lived--stayed by--to rebuke it; rose up above it finally, and put it down, though with a thrust that hurt the heart in which the doubt was trampled. wait. wait--with all your might! desire could do nothing very meekly; but she could even _wait_ with all her might. she put her foot down with a will, at every step. "i was put here to be desire ledwith," she said, relentlessly, to herself; "not rosamond holabird, nor even dolly. well, i suppose i can stay put, and _be_! if things would only _let_ me be!" but they will not. things never do, desire. they are coming, now, upon you. hard things,--and all at once. xviii. all at once. there was a monday morning train going down from z----. mr. ledwith and kenneth kincaid were in it, reading the morning papers, seated side by side. it was nearly a week since the picnic, but the engagement of rosamond and kenneth had not transpired. mr. holabird had been away in new york. of course nothing was said beyond mrs. holabird and ruth and dolly kincaid, until his return. but kenneth carried a happy face about with him, in the streets and in the cars and about his work; and his speech was quick and bright with the men he met and had need to speak to. it almost told itself; people might have guessed it, if they had happened, at least to see the _two_ faces in the same day, and if they were alive to sympathetic impressions of other people's pain or joy. there are not many who stop to piece expressions, from pure sympathy, however; they are, for the most part, too busy putting this and that together for themselves. desire would have guessed it in a minute; but she saw little of either in this week. mrs. ledwith was not well, and there was a dress to be made for helena. kenneth kincaid's elder men friends said of him, when they saw him in these days, "that's a fine fellow; he is doing very well." they could read that; he carried it in his eye and in his tone and in his step, and it was true. it was a hot morning; it would be a stifling day in the city. they sat quiet while they could, in the cars, taking the fresh air of the fields and the sea reaches, reading the french news, and saying little. they came almost in to the city terminus, when the train stopped. not at a station. there were people to alight at the last but one; these grew impatient after a few minutes, and got out and walked. the train still waited. mr. ledwith finished a column he was reading, and then looked up, as the conductor came along the passage. "what is the delay?" he asked of him. "freight. got such a lot of it. takes a good while to handle." freight outward bound. a train making up. mr. ledwith turned to his newspaper again. ten minutes went by. kenneth kincaid got up and went out, like many others. they might be kept there half an hour. mr. ledwith had read all his paper, and began to grow impatient. he put his head out at the window, and looked and listened. half the passengers were outside. brake-men were walking up and down. "has he got a flag out there?" says the conductor to one of these. "don't know. can't see. yes, he has; i heard him whistle brakes." just then, their own bell sounded, and men jumped on board. kenneth kincaid came back to his seat. behind, there was a long new york train coming in. mr. ledwith put his head out again, and looked back. all right; there had been a flag; the train had slackened just beyond a curve. but why will people do such things? what is the use of asking? mr. ledwith still looked out; he could not have told you why. a quicker motion; a darkening of the window; a freight car standing upon a siding, close to the switch, as they passed by; a sudden, dull blow, half unheard in the rumble of the train. women, sitting behind, sprang up,--screamed; one dropped, fainting: they had seen a ghastly sight; warm drops of blood flew in upon them; the car was in commotion. kenneth kincaid, with an exclamation of horror, clutched hold of a lifeless body that fell--was thrust--backward beside him; the poor head fractured, shattered, against the fatal window frame. * * * * * the eleven o'clock train came out. people came up the street,--a group of gentlemen, three or four,--toward mr. prendible's house. desire sat in a back window behind the blinds, busy. mrs. ledwith was lying on the bed. steps came in at the house door. there was an exclamation; a hush. mr. prendible's voice, kenneth kincaid's, mr. dimsey's, the minister's. "o! how? "--mrs. prendible's voice, now. "take care!" "where are they?" mrs. ledwith heard. "what is the matter?"--springing up, with a sudden instinct of precognition. desire had not seen or heard till now. she dropped her work. "what is it, mother?" mrs. ledwith was up, upon the floor; in the doorway out in the passage; trembling; seized all over with a horrible dread and vague knowledge. "_tell_ me what it is!" she cried, to those down below. they were all there upon the staircase; mrs. prendible furthest up. "o, mrs. ledwith!" she cried. "_don't_ be frightened! _don't_ take on! take it easy,--do!" desire rushed down among them; past mrs. prendible, past the minister, straight to kenneth kincaid. kenneth took her right in his arms, and carried her into a little room below. "there could have been no pain," he said, tenderly. "it was the accident of a moment. be strong,--be patient, dear!" there had been tender words natural to his lips lately. it was not strange that in his great pity he used them now. "my father!" gasped desire. "yes; your father. it was our father's will." "help me to go to my mother!" she took his hand, half blind, almost reeling. and then they all, somehow, found themselves up-stairs. there were moans of pain; there were words of prayer. we have no right there. it is all told. * * * * * "be strong,--be patient, dear!" it came back, in the midst of the darkness, the misery; it helped her through those days; it made her strong for her mother. it comforted her, she hardly knew how much; but o, how cruel it seemed afterward! they went directly down to boston. mr. ledwith was buried from their own house. it was all over; and now, what should they do? uncle titus came to see them. mrs. ripwinkley came right back from homesworth. dorris kincaid left her summer-time all behind, and came to stay with them a week in shubarton place. mrs. ledwith craved companionship; her elder daughters were away; there were these five weeks to go by until she could hear from them. she would not read their letters that came now, full of chat and travel. poor laura! her family scattered; her dependence gone; her life all broken down in a moment! dorris kincaid did not speak of kenneth and rosamond. how could she bring news of others' gladness into that dim and sorrowful house? luclarion grapp shut up her rooms, left her plants and her birds with mrs. gallilee, and came up to shubarton place in the beginning. there were no servants there; everything was adrift; the terrible blows of life take people between the harness, most unprovided, unawares. it was only for a little while, until they could hear from the girls, and make plans. grant ledwith's income died with him; there was ten thousand dollars, life insurance; that would give them a little more than a sixth part of what his salary had been; and there were the two thousand a year of uncle titus; and the house, on which there was a twelve thousand dollar mortgage. mrs. ledwith had spent her life in cutting and turning and planning; after the first shock was over, even her grief was counterpoised and abated, by the absorption of her thoughts into the old channels. what they should do, how they should live, what they could have; how it should be contrived and arranged. her mind busied itself with all this, and her trouble was veiled,--softened. she had a dozen different visions and schemes, projected into their details of residence, establishment, dress, ordering,--before the letters came, bringing back the first terribleness in the first reception of and response to it, of her elder children. it was so awful to have them away,--on the other side of the world! if they were only once all together again! families ought not to separate. but then, it had been for their good; how could she have imagined? she supposed she should have done the same again, under the same circumstances. and then came mrs. megilp's letter, delayed a mail, as she would have delayed entering the room, if they had been rejoined in their grief, until the family had first been gathered together with their tears and their embraces. then she wrote,--as she would have come in; and her letter, as her visit would have been, was after a few words of tender condolence,--and they were very sweet and tender, for mrs. megilp knew how to lay phrases like illuminating gold-leaf upon her meaning,--eminently practical and friendly, full of judicious, not to say mitigating, suggestions. it was well, she thought, that agatha and florence were with her. they had been spared so much; and perhaps if all this had happened first, they might never have come. as to their return, she thought it would be a pity; "it could not make it really any better for you," she said; "and while your plans are unsettled, the fewer you are, the more easily you will manage. it seems hard to shadow their young lives more than is inevitable; and new scenes and interests are the very best things for them; their year of mourning would be fairly blotted out at home, you know. for yourself, poor friend, of course you cannot care; and desire and helena are not much come forward, but it would be a dead blank and stop to them, so much lost, right out; and i feel as if it were a kind providence for the dear girls that they should be just where they are. we are living quietly, inexpensively; it will cost no more to come home at one time than at another;" etc. there are persons to whom the pastime of life is the whole business of it; sickness and death and misfortune,--to say nothing of cares and duties--are the interruptions, to be got rid of as they may. the next week came more letters; they had got a new idea out there. why should not mrs. ledwith and the others come and join them? they were in munich, now; the schools were splendid; would be just the thing for helena; and "it was time for mamma to have a rest." this thought, among the dozen others, had had its turn in mrs. ledwith's head. to break away, and leave everything, that is the impulse of natures like hers when things go hard and they cannot shape them. only to get off; if she could do that! meanwhile, it was far different with desire. she was suffering with a deeper pain; not with a sharper loss, for she had seen so little of her father; but she looked in and back, and thought of what she _ought_ to miss, and what had never been. she ought to have known her father better; his life ought to have been more to her; was it her fault, or, harder yet, had it been his? this is the sorest thrust of grief; when it is only shock, and pity, and horror, and after these go by, not grief enough! the child wrestled with herself, as she always did, questioning, arraigning. if she could make it all right, in the past, and now; if she could feel that all she had to do was to be tenderly sorry, and to love on through the darkness, she would not mind the dark; it would be only a phase of the life,--the love. but to have lived her life so far, to have had the relations of it, and yet _not_ to have lived it, not to have been real child, real sister, not to be real stricken daughter now, tasting the suffering just as god made it to be tasted,--was she going through all things, even this, in a vain shadow? _would_ not life touch her? she went away back, strangely, and asked whether she had had any business to be born? whether it were a piece of god's truth at all, that she and all of them should be, and call themselves a household,--a home? the depth, the beauty of it were so unfulfilled! what was wrong, and how far back? living in the midst of superficialities; in the noontide of a day of shams; putting her hands forth and grasping, almost everywhere, nothing but thin, hard surface,--she wondered how much of the world was real; how many came into the world where, and as, god meant them to come. what it was to "climb up some other way into the sheepfold," and to be a thief and a robber, even of life! these were strange thoughts. desire ledwith was a strange girl. but into the midst there crept one comfort; there was one glimpse out of the darkness into the daylight. kenneth kincaid came in often to see them,--to inquire; just now he had frequent business in the city; he brought ferns and flowers, that dorris gathered and filled into baskets, fresh and damp with moss. dorris was a dear friend; she dwelt in the life and the brightness; she reached forth and gathered, and turned and ministered again. the ferns and flowers were messages; leaves out of god's living word, that she read, found precious, and sent on; apparitions, they seemed standing forth to sense, and making sweet, true signs from the inner realm of everlasting love and glory. and kenneth,--desire had never lost out of her heart those words,--"be strong,--be patient, dear!" he did not speak to her of himself; he could not demand congratulation from her grief; he let it be until she should somehow learn, and of her own accord, speak to him. so everybody let her alone, poor child, to her hurt. the news of the engagement was no boston news; it was something that had occurred, quietly enough, among a few people away up in z----. of the persons who came in,--the few remaining in town,--nobody happened to know or care. the ripwinkleys did, of course; but mrs. ripwinkley remembered last winter, and things she had read in desire's unconscious, undisguising face, and aware of nothing that could be deepening the mischief now, thinking only of the sufficient burden the poor child had to bear, thought kindly, "better not." meanwhile mrs. ledwith was dwelling more and more upon the european plan. she made up her mind, at last, to ask uncle titus. when all was well, she would not seem to break a compact by going away altogether, so soon, to leave him; but now,--he would see the difference; perhaps advise it. she would like to know what he would advise. after all that had happened,--everything so changed,--half her family abroad,--what could she do? would it not be more prudent to join them, than to set up a home again without them, and keep them out there? and all helena's education to provide for, and everything so cheap and easy there, and so dear and difficult here? "now, tell me, truly, uncle, should you object? should you take it at all hard? i never meant to have left you, after all you have done; but you see i have to break up, now poor grant is gone; we cannot live as we did before, even with what you do; and--for a little while--it is cheaper there; and by and by we can come back and make some other plan. besides, i feel sometimes as if i _must_ go off; as if there weren't anything left here for me." poor woman! poor _girl_, still,--whose life had never truly taken root! "i suppose," said uncle titus, soberly, "that god shines all round. he's on this side as much as he is on that." mrs. ledwith looked up out of her handkerchief, with which at that moment she had covered her eyes. "i never knew uncle titus was pious!" she said to herself. and her astonishment dried her tears. he said nothing more that was pious, however; he simply assured her, then and in conversations afterward, that he should take nothing "hard;" he never expected to bind her, or put her on parole; he chose to come to know his relatives, and he had done so; he had also done what seemed to him right, in return for their meeting him half way; they were welcome to it all, to take it and use it as they best could, and as circumstances and their own judgment dictated. if they went abroad, he should advise them to do it before the winter. these words implied consent, approval. mrs. ledwith went up-stairs after them with a heart so much lightened that she was very nearly cheerful. there would be a good deal to do now, and something to look forward to; the old pulses of activity were quickened. she could live with those faculties that had been always vital in her, as people breathe with one live lung; but trouble and change had wrought in her no deeper or further capacity; had wakened nothing that had never been awake before. the house and furniture were to be sold; they would sail in september. when desire perceived that it was settled, she gave way; she had said little before; her mother had had many plans, and they amused her; she would not worry her with opposition; and besides, she was herself in a secret dream of a hope half understood. it happened that she told it to kenneth kincaid herself; she saw almost every one who came, instead of her mother; mrs. ledwith lived in her own room chiefly. this was the way in which it had come about, that nobody noticed or guessed how it was with desire, and what aspect kenneth's friendship and kindness, in the simple history of those few weeks, might dangerously grow to bear with her. except one person. luclarion grapp, at last, made up her mind. kenneth heard what desire told him, as he heard all she ever had to tell, with a gentle interest; comforted her when she said she could not bear to go, with the suggestion that it might not be for very long; and when she looked up in his face with a kind of strange, pained wonder, and repeated,-"but i cannot _bear_,--i tell you, i cannot _bear_ to go!" he answered,-"one can bear all that is right; and out of it the good will come that we do not know. all times go by. i am sorry--very sorry--that you must go; but there will be the coming back. we must all wait for that." she did not know what she looked for; she did not know what she expected him to mean; she expected nothing; the thought of his preventing it in any way never entered into her head; she knew, if she _had_ thought, how he himself was waiting, working. she only wanted him to _care_. was this caring? much? she could not tell. "we never can come _back_," she said, impetuously. "there will be all the time--everything--between." he almost spoke to her of it, then; he almost told her that the everything might be more, not less; that friendships gathered, multiplied; that there would be one home, he hoped, in which, by and by, she would often be; in which she would always be a dear and welcome comer. but she was so sad, so tried; his lips were held; in his pure, honest kindness, he never dreamt of any harm that his silence might do; it only seemed so selfish to tell her how bright it was with him. so he said, smiling,-"and who knows what the 'everything' may be?" and he took both her hands in his as he said good-by,--for his little stops were of minutes on his way, always,--and held them fast, and looked warmly, hopefully into her face. it was all for her,--to give her hope and courage; but the light of it was partly kindled by his own hope and gladness that lay behind; and how could she know that, or read it right? it was at once too much, and not enough, for her. five minutes after, luclarion grapp went by the parlor door with a pile of freshly ironed linen in her arms, on her way up-stairs. desire lay upon the sofa, her face down upon the pillow; her arms were thrown up, and her hands clasped upon the sofa-arm; her frame shook with sobs. luclarion paused for the time of half a step; then she went on. she said to herself in a whisper, as she went,-"it is a stump; a proper hard one! but there's nobody else; and i have got to tell her!" * * * * * that evening, under some pretense of clean towels, luclarion came up into desire's room. she was sitting alone, by the window, in the dark. luclarion fussed round a little; wiped the marble slab and the basin; set things straight; came over and asked desire if she should not put up the window-bars, and light the gas. "no," said desire. "i like this best." so did luclarion. she had only said it to make time. "desire," she said,--she never put the "miss" on, she had been too familiar all her life with those she was familiar with at all,--"the fact is i've got something to say, and i came up to say it." she drew near--came close,--and laid her great, honest, faithful hand on the back of desire ledwith's chair, put the other behind her own waist, and leaned over her. "you see, i'm a woman, desire, and i know. you needn't mind me, i'm an old maid; that's the way i do know. married folks, even mothers, half the time forget. but old maids never forget. i've had my stumps, and i can see that you've got yourn. but you'd ought to understand; and there's nobody, from one mistake and another, that's going to tell you. it's awful hard; it will be a trouble to you at first,"--and luclarion's strong voice trembled tenderly with the sympathy that her old maid heart had in it, after, and because of, all those years,--"but kenneth kincaid"-"_what_!" cried desire, starting to her feet, with a sudden indignation. "is going to be married to rosamond holabird," said luclarion, very gently. "there! you ought to know, and i have told you." "what makes you suppose that that would be a trouble to me?" blazed desire. "how do you dare"-"i didn't dare; but i had to!" sobbed luclarion, putting her arms right round her. and then desire--as she would have done at any rate, for that blaze was the mere flash of her own shame and pain--broke down with a moan. "all at once! all at once!" she said piteously, and hid her face in luclarion's bosom. and luclarion folded her close; hugged her, the good woman, in her love that was sisterly and motherly and all, because it was the love of an old maid, who had endured, for a young maid upon whom the endurance was just laid,--and said, with the pity of heaven in the words,-"yes. all at once. but the dear lord stands by. take hold of his hand,--and bear with all your might!" xix. inside. "do you think, luclarion," said desire, feebly, as luclarion came to take away her bowl of chicken broth,--"that it is my _duty_ to go with mamma?" "i don't know," said luclarion, standing with the little waiter in her right hand, her elbow poised upon her hip,--"i've thought of that, and i _don't_ know. there's most generally a stump, you see, one way or another, and that settles it, but here there's one both ways. i've kinder lost my road: come to two blazes, and can't tell which. only, it ain't my road, after all. it lays between the lord and you, and i suppose he means it shall. don't you worry; there'll be some sort of a sign, inside or out. that's his business, you've just got to keep still, and get well." desire had asked her mother, before this, if she would care very much,--no, she did not mean that,--if she would be disappointed, or disapprove, that she should stay behind. "stay behind? not go to europe? why, where _could_ you stay? what would you do?" "there would be things to do, and places to stay," desire had answered, constrainedly. "i could do like dorris." "teach music!" "no. i don't know music. but i might teach something i do know. or i could--rip," she said, with an odd smile, remembering something she had said one day so long ago; the day the news came up to z---from uncle oldways. "and i might make out to put together for other people, and for a real business. i never cared to do it just for myself." "it is perfectly absurd," said mrs ledwith. "you couldn't be left to take care of yourself. and if you could, how it would look! no; of course you must go with us." "but do you _care_?" "why, if there were any proper way, and if you really hate so to go,--but there isn't," said mrs. ledwith, not very grammatically or connectedly. "she _doesn't_ care," said desire to herself, after her mother had left her, turning her face to the pillow, upon which two tears ran slowly down. "and that is my fault, too, i suppose. i have never been _anything_!" lying there, she made up her mind to one thing. she would get uncle titus to come, and she would talk to him. "he won't encourage me in any notions," she said to herself. "and i mean now, if i can find it out, to do the thing god means; and then i suppose,--i _believe_,--the snarl will begin to unwind." meanwhile, luclarion, when she had set a nice little bowl of tea-muffins to rise, and had brought up a fresh pitcher of ice-water into desire's room, put on her bonnet and went over to aspen street for an hour. down in the kitchen, at mrs. ripwinkley's, they were having a nice time. their girl had gone. since luclarion left, they had fallen into that gulf-stream which nowadays runs through everybody's kitchen. girls came, and saw, and conquered in their fashion; they muddled up, and went away. the nice times were in the intervals when they _had_ gone away. mrs. ripwinkley did not complain; it was only her end of the "stump;" why should she expect to have a luclarion grapp to serve her all her life? this last girl had gone as soon as she found out that sulie praile was "no relation, and didn't anyways belong there, but had been took in." she "didn't go for to come to work in an _insecution_. she had always been used to first-class private families." girls will not stand any added numbers, voluntarily assumed, or even involuntarily befalling; they will assist in taking up no new responsibilities; to allow things to remain as they are, and cannot help being, is the depth of their condescension,--the extent of what they will put up with. there must be a family of some sort, of course, or there would not be a "place;" that is what the family is made for; but it must be established, no more to fluctuate; that is, you may go away, some of you, if you like, or you may die; but nobody must come home that has been away, and nobody must be born. as to anybody being "took in!" why, the girl defined it; it was not being a family, but an _insecution_. so the three--diana, and hazel, and sulie--were down in the kitchen; mrs. ripwinkley was busy in the dining-room close by; there was a berry-cake to be mixed up for an early tea. diana was picking over the berries, hazel was chopping the butter into the flour, and sulie on a low cushioned seat in a corner--there was one kept ready for her in every room in the house, and hazel and diana carried her about in an "arm-chair," made of their own clasped hands and wrists, wherever they all wanted to go,--sulie was beating eggs. sulie did that so patiently; you see she had no temptation to jump up and run off to anything else. the eggs turned, under her fingers, into thick, creamy, golden froth, fine to the last possible divisibility of the little air-bubbles. they could not do without sulie now. they had had her for "all winter;" but in that winter she had grown into their home. "why," said hazel to her mother, when they had the few words about it that ended in there being no more words at all,--"that's the way children are _born_ into houses, isn't it? they just come; and they're new and strange at first, and seem so queer. and then after a while you can't think how the places were, and they not in them. sulie belongs, mother!" so sulie beat eggs, and darned stockings, and painted her lovely little flower-panels and racks and easels, and did everything that could be done, sitting still in her round chair, or in the cushioned corners made for her; and was always in the kitchen, above all, when any pretty little cookery was going forward. vash ran in and out from the garden, and brought balsamine blossoms, from which she pulled the little fairy slippers, and tried to match them in pairs; and she picked off the "used-up and puckered-up" morning glories, which she blew into at the tube-end, and "snapped" on the back of her little brown hand. wasn't that being good for anything, while berry-cake was making? the girls thought it was; as much as the balsamine blossoms were good for anything, or the brown butterflies with golden spots on their wings, that came and lived among them. the brown butterflies were a "piece of the garden;" little brown vash was a piece of the house. besides, she would eat some of the berry-cake when it was made; wasn't that worth while? she would have a "little teenty one" baked all for herself in a tin pepper-pot cover. isn't that the special pleasantness of making cakes where little children are? vash was always ready for an "aaron," too; they could not do without her, any more than without sulie. pretty soon, when diana should have left school, and vash should be a little bigger, they meant to "coã¶perate," as the holabirds had done at westover. of course, they knew a great deal about the holabirds by this time. hazel had stayed a week with dorris at miss waite's; and one of witch hazel's weeks among "real folks" was like the days or hours in fairy land, that were years on the other side. she found out so much and grew so close to people. hazel and ruth holabird were warm friends. and hazel was to be ruth's bridesmaid, by and by! for ruth holabird was going to be married to dakie thayne. "that seemed so funny," hazel said. "ruth didn't _look_ any older than she did; and mr. dakie thayne was such a nice boy!" he was no less a man, either; he had graduated among the first three at west point; he was looking earnestly for the next thing that he should do in life with his powers and responsibilities; he did not count his marrying a _separate_ thing; that had grown up alongside and with the rest; of course he could do nothing without ruth; that was just what he had told her; and she,--well ruth was always a sensible little thing, and it was just as plain to her as it was to him. of course she must help him think and plan; and when the plans were made, it would take two to carry them out; why, yes, they must be married. what other way would there be? that wasn't what she _said_, but that was the quietly natural and happy way in which it grew to be a recognized thing in her mind, that pleasant summer after he came straight home to them with his honors and his lieutenant's commission in the engineers; and his hearty, affectionate taking-for-granted; and it was no surprise or question with her, only a sure and very beautiful "rightness," when it came openly about. dakie thayne was a man; the beginning of a very noble one; but it is the noblest men that always keep a something of the boy. if you had not seen anything more of dakie thayne until he should be forty years old, you would then see something in him which would be precisely the same that it was at outledge, seven years ago, with leslie goldthwaite, and among the holabirds at westover, in his first furlough from west point. luclarion came into the ripwinkley kitchen just as the cakes--the little pepper-pot one and all--were going triumphantly into the oven, and hazel was baring her little round arms to wash the dishes, while diana tended the pans. mrs. ripwinkley heard her old friend's voice, and came out. "that girl ought to be here with you; or somewheres else than where she is, or is likely to be took," said luclarion, as she looked round and sat down, and untied her bonnet-strings. miss grapp hated bonnet-strings; she never endured them a minute longer than she could help. "desire?" asked mrs. ripwinkley, easily comprehending. "yes; desire. i tell you she has a hard row to hoe, and she wants comforting. she wants to know if it is her duty to go to yourup with her mother. now it may be her duty to be _willing_ to go; but it ain't anybody's else duty to let her. that's what came to me as i was coming along. i couldn't tell _her_ so, you see, because it would interfere with her part; and that's all in the tune as much as any; only we've got to chime in with our parts at the right stroke, the lord being leader. ain't that about it, mrs. ripwinkley?" "if we are sure of the score, and can catch the sign," said mrs. ripwinkley, thoughtfully. "well, i've sung mine; it's only one note; i may have to keep hammering on it; that's according to how many repeats there are to be. mr. oldways, he ought to know, for one. amongst us, we have got to lay our heads together, and work it out. she's a kind of an odd chicken in that brood; and my belief is she's like the ugly duck hazel used to read about. but she ought to have a chance; if she's a swan, she oughtn't to be trapesed off among the weeds and on the dry ground. 'tisn't even ducks she's hatched with; they don't take to the same element." "i'll speak to uncle titus, and i will think," said mrs. ripwinkley. but before she did that, that same afternoon by the six o'clock penny post, a little note went to mr. oldways:- "dear uncle titus,- "i want to talk with you a little. if i were well, i should come to see you in your study. will you come up here, and see me in my room? "yours sincerely, desire ledwith." uncle titus liked that. it counted upon something in him which few had the faith to count upon; which, truly he gave few people reason to expect to find. he put his hat directly on, took up his thick brown stick, and trudged off, up borden street to shubarton place. when luclarion let him in, he told her with some careful emphasis, that he had come to see desire. "ask her if i shall come up," he said. "i'll wait down here." helena was practicing in the drawing-room. mrs. ledwith lay, half asleep, upon a sofa. the doors into the hall were shut,--luclarion had looked to that, lest the playing should disturb desire. luclarion was only gone three minutes. then she came back, and led mr. oldways up three flights of stairs. "it's a long climb, clear from the door," she said. "i can climb," said mr. oldways, curtly. "i didn't expect it was going to stump _you_," said luclarion, just as short in her turn. "but i thought i'd be polite enough to mention it." there came a queer little chuckling wheeze from somewhere, like a whispered imitation of the first few short pants of a steam-engine: that was uncle titus, laughing to himself. luclarion looked down behind her, out of the corner of her eyes, as she turned the landing. uncle titus's head was dropped between his shoulders, and his shoulders were shaking up and down. but he kept his big stick clutched by the middle, in one hand, and the other just touched the rail as he went up. uncle titus was not out of breath. not he. he could laugh and climb. desire was sitting up for a little while, before going to bed again for the night. there was a low gas-light burning by the dressing-table, ready to turn up when the twilight should be gone; and a street lamp, just lighted, shone across into the room. luclarion had been sitting with her, and her gray knitting-work lay upon the chair that she offered when she had picked it up, to mr. oldways. then she went away and left them to their talk. "mrs. ripwinkley has been spry about it," she said to herself, going softly down the stairs. "but she always was spry." "you're getting well, i hope," said uncle titus, seating himself, after he had given desire his hand. "i suppose so," said desire, quietly. "that was why i wanted to see you. i want to know what i ought to do when i am well." "how can i tell?" asked uncle titus, bluntly. "better than anybody i can ask. the rest are all too sympathizing. i am afraid they would tell me as i wish they should." "and i don't sympathize? well, i don't think i do much. i haven't been used to it." "you have been used to think what was right; and i believe you would tell me truly. i want to know whether i ought to go to europe with my mother." "why not? doesn't she want you to go?"--and uncle titus was sharp this time. "i suppose so; that is, i suppose she expects i will. but i don't know that i should be much except a hindrance to her. and i think i could stay and do something here, in some way. uncle titus, i hate the thought of going to europe! now, don't you suppose i ought to go?" "_why_ do you hate the thought of going to europe?" asked uncle titus, regarding her with keenness. "because i have never done anything real in all my life!" broke forth desire. "and this seems only plastering and patching what can't be patched. i want to take hold of something. i don't want to float round any more. what is there left of all we have ever tried to do, all these years? of all my poor father's work, what is there to show for it now? it has all melted away as fast as it came, like snow on pavements; and now his life has melted away; and i feel as if we had never been anything real to each other! uncle titus, i can't tell you _how_ i feel!" uncle titus sat very still. his hat was in one hand, and both together held his cane, planted on the floor between his feet. over hat and cane leaned his gray head, thoughtfully. if desire could have seen his eyes, she would have found in them an expression that she had never supposed could be there at all. she had not so much spoken _to_ uncle titus, in these last words of hers, as she had irresistibly spoken _out_ that which was in her. she wanted uncle titus's good common sense and sense of right to help her decide; but the inward ache and doubt and want, out of which grew her indecisions,--these showed themselves forth at that moment simply because they must, with no expectation of a response from him. it might have been a stone wall that she cried against; she would have cried all the same. then it was over, and she was half ashamed, thinking it was of no use, and he would not understand; perhaps that he would only set the whole down to nerves and fidgets and contrariness, and give her no common sense that she wanted, after all. but uncle titus spoke, slowly; much as if he, too, were speaking out involuntarily, without thought of his auditor. people do so speak, when the deep things are stirred; they speak into the deep that answereth unto itself,--the deep that reacheth through all souls, and all living, whether souls feel into it and know of it or not. "the real things are inside," he said. "the real world is the inside world. _god_ is not up, nor down, but in the _midst_." then he looked up at desire. "what is real of your life is living inside you now. that is something. look at it and see what it is." "discontent. misery. failure." "_sense_ of failure. well. those are good things. the beginning of better. those are _live_ things, at any rate." desire had never thought of that. now _she_ sat still awhile. then she said,--"but we can't _be_ much, without doing it. i suppose we are put into a world of outsides for something." "yes. to find out what it means. that's the inside of it. and to help make the outside agree with the in, so that it will be easier for other people to find out. that is the 'kingdom come and will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' heaven is the inside,--the truth of things." "why, i never knew"--began desire, astonished. she had almost finished aloud, as her mother had done in her own mind. she never knew that uncle oldways was "pious." "never knew that was what it meant? what else can it mean? what do you suppose the resurrection was, or is?" desire answered with a yet larger look of wonder, only in the dim light it could not be wholly seen. "the raising up of the dead; christ coming up out of the tomb." "the coming out of the tomb was a small part of it; just what could not help being, if the rest was. jesus christ rose out of dead _things_, i take it, into these very real ones that we are talking of, and so lived in them. the resurrection is a man's soul coming alive to the soul of creation--god's soul. _that_ is eternal life, and what jesus of nazareth was born to show. our coming to that is our being 'raised with him;' and it begins, or ought to, a long way this side the tomb. if people would only read the new testament, expecting to get as much common sense and earnest there as they do among the new lights and little 'progressive-thinkers' that are trying to find it all out over again, they might spare these gentlemen and themselves a great deal of their trouble." the exclamation rose half-way to her lips again,--"i never knew you thought like this. i never heard you talk of these things before!" but she held it back, because she would not stop him by reminding him that he _was_ talking. it was just the truth that was saying itself. she must let it say on, while it would. "un--" she stopped there, at the first syllable. she would not even call him "uncle titus" again, for fear of recalling him to himself, and hushing him up. "there is something--isn't there--about those who _attain_ to that resurrection; those who are _worthy_? i suppose there must be some who are just born to this world, then, and never--'born again?'" "it looks like it, sometimes; who can tell?" "uncle oldways,"--it came out this time in her earnestness, and her strong personal appeal,--"do you think there are some people--whole families of people--who have no business in the reality of things to be at all? who are all a mistake in the world, and have nothing to do with its meaning? i have got to feeling sometimes lately, as if--_i_--had never had any business to be." she spoke slowly--awe-fully. it was a strange speech for a girl in her nineteenth year. but she was a girl in this nineteenth century, also; and she had caught some of the thoughts and questions of it, and mixed them up with her own doubts and unsatisfactions which they could not answer. "the world is full of mistakes; mistakes centuries long; but it is full of salvation and setting to rights, also. 'the kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.' you have been _allowed_ to be, desire ledwith. and so was the man that was born blind. and i think there is a colon put into the sentence about him, where a comma was meant to be." desire did not ask him, then, what he meant; but she turned to the story after he had gone, and found this:-"neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of god should be manifest in him." you can see, if you look also, where she took the colon out, and put the comma in. were all the mistakes--the sins, even--for the very sake of the pure blessedness and the more perfect knowledge of the setting right? desire began to think that uncle oldways' theology might help her. what she said to him now was,-"i want to do something. i should like to go and live with luclarion, i think, down there in neighbor street. i should like to take hold of some other lives,--little children's, perhaps,"--and here desire's voice softened,--"that don't seem to have any business to be, either, and see if i could help or straighten anything. then i feel is if i should know." "then--according to the scripture--you _would_ know. but--that's undertaking a good deal. luclarion grapp has got there; but she has been fifty-odd years upon the road. and she has been doing real things all the time. that's what has brought her there. you can't boss the world's hard jobs till you've been a journeyman at the easy ones." "and i've missed my apprenticeship!" said desire, with changed voice and face, falling back into her disheartenment again. "no!" uncle oldways almost shouted. "not if you come to the master who takes in the eleventh hour workers. and it isn't the eleventh hour with you,--_child_!" he dwelt on that word "child," reminding her of her short mistaking and of the long retrieval. her nineteen years and the forever and ever contrasted themselves before her suddenly, in the light of hope. she turned sharply, though, to look at her duty. her journeyman's duty of easy things. "must i go to europe with my mother?" she asked again, the conversation coming round to just that with which it had begun. "i'll talk with your mother," said uncle oldways, getting up and looking into his hat, as a man always does when he thinks of putting it on presently. "good-night. i suppose you are tired enough now. i'll come again and see you." desire stood up and gave him her hand. "i thank you, uncle titus, with all my heart." he did not answer her a word; but he knew she meant it. he did not stop that night to see his niece. he went home, to think it over. but as he walked down borden street, swinging his big stick, he said to himself,-"next of kin! old marmaduke wharne was right. but it takes more than the family bible to tell you which it is!" two days after, he had a talk with mrs. ledwith which relieved both their minds. from the brown-and-apricot drawing-room,--from among the things that stood for nothing now, and had never stood for home,--he went straight up, without asking, and knocked at desire's third-story door. "come in!" she said, without a note of expectation in her voice. she had had a dull morning. helena had brought her a novel from loring's that she could not read. novels, any more than life, cannot be read with very much patience, unless they touch something besides surface. why do critics--some of them--make such short, smart work,--such cheerful, confident despatch, nowadays, of a story with religion in it, as if it were an abnormity,--a thing with sentence of death in itself, like a calf born with two heads,--that needs not their trouble, save to name it as it is? why, that is, if religion stand for the relation of things to spirit, which i suppose it should? somebody said that somebody had written a book made up of "spiritual struggles and strawberry short-cake." that was bright and funny; and it seemed to settle the matter; but, taking strawberry short-cake representatively, what else is human experience on earth made up of? and are novels to be pictures of human experience, or not? this has nothing to do with present matters, however, except that desire found nothing real in her novel, and so had flung it aside, and was sitting rather listlessly with her crochet which she never cared much for, when uncle oldways entered. her face brightened instantly as he came in. he sat down just where he had sat the other night. mr. oldways had a fashion of finding the same seat a second time when he had come in once; he was a man who took up most things where he left them off, and this was an unconscious sign of it. "your mother has decided to sell the house on the 23d, it seems," he said. "yes; i have been out twice. i shall be able to go away by then; i suppose that is all she has waited for." "do you think you could be contented to come and live with me?" "come and _live_?" "yes. and let your mother and helena go to europe." "o, uncle oldways! i think i could _rest_ there! but i don't want only to rest, you know. i must do something. for myself, to begin with. i have made up my mind not to depend upon my mother. why should i, any more than a boy? and i am sure i cannot depend on anybody else." these were desire ledwith's thanks; and mr. oldways liked them. she did not say it to please him; she thought it seemed almost ungrateful and unwilling; but she was so intent on taking up life for herself. "you must have a place to do in,--or from," said mr. oldways. "and it is better you should be under some protection. you must consent to that for your mother's sake. how much money have you got?" "two hundred and fifty dollars a year. of my own." this was coming to business and calculation and common sense. desire was encouraged. uncle oldways did not think her quite absurd. "that will clothe you,--without much fuss and feathers?" "i have done with fuss and feathers,"--desire said with a grave smile, glancing at her plain white wrapper and the black shawl that was folded around her. "then come where is room for you and a welcome, and do as much more as you please, and can, for yourself, or for anybody else. i won't give you a cent; you shall have something to do for me, if you choose. i am an old man now, and want help. perhaps what i want as much as anything is what i've been all my life till lately, pretty obstinate in doing without." uncle oldways spoke short, and drew his breath in and puffed it out between his sentences, in his bluff way; but his eyes were kind, as he sat looking at the young girl over his hat and cane. she thought of the still, gray parlor; of rachel froke and her face of peace; and the quaker meeting and the crumbs last year; of uncle oldways' study, and his shelves rich with books; of the new understanding that had begun between herself and him, and the faith she had found out, down beneath his hard reserves; of the beautiful neighborhood, miss craydocke's beehive, aunt franks' cheery home and the ways of it, and hazel's runnings in and out. it seemed as if the real things had opened for her, and a place been made among them in which she should have "business to be," and from which her life might make a new setting forth. "and mamma knows?" she said, inquiringly, after that long pause. "yes. i told you i would talk with her. that is what we came to. it is only for you to say, now." "i will come. i shall be glad to come!" and her face was full of light as she looked up and said it. * * * * * desire never thought for a moment of what her mother could not help thinking of; of what mrs. megilp thought and said, instantly, when she learned it three weeks later. it is wonderful how abiding influence is,--even influence to which we are secretly superior,--if ever we have been subjected to, or allowed ourselves to be swayed by it. the veriest tyranny of discipline grows into one's conscience, until years after, when life has got beyond the tyranny, conscience,--or something superinduced upon it,--keeps up the echo of the old mandates, and one can take no comfort in doing what one knows all the time one has a perfect right, besides sound reason, to do. it was a great while before our grandmothers' daughters could peaceably stitch and overcast a seam, instead of over-sewing and felling it. i know women who feel to this moment as if to sit down and read a book of a week-day, in the daytime, were playing truant to the needle, though all the sewing-machines on the one hand, and all the demand and supply of mental culture on the other, of this present changed and bettered time, protest together against the absurdity. mrs. ledwith had heard the megilp precepts and the megilp forth-putting of things, until involuntarily everything showed itself to her in a megilp light. the megilp "sense of duty," therefore, came up as she unhesitatingly assented to uncle oldways' proposal and request. he wanted desire; of course she could not say a word; she owed him something, which she was glad she could so make up; and secretly there whispered in her mind the suggestion which mrs. megilp, on the other side of the water, spoke right out. "if he wants her, he must mean something by her. he is an old man; he might not live to give her back into her mother's keeping; what would she do there, in that old house of his, if he should die, unless--he _does_ mean something? he has taken a fancy to her; she is odd, as he is; and he isn't so queer after all, but that his crotchets have a good, straightforward sense of justice in them. uncle titus knows what he is about; and what's more, just what he ought to be about. it is a good thing to have desire provided for; she is uncomfortable and full of notions, and she isn't likely ever to be married." so desire was given up, easily, she could not help feeling; but she knew she had been a puzzle and a vexation to her mother, and that mrs. ledwith had never had the least idea what to do with her; least of all had she now, what she should do with her abroad. "it was so much better for her that uncle titus had taken her home." with these last words mrs. ledwith reassured herself and cheered her child. perhaps it would have been the same--it came into desire's head, that would conceive strange things--if the angels had taken her. mrs. ledwith went to new york; she stayed a few days with mrs. macmichael, who wanted her to buy lace for her in brussels and bohemian glass in prague; then a few days more with her cousin, geraldine raxley; and then the _city of antwerp_ sailed. xx. neighbors and next of kin. "i'll tell you what to do with them, luclarion," said hazel briskly. "teach them to play." "music! pianners!" exclaimed luclarion, dismayed. "no. games. teach them to have good times. that was the first thing ever we learnt, wasn't it, dine? and we never could have got along without it." "it takes _you_!" said luclarion, looking at hazel with delighted admiration. "does it? well i don't know but it does. may i go, mother? luclarion, haven't you got a great big empty room up at the top of the house?" luclarion had. "that's just what it's for, then. couldn't mr. gallilee put up a swing? and a 'flying circle' in the middle? you see they can't go out on the roofs; so they must have something else that will seem kind of flighty. and _i'll_ tell you how they'll learn their letters. sulie and i will paint 'em; great big ones, all colors; and hang 'em up with ribbons, and every child that learns one, so as to know it everywhere, shall take it down and carry it home. then we will have marbles for numbers; and they shall play addition games, and multiplication games, and get the sums for prizes; the ones that get to the head, you know. why, you don't understand _objects_, luclarion!" luclarion had been telling them of the wild little folk of neighbor street, and worse, of arctic street. she wanted to do something with them. she had tried to get them in with gingerbread and popcorn; they came in fast enough for those; but they would not stay. they were digging in the gutters and calling names; learning the foul language of the places into which they were born; chasing and hiding in alley-ways; filching, if they could, from shops; going off begging with lies on their lips. it was terrible to see the springs from which the life of the city depths was fed. "if you could stop it _there_!" luclarion said, and said with reason. "will you let me go?" asked hazel of her mother, in good earnest. "'twon't hurt her," put in luclarion. "nothing's catching that you haven't got the seeds of in your own constitution. and so the catching will be the other way." the seeds of good,--to catch good; that was what luclarion grapp believed in, in those dirty little souls,--no, those clean little _souls_, overlaid with all outward mire and filth of body, clothing, speech, and atmosphere, for a mile about; through which they could no more grope and penetrate, to reach their own that was hidden from them in the clearer life beyond, than we can grope and reach to other stars. "i will get desire," quoth hazel, inspired as she always was, both ways. running in at the house in greenley street the next thursday, she ran against uncle titus coming out. "what now?" he demanded. "desire," said hazel. "i've come for her. we're wanted at luclarion's. we've got work to do." "humph! work? what kind?" "play," said hazel, laughing. she delighted to bother and mystify uncle titus, and imagined that she did. "i thought so. tea parties?" "something like," said hazel. "there are children down there that don't know how to grow up. they haven't any comfortable sort of fashion of growing up. somebody has got to teach them. they don't know how to play 'grand mufti,' and they never heard of 'king george and his troops.' luclarion tried to make them sit still and learn letters; but of course they wouldn't a minute longer than the gingerbread lasted, and they are eating her out of house and home. it will take young folks, and week-days, you see; so desire and i are going." and hazel ran up the great, flat-stepped staircase. "lives that have no business to be," said uncle titus to himself, going down the brick walk. "the lord has his own ways of bringing lives together. and his own business gets worked out among them, beyond their guessing. when a man grows old, he can stand still now and then, and see a little." it was a short cross street that luclarion lived in, between two great thoroughfares crowded with life and business, bustle, drudgery, idleness, and vice. you will not find the name i give it,--although you may find one that will remind you of it,--in any directory or on any city map. but you can find the places without the names; and if you go down there with the like errands in your heart, you will find the work, as she found it, to do. she heard the noise of street brawls at night, voices of men and women quarreling in alley-ways, and up in wretched garrets; flinging up at each other, in horrible words, all the evil they knew of in each other's lives,--"away back," luclarion said, "to when they were little children." "and what is it," she would say to mrs. ripwinkley telling her about it, "that _flings_ it up, and can call it a shame, after all the shames of years and years? except just _that_ that the little children _were_, underneath, when the lord let them--he knows why--be born so? i tell you, ma'am, it's a mystery; and the nigher you come to it, the more it is; it's a piece of hell and a piece of heaven; it's the wrastle of the angel and the dragon; and it's going on at one end, while they're building up their palaces and living soft and sweet and clean at the other, with everything hushed up that can't at least _seem_ right and nice and proper. i know there's good folks there, in the palaces; _beautiful_ folks; there, and all the way down between; with god's love in them, and his hate, that is holy, against sin; and his pity, that is _prayers_ in them, for all people and places that are dark; but if they would _come down_ there, and take hold! i think it's them that would, that might have part in the first resurrection, and live and reign the thousand years." luclarion never counted herself among them,--those who were to have thrones and judgments; she forgot, even, that she had gone down and taken hold; her words came burning-true, out of her soul; and in the heat of truth they were eloquent. but i meant to tell you of her living. in the daytime it was quiet; the gross evils crept away and hid from the sunshine; there was labor to take up the hours, for those who did labor; and you might not know or guess, to go down those avenues, that anything worse gathered there than the dust of the world's traffic that the lumbering drays ground up continually with their wheels, and the wind,--that came into the city from far away country places of green sweetness, and over hills and ponds and streams and woods,--flung into the little children's faces. luclarion had taken a house,--one of two, that fronted upon a little planked court; aside, somewhat, from neighbor street, as that was a slight remove from the absolute terrible contact of arctic street. but it was in the heart of that miserable quarter; she could reach out her hands and touch and gather in, if it would let her, the wretchedness. she had chosen a place where it was possible for her to make a nook of refuge, not for herself only, or so much, as for those to whom she would fain be neighbor, and help to a better living. it had been once a dwelling of some well-to-do family of the days gone by; of some merchant, whose ventures went out and came in at those wharves below, whence the air swept up pure, then, with its salt smell, into the streets. the rooms were fairly large; luclarion spent money out of her own little property, that had been growing by care and saving till she could spare from it, in doing her share toward having it all made as sweet and clean as mortar and whitewash and new pine-boards and paint and paper could make it. all that was left of the old, they scoured with carbolic soap; and she had the windows opened, and in the chimneys that had been swept of their soot she had clear fires made and kept burning for days. then she put her new, plain furnishings into her own two down-stairs rooms; and the gallilees brought in theirs above; and beside them, she found two decent families,--a german paper-hanger's, and that of a carpenter at one of the theatres, whose wife worked at dressmaking,--to take the rest. away up, at the very top, she had the wide, large room that hazel spoke of, and a smaller one to which she climbed to sleep, for the sake of air as near heaven as it could be got. one of her lower-rooms was her living and housekeeping room; the other she turned into a little shop, in which she sold tapes and needles and cheap calicoes and a few ribbons; and kept a counter on the opposite side for bread and yeast, gingerbread, candy, and the like. she did this partly because she must do something to help out the money for her living and her plans, and partly to draw the women and children in. how else could she establish any relations between herself and them, or get any permanent hold or access? she had "turned it all over in her mind," she said; "and a tidy little shop with fair, easy prices, was the very thing, and a part of just what she came down there to do." she made real, honest, hop-raised bread, of sweet flour that she gave ten dollars a barrel for; it took a little more than a pint, perhaps, to make a tea loaf; that cost her three cents; she sold her loaf for four, and it was better than they could get anywhere else for five. then, three evenings in a week, she had hot muffins, or crumpets, home-made; (it was the subtle home touch and flavor that she counted on, to carry more than a good taste into their mouths, even a dim notion of home sweetness and comfort into their hearts;) these first,--a quart of flour at five cents, two eggs at a cent apiece, and a bit of butter, say three cents more, with three cents worth of milk, made an outlay of fifteen cents for a dozen and a half; so she sold them for ten cents a dozen, and the like had never been tasted or dreamed of in all that region round about; no, nor i dare almost to say, in half the region round about republic avenue either, where they cannot get luclarion grapps to cook. the crumpets were cheaper; they were only bread-sponge, baked on a griddle; they were large, and light and tender; a quart of flour would make ten; she gave the ten for seven cents. and do you see, putting two cents on every quart of her flour, for her labor, she _earned_, not _made_,--that word is for speculators and brokers,--with a barrel of one hundred and ninety six pounds or quarts, three dollars and ninety-two cents? the beauty of it was, you perceive, that she did a small business; there was an eager market for all she could produce, and there was no waste to allow a margin for. i am not a bit of a political economist myself; but i have a shrewd suspicion that luclarion grapp was, besides having hit upon the initial, individual idea of a capital social and philanthropic enterprise. this was all she tried to do at first; she began with bread; the lord from heaven began with that; she fed as much of the multitude as she could reach; they gathered about her for the loaves; and they got, consciously or unconsciously, more than they came or asked for. they saw her clean-swept floor; her netted windows that kept the flies out, the clean, coarse white cotton shades,--tacked up, and rolled and tied with cord, country-fashion, for luclarion would not set any fashions that her poor neighbors might not follow if they would;--and her shelves kept always dusted down; they could see her way of doing that, as they happened in at different times, when she whisked about, lightly and nicely, behind and between her jars and boxes and parcels with the little feather duster that she kept hanging over her table where she made her change and sat at her sewing. they grew ashamed by degrees,--those coarse women,--to come in in their frowsy rags, to buy her delicate muffins or her white loaves; they would fling on the cleanest shawl they had or could borrow, to "cut round to old maid grapp's," after a cent's worth of yeast,--for her yeast, also, was like none other that could be got, and would _almost_ make her own beautiful bread of itself. back of the shop was her house-room; the cheapest and cleanest of carpet,--a square, bound round with bright-striped carpet-binding,--laid in the middle of a clean dark yellow floor; a plain pine table, scoured white, standing in the middle of that; on it, at tea-time, common blue and white crockery cups and plates, and a little black teapot; a napkin, coarse, but fresh from the fold, laid down to save, and at the same time to set off, with a touch of delicate neatness, the white table; a wooden settee, with a home-made calico-covered cushion and pillows, set at right angles with the large, black, speckless stove; a wooden rocking-chair, made comfortable in like manner, on the other side; the sink in the corner, clean, freshly rinsed, with the bright tin basin hung above it on a nail. there was nothing in the whole place that must not be, in some shape, in almost the poorest; but all so beautifully ordered, so stainlessly kept. through that open door, those women read a daily sermon. and luclarion herself,--in a dark cotton print gown, a plain strip of white about the throat,--even that was cotton, not linen, and two of them could be run together in ten minutes for a cent,--and a black alpacca apron, never soiled or crumpled, but washed and ironed when it needed, like anything else,--her hair smoothly gathered back under a small white half-handkerchief cap, plain-hemmed,--was the sermon alive; with the soul of it, the inner sweetness and purity, looking out at them from clear pleasant eyes, and lips cheery with a smile that lay behind them. she had come down there just to do as god told her to be a neighbor, and to let her light shine. he would see about the glorifying. she did not try to make money out of her candy, or her ginger-nuts; she kept those to entice the little children in; to tempt them to come again when they had once done an errand, shyly, or saucily, or hang-doggedly,--it made little difference which to her,--in her shop. "i'll tell you what it's like," hazel said, when she came in and up-stairs the first saturday afternoon with desire, and showed and explained to her proudly all luclarion's ways and blessed inventions. "it's like your mother and mine throwing crumbs to make the pigeons come, when they were little girls, and lived in boston,--i mean _here_!" hazel waked up at the end of her sentence, suddenly, as we all do sometimes, out of talking or thinking, to the consciousness that it was _here_ that she had mentally got round to. desire had never heard of the crumbs or the pigeons. mrs. ledwith had always been in such a hurry, living on, that she never stopped to tell her children the sweet old tales of how she _had_ lived. her child-life had not ripened in her as it had done in frank. desire and hazel went up-stairs and looked at the empty room. it was light and pleasant; dormer windows opened out on a great area of roofs, above which was blue sky; upon which, poor clothes fluttered in the wind, or cats walked and stretched themselves safely and lazily in the sun. "i always _do_ like roofs!" said hazel. "the nicest thing in 'mutual friend' is jenny wren up on the jew's roof, being dead. it seems like getting up over the world, and leaving it all covered up and put away." "except the old clothes," said desire. "they're _washed_" answered hazel, promptly; and never stopped to think of the meaning. then she jumped down from the window, along under which a great beam made a bench to stand on, and looked about the chamber. "a swing to begin with," she said. "why what is that? luclarion's got one!" knotted up under two great staples that held it, was the long loop of clean new rope; the notched board rested against the chimney below. "it's all ready! let's go down and catch one! luclarion, we've come to tea," she announced, as they reached the sitting-room. "there's the shop bell!" in the shop was a woman with touzled hair and a gown with placket split from gathers to hem, showing the ribs of a dirty skeleton skirt. a child with one garment on,--some sort of woolen thing that had never been a clean color, and was all gutter-color now,--the woman holding the child by the hand here, in a safe place, in a way these mothers have who turn their children out in the street dirt and scramble without any hand to hold. no wonder, though, perhaps; in the strangeness and unfitness of the safe, pure place, doubtless they feel an uneasy instinct that the poor little vagabonds have got astray, and need some holding. "give us a four-cent loaf!" said the woman, roughly, her eyes lowering under crossly furrowed brows, as she flung two coins upon the little counter. luclarion took down one, looked at it, saw that it had a pale side, and exchanged it for another. "here is a nice crusty one," she said pleasantly, turning to wrap it in a sheet of paper. "none o' yer gammon! give it here; there's your money; come along, crazybug!" and she grabbed the loaf without a wrapper, and twitched the child. hazel sat still. she knew there was no use. but desire with her point-black determination, went right at the boy, took hold of his hand, dirt and all; it was disagreeable, therefore she thought she must do it. "don't you want to come and swing?" she said. "---yer swing! and yer imperdence! clear out! he's got swings enough to home! go to ----, and be ----, you ----------!" out of the mother's mouth poured a volley of horrible words, like a hailstorm of hell. desire fell back, as from a blinding shock of she knew not what. luclarion came round the counter, quite calmly. "ma'am," she said, "those words won't hurt _her_. she don't know the language. but you've got god's daily bread in your hand; how can you talk devil's dutch over it?" the woman glared at her. but she saw nothing but strong, calm, earnest asking in the face; the asking of god's own pity. she rebelled against that, sullenly; but she spoke no more foul words. i think she could as soon have spoken them in the face of christ; for it was the christ in luclarion grapp that looked out at her. "you needn't preach. you can order me out of your shop, if you like. i don't care." "i don't order you out. i'd rather you would come again. i don't think you will bring that street-muck with you, though." there was both confidence and command in the word like the "neither do i condemn thee: go, and sin no more." it detached the street-muck from the woman. it was not _she_; it was defilement she had picked up, when perhaps she could not help it. she could scrape her shoes at the door, and come in clean. "you know a darned lot about it, i suppose!" were the last words of defiance; softened down, however, you perceive, to that which can be printed. desire was pale, with a dry sob in her throat, when the woman had gone and luclarion turned round. "the angels in heaven know; why shouldn't you?" said luclarion. "that's what we've got to help." a child came in afterwards, alone; with an actual clean spot in the middle of her face, where a ginger-nut or an acid drop might go in. this was a regular customer of a week past. the week had made that clean spot; with a few pleasant and encouraging hints from luclarion, administered along with the gingerbread. now it was hazel's turn. the round mouth and eyes, with expectation in them, were like a spot of green to hazel, feeling with her witch-wand for a human spring. but she spoke to desire, looking cunningly at the child. "let us go back and swing," she said. the girl's head pricked itself up quickly. "we've got a swing up-stairs," said hazel, passing close by, and just pausing. "a new one. i guess it goes pretty high; and it looks out of top windows. wouldn't you like to come and see?" the child lived down in a cellar. "take up some ginger-nuts, and eat them there," said luclarion to hazel. if it had not been for that, the girl would have hung back, afraid of losing her shop treat. hazel knew better than to hold out her hand, at this first essay; she would do that fast enough when the time came. she only walked on, through the sitting-room, to the stairs. the girl peeped, and followed. clean stairs. she had never trodden such before. everything was strange and clean here, as she had never seen anything before in all her life, except the sky and the white clouds overhead. heaven be thanked that they are held over us, spotless, always! hazel heard the little feet, shuffling, in horrible, distorted shoes, after her, over the steps; pausing, coming slowly but still starting again, and coming on. up on the high landing, under the skylight, she opened the door wide into the dormer-windowed room, and went in; she and desire, neither of them looking round. hazel got into the swing. desire pushed; after three vibrations they saw the ragged figure standing in the doorway, watching, turning its head from side to side as the swing passed. "almost!" cried hazel, with her feet up at the window. "there!" she thrust them out at that next swing; they looked as if they touched the blue. "i can see over all the chimneys, and away off, down the water! now let the old cat die." out again, with a spring, as the swinging slackened, she still took no notice of the child, who would have run, like a wild kitten, if she had gone after her. she called desire, and plunged into a closet under the eaves. "i wonder what's here!" she exclaimed. "rats!" the girl in the doorway saw the dark, into which the low door opened; she was used to rats in the dark. "i don't believe it," says hazel; "luclarion has a cut, a great big buff one with green eyes. she came in over the roofs, and she runs up here nights. i shouldn't wonder if there might be kittens, though,--one of these days, at any rate. why! what a place to play 'dare' in! it goes way round, i don't know where! look here, desire!" she sat on the threshold, that went up a step, over the beam, and so leaned in. she had one eye toward the girl all the time, out of the shadow. she beckoned and nodded, and desire came. at the same moment, the coast being clear, the girl gave a sudden scud across, and into the swing. she began to scuff with her slipshod, twisted shoes, pushing herself. hazel gave another nod behind her to desire. desire stood up, and as the swing came back, pushed gently, touching the board only. the girl laughed out with the sudden thrill of the motion. desire pushed again. higher and higher, till the feet reached up to the window. "there!" she cried; and kicked an old shoe off, out over the roof. "i've lost my shoe!" "never mind; it'll be down in the yard," said hazel. thereupon the child, at the height of her sweep again, kicked out the other one. desire and hazel, together, pushed her for a quarter of an hour. "now let's have ginger-cakes," said hazel, taking them out of her pocket, and leaving the "cat" to die. little barefoot came down at that, with a run; hanging to the rope at one side, and dragging, till she tumbled in a sprawl upon the floor. "you ought to have waited," said desire. "poh! i don't never wait!" cried the ragamuffin rubbing her elbows. "i don't care." "but it isn't nice to tumble round," suggested hazel. "i _ain't_ nice," answered the child, and settled the subject. "well, these ginger-nuts are," said hazel. "here!" "have you had a good time?" she asked when the last one was eaten, and she led the way to go down-stairs. "good time! that ain't nothin'! i've had a reg'lar bust! i'm comin' agin'; it's bully. now i must get my loaf and my shoes, and go along back and take a lickin'." that was the way hazel caught her first child. she made her tell her name,--ann fazackerley,--and promise to come on saturday afternoon, and bring two more girls with her. "we'll have a party," said hazel, "and play puss in the corner. but you must get leave," she added. "ask your mother. i don't want you to be punished when you go home." "lor! you're green! i ain't got no mother. an' i always hooks jack. i'm licked reg'lar when i gets back, anyway. there's half a dozen of 'em. when 'tain't one, it's another. that's jane goffey's bread; she's been a swearin' after it this hour, you bet. but i'll come,--see if i don't!" hazel drew a hard breath as she let the girl go. back to her crowded cellar, her jane goffeys, the swearings, and the lickings. what was one hour at a time, once or twice a week, to do against all this? but she remembered the clean little round in her face, out of which eyes and mouth looked merrily, while she talked rough slang; the same fun and daring,--nothing worse,--were in this child's face, that might be in another's saying prettier words. how could she help her words, hearing nothing but devil's dutch around her all the time? children do not make the language they are born into. and the face that could be simply merry, telling such a tale as that,--what sort of bright little immortality must it be the outlook of? hazel meant to try her hour. * * * * * this is one of my last chapters. i can only tell you now they began,--these real folks,--the work their real living led them up to. perhaps some other time we may follow it on. if i were to tell you now a finished story of it, i should tell a story ahead of the world. i can show you what six weeks brought it to. i can show you them fairly launched in what may grow to a beautiful private charity,--an "insecution,"--a broad social scheme,--a millennium; at any rate, a life work, change and branch as it may, for these girls who have found out, in their girlhood, that there is genuine living, not mere "playing pretend," to be done in the world. but you cannot, in little books of three hundred pages, see things through. i never expected or promised to do that. the threescore years and ten themselves, do not do it. it turned into regular wednesday and saturday afternoons. three girls at first, then six, then less again,--sometimes only one or two; until they gradually came up to and settled at, an average of nine or ten. the first saturday they took them as they were. the next time they gave them a stick of candy each, the first thing, then hazel's fingers were sticky, and she proposed the wash-basin all round, before they went up-stairs. the bright tin bowl was ready in the sink, and a clean round towel hung beside; and with some red and white soap-balls, they managed to fascinate their dirty little visitors into three clean pairs of hands, and three clean faces as well. the candy and the washing grew to be a custom; and in three weeks' time, watching for a hot day and having it luckily on a saturday, they ventured upon instituting a whole bath, in big round tubs, in the back shed-room, where a faucet came in over a wash bench, and a great boiler was set close by. they began with a foot-paddle, playing pond, and sailing chips at the same time; then luclarion told them they might have tubs full, and get in all over and duck, if they liked; and children who may hate to be washed, nevertheless are always ready for a duck and a paddle. so luclarion superintended the bath-room; diana helped her; and desire and hazel tended the shop. luclarion invented a shower-bath with a dipper and a colander; then the wet, tangled hair had to be combed,--a climax which she had secretly aimed at with a great longing, from the beginning; and doing this, she contrived with carbolic soap and a separate suds, and a bit of sponge, to give the neglected little heads a most salutary dressing. saturday grew into bath-day; soap-suds suggested bubbles; and the ducking and the bubbling were a frolic altogether. then hazel wished they could be put into clean clothes each time; wouldn't it do, somehow? but that would cost. luclarion had come to the limit of her purse; hazel had no purse, and desire's was small. "but you see they've _got_ to have it," said hazel; and so she went to her mother, and from her straight to uncle oldways. they counted up,--she and desire, and diana; two little common suits, of stockings, underclothes, and calico gowns, apiece; somebody to do a washing once a week, ready for the change; and then--"those horrid shoes!" "i don't see how you can do it," said mrs. ripwinkley. "the things will be taken away from them, and sold. you would have to keep doing, over and over, to no purpose, i am afraid." "i'll see to that," said luclarion, facing her "stump." "we'll do for them we can do for; if it ain't ones, it will be tothers. those that don't keep their things, can't have 'em; and if they're taken away, i won't sell bread to the women they belong to, till they're brought back. besides, the _washing_ kind of sorts 'em out, beforehand. 'taint the worst ones that are willing to come, or to send, for that. you always have to work in at an edge, in anything, and make your way as you go along. it'll regulate. i'm _living_ there right amongst 'em; i've got a clew, and a hold; i can follow things up; i shall have a 'circle;' there's circles everywhere. and in all the wheels there's a moving _spirit_; you ain't got to depend just on yourself. things work; the lord sees to it; it's _his_ business as much as yours." hazel told uncle titus that there were shoes and stockings and gowns wanted down in neighbor street; things for ten children; they must have subscriptions. and so she had come to him. the ripwinkleys had never given uncle titus a christmas or a birthday present, for fear they should seem to establish a mutual precedent. they had never talked of their plans which involved calculation, before him; they were terribly afraid of just one thing with him, and only that one,--of anything most distantly like what desire ledwith called "a megilp bespeak." but now hazel went up to him as bold as a lion. she took it for granted he was like other people,--"real folks;" that he would do--what must be done. "how much will it cost?" "for clothes and shoes for each child, about eight dollars for three months, we guess," said hazel. "mother's going to pay for the washing!" "_guess_? haven't you calculated?" "yes, sir. 'guess' and 'calculate' mean the same thing in yankee," said hazel, laughing. uncle titus laughed in and out, in his queer way, with his shoulders going up and down. then he turned round, on his swivel chair, to his desk, and wrote a check for one hundred dollars. "there. see how far you can make that go." "that's good," said hazel, heartily, looking at it; "that's splendid!" and never gave him a word of personal thanks. it was a thing for mutual congratulations, rather, it would seem; the "good" was just what they all wanted, and there it was. why should anybody in particular be thanked, as if anybody in particular had asked for anything? she did not say this, or think it; she simply did not think about it at all. and uncle oldways--again--liked it. there! i shall not try, now, to tell you any more; their experiences, their difficulties, their encouragements, would make large material for a much larger book. i want you to know of the idea, and the attempt. if they fail, partly,--if drunken fathers steal the shoes, and the innocent have to forfeit for the guilty,--if the bad words still come to the lips often, though hazel tells them they are not "nice,"--and beginning at the outside, they are in a fair way of learning the niceness of being nice,--if some children come once or twice, and get dressed up, and then go off and live in the gutters again until the clothes are gone,--are these real failures? there is a bright, pure place down there in neighbor street, and twice a week some little children have there a bright, pure time. will this be lost in the world? in the great ledger of god will it always stand unbalanced on the debit side? if you are afraid it will fail,--will be swallowed up in the great sink of vice and misery, like a single sweet, fresh drop, sweet only while it is falling,--go and do likewise; rain down more; make the work larger, stronger; pour the sweetness in faster, till the wide, grand time of full refreshing shall have come from the presence of the lord! ada geoffrey went down and helped. miss craydocke is going to knit scarlet stockings all winter for them; mr. geoffrey has put a regular bath-room in for luclarion, with half partitions, and three separate tubs; mrs. geoffrey has furnished a dormitory, where little homeless ones can be kept to sleep. luclarion has her hands full, and has taken in a girl to help her, whose board and wages rachel froke and asenath scherman pay. a thing like that spreads every way; you have only to be among, and one of--real folks. * * * * * desire, besides her work in neighbor street, has gone into the normal school. she wants to make herself fit for any teaching; she wants also to know and to become a companion of earnest, working girls. she told uncle titus this, after she had been with him a month, and had thought it over; and uncle titus agreed, quite as if it were no real concern of his, but a very proper and unobjectionable plan for her, if she liked it. one day, though, when marmaduke wharne--who had come this fall again to stay his three days, and talk over their business,--sat with him in his study, just where they had sat two years and a little more ago, and hazel and desire ran up and down stairs together, in and out upon their busy wednesday errands,--marmaduke said to titus,-"afterwards is a long time, friend; but i mistrust you have found the comfort, as well as the providence, of 'next of kin?'" "afterwards _is_ a long time," said titus oldways, gravely; "but the lord's line of succession stretches all the way through." and that same night he had his other old friend, miss craydocke, in; and he brought two papers that he had ready, quietly out to be signed, each with four names: "titus oldways," by itself, on the one side; on the other,- "rachel froke, marmaduke wharne, keren-happuch craydocke." and one of those two papers--which are no further part of the present story, seeing that good old uncle titus is at this moment alive and well, as he has a perfect right, and is heartily welcome to be, whether the story ever comes to a regular winding up or not--was laid safely away in a japanned box in a deep drawer of his study table; and marmaduke wharne put the other in his pocket. he and titus knew. i myself guess, and perhaps you do; but neither you nor i, nor rachel, nor keren-happuch, know for certain; and it is no sort of matter whether we do or not. the "next of kin" is a better and a deeper thing than any claim of law or register of bequest can show. titus oldways had found that out; and he had settled in his mind, to his restful and satisfied belief, that god, to the last moment of his time, and the last particle of his created substance, can surely care for and order and direct his own. is that end and moral enough for a two years' watchful trial and a two years' simple tale? xxi. the horseshoe. they laid out the waite place in this manner:-right into the pretty wooded pasture, starting from a point a little way down the road from the old house, they projected a roadway which swept round, horseshoe fashion, till it met itself again within a space of some twenty yards or so; and this sweep made a frontage--upon its inclosed bit of natural, moss-turfed green, sprinkled with birch and pine and oak trees, and with gray out-croppings of rock here and there--for the twenty houses, behind which opened the rest of the unspoiled, irregular, open slope and swell and dingle of the hill-foot tract that dipped down at one reach, we know, to the river. the trees, and shrubs, and vines, and ferns, and stones, were left in their wild prettiness; only some roughness of nature's wear and tear of dead branches and broken brushwood, and the like, were taken away, and the little footpaths cleared for pleasant walking. there were all the little shady, sweet-smelling nooks, just as they had been; all the little field-parlors, opening with their winding turns between bush and rock, one into another. the twenty households might find twenty separate places, if they all wanted to take a private out-door tea at once. the cellars were dug; the frames were up; workmen were busy with brick and mortar, hammer and plane; two or three buildings were nearly finished, and two--the two standing at the head of the horseshoe, looking out at the back into the deepest and pleasantest wood-aisle, where the leaves were reddening and mellowing in the early october frost, and the ferns were turning into tender transparent shades of palest straw-color--were completed, and had dwellers in them; the cheeriest, and happiest, and coziest of neighbors; and who do you think these were? miss waite and delia, of course, in one house; and with them, dividing the easy rent and the space that was ample for four women, were lucilla waters and her mother. in the other, were kenneth and rosamond kincaid and dorris. kenneth and rosamond had been married just three weeks. rosamond had told him she would begin the world with him, and they had begun. begun in the simple, true old-fashioned way, in which, if people only would believe it, it is even yet not impossible for young men and women to inaugurate their homes. they could not have had a place at westover, and a horse and buggy for kenneth to go back and forth with; nor even a house in one of the best streets of z----; and down at east square everything was very modern and pretentious, based upon the calculation of rising values and a rush of population. but here was this new neighborhood of--well, yes,--"model houses;" a blessed christian speculation for a class not easily or often reached by any speculations save those that grind and consume their little regular means, by forcing upon them the lawless and arbitrary prices of the day, touching them at every point in their _living_, but not governing correspondingly their income, as even the hod-carrier's and railroad navvy's daily pay is reached and ruled to meet the proportion of the time. they would be plain, simple, little-cultured people that would live there: the very "betwixt and betweens" that rosamond had used to think so hardly fated. would she go and live among them, in one of these little new, primitive homes, planted down in the pasture-land, on the outskirts? would she--the pretty, graceful, elegant rosamond--live semi-detached with old miss arabel waite? that was just exactly the very thing she would do; the thing she did not even let kenneth think of first, and ask her, but that, when they had fully agreed that they would begin life somehow, in some right way together, according to their means, she herself had questioned him if they might not do. and so the houses were hurried in the building; for old miss arabel must have hers before the winter; (it seems strange how often the change comes when one could not have waited any longer for it;) and kenneth had mill building, and surveying, and planning, in east square, and mr. roger marchbanks' great gray-stone mansion going up on west hill, to keep him busy; work enough for any talented young fellow, fresh from the school of technology, who had got fair hold of a beginning, to settle down among and grasp the "next things" that were pretty sure to follow along after the first. dorris has all ruth's music scholars, and more; for there has never been anybody to replace miss robbyns, and there are many young girls in z----, and down here in east square, who want good teaching and cannot go away to get it. she has also the organ-playing in the new church. she keeps her morning hours and her saturdays to help rosamond; for they are "coã¶perating" here, in the new home; what was the use, else, of having coã¶perated in the old? rosamond cannot bear to have any coarse, profane fingers laid upon her little household gods,--her wedding-tins and her feather dusters,--while the first gloss and freshness are on, at any rate; and with her dainty handling, the gloss is likely to last a long while. such neighbors, too, as the waites and waterses are! how they helped in the fitting up, running in in odd half hours from their own nailing and placing, which they said could wait awhile, since they weren't brides; and such real old times visiting as they have already between the houses; coming and taking right hold, with wiping up dinner plates as likely as not, if that is the thing in hand; picking up what is there, as easily as "the girls" used to help work out some last new pattern of crochet, or try over music, or sort worsteds for gorgeous affghans for the next great fair! miss arabel is apt to come in after dinner, and have a dab at the plates; she knows she interrupts nothing then; and she "has never been used to sitting talking, with gloves on and a parasol in her lap." and now she has given up trying to make impossible biases, she has such a quantity of time! it was the matter of receiving visits from her friends who _did_ sit with their parasols in their laps, or who only expected to see the house, or look over wedding presents, that would be the greatest hindrance, rosamond realized at once; that is, if she would let it; so she did just the funniest thing, perhaps, that ever a bride did do: she set her door wide open from her pretty parlor, with its books and flowers and pictures and window-draperies of hanging vines, into the plain, cozy little kitchen, with its tin pans and bright new buckets and its shaker chairs; and when she was busy there, asked her girl-friends right in, as she had used to take them up into her bedroom, if she were doing anything pretty or had something to show. and they liked it, for the moment, at any rate; they could not help it; they thought it was lovely; a kind of bewitching little play at keeping house; though some of them went away and wondered, and said that rosamond holabird had quite changed all her way of living and her position; it was very splendid and strong-minded, they supposed; but they never should have thought it of her, and of course she could not keep it up. "and the neighborhood!" was the cry. "the rabble she has got, and is going to have, round her! all planks and sand, and tubs of mortar, now; you have to half break your neck in getting up there; and when it is settled it will be--such a frowze of common people! why the foreman of our factory has engaged a house, and mrs. haslam, who actually used to do up laces for mamma, has got another!" that is what is said--in some instances--over on west hill, when the elegant visitors came home from calling at the horseshoe. meanwhile, what rosamond does is something like this, which she happened to do one bright afternoon a very little while ago. she and dorris had just made and baked a charming little tea-cake, which was set on a fringed napkin in a round white china dish, and put away in the fresh, oak-grained kitchen pantry, where not a crumb or a slop had ever yet been allowed to rest long enough to defile or give a flavor of staleness; out of which everything is tidily used up while it is nice, and into which little delicate new-made bits like this, for next meals, are always going. the tea-table itself,--with its three plates, and its new silver, and the pretty, thin, shallow cups and saucers, that an irish girl would break a half-dozen of every week,--was laid with exquisite preciseness; the square white napkins at top and bottom over the crimson cloth, spread to the exactness of a line, and every knife and fork at fair right angles; the loaf was upon the white carved trencher, and nothing to be done when kenneth should come in, but to draw the tea, and bring the brown cake forth. rosamond will not leave all these little doings to break up the pleasant time of his return; she will have her leisure then, let her be as busy as she may while he is away. there was an hour or more after all was done; even after the panjandrums had made their state call, leaving their barouche at the heel of the horseshoe, and filling up all rosamond's little vestibule with their flounces, as they came in and went out. the panjandrums were new people at west hill; very new and very grand, as only new things and new people can be, turned out in the latest style pushed to the last agony. mrs. panjandrum's dress was all in two shades of brown, to the tips of her feathers, and the toes of her boots, and the frill of her parasol; and her carriage was all in two shades of brown, likewise; cushions, and tassels, and panels; the horses themselves were cream-color, with dark manes and tails. next year, perhaps, everything will be in pansy-colors,--black and violet and gold; and then she will probably have black horses with gilded harness and royal purple tails. it was very good of the panjandrums, doubtless, to come down to the horseshoe at all; i am willing to give them all the credit of really admiring rosamond, and caring to see her in her little new home; but there are two other things to be considered also: the novel kind of home rosamond had chosen to set up, and the human weakness of curiosity concerning all experiments, and friends in all new lights; also the fact of that other establishment shortly to branch out of the holabird connection. the family could not quite go under water, even with people of the panjandrum persuasion, while there was such a pair of prospective corks to float them as mr. and mrs. dakie thayne. the panjandrum carriage had scarcely bowled away, when a little buggy and a sorrel pony came up the road, and somebody alighted with a brisk spring, slipped the rein with a loose knot through the fence-rail at the corner, and came up one side of the two-plank foot-walk that ran around the horseshoe; somebody who had come home unexpectedly, to take his little wife to ride. kenneth kincaid had business over at the new district of "clarendon park." drives, and livery-stable bills, were no part of the items allowed for, in the programme of these young people's living; therefore rosamond put on her gray hat, with its soft little dove's breast, and took her bright-striped shawl upon her arm, and let kenneth lift her into the buggy--for which there was no manner of need except that they both liked it,--with very much the feeling as if she were going off on a lovely bridal trip. they had had no bridal trip, you see; they did not really want one; and this little impromptu drive was such a treat! now the wonders of nature and the human mind show--if i must go so far to find an argument for the statement i am making--that into a single point of time or particle of matter may be gathered the relations of a solar system or the experiences of a life; that a universe may be compressed into an atom, or a molecule expanded into a macrocosm; therefore i expect nobody to sneer at my rosamond as childishly nappy in her simple honeymoon, or at me for making extravagant and unsupported assertions, when i say that this hour and a half, and these four miles out to clarendon park and back,--the lifting and the tucking in, and the setting off, the sitting side by side in the ripe october air and the golden twilight, the noting together every pretty turn, every flash of autumn color in the woods, every change in the cloud-groupings overhead, every glimpse of busy, bright-eyed squirrels up and down the walls, every cozy, homely group of barnyard creatures at the farmsteads, the change, the pleasure, the thought of home and always-togetherness,--all this made the little treat of a country ride as much to them, holding all that any wandering up and down the whole world in their new companionship could hold,--as a going to europe, or a journey to mountains and falls and sea-sides and cities, in a skimming of the states. you cannot have more than there is; and you do not care, for more than just what stands for and emphasizes the essential beauty, the living gladness, that no _place_ gives, but that hearts carry about into places and baptize them with, so that ever afterward a tender charm hangs round them, because "we saw it _then_." and kenneth and rosamond kincaid had all these bright associations, these beautiful glamours, these glad reminders, laid up for years to come, in a four miles space that they might ride or walk over, re-living it all, in the returning octobers of many other years. i say they had a bridal tour that day, and that the four miles were as good as four thousand. such little bits of signs may stand for such high, great, blessed things! "how lovely stillness and separateness are!" said rosamond as they sat in the buggy, stopping to enjoy a glimpse of the river on one side, and a flame of burning bushes on the other, against the dark face of a piece of woods that held the curve of road in which they stood, in sheltered quiet. "how pretty a house would be, up on that knoll. do you know things puzzle me a little, kenneth? i have almost come to a certain conclusion lately, that people are not meant to live apart, but that it is really everybody's duty to live in a town, or a village, or in some gathering of human beings together. life tends to that, and all the needs and uses of it; and yet,--it is so sweet in a place like this,--and however kind and social you may be, it seems once in a while such an escape! do you believe in beautiful country places, and in having a little piece of creation all to yourself, if you can get it, or if not what do you suppose all creation is made for?" "perhaps just that which you have said, rose." rosamond has now, what her mother hinted once, somebody to call her "rose," with a happy and beautiful privilege. "perhaps to escape into. not for one, here and there, selfishly, all the time; but for the whole, with fair share and opportunity. creation is made very big, you see, and men and women are made without wings, and with very limited hands and feet. also with limited lives; that makes the time-question, and the hurry. there is a suggestion,--at any rate, a necessity,--in that. it brings them within certain spaces, always. in spite of all the artificial lengthening of railroads and telegraphs, there must still be centres for daily living, intercourse, and need. people tend to towns; they cannot establish themselves in isolated independence. yet packing and stifling are a cruelty and a sin. i do not believe there ought to be any human being so poor as to be forced to such crowding. the very way we are going to live at the horseshoe, seems to me an individual solution of the problem. it ought to come to pass that our towns should be built--and if built already, wrongly, _thinned out_,--on this principle. people are coming to learn a little of this, and are opening parks and squares in the great cities, finding that there must be room for bodies and souls to reach out and breathe. if they could only take hold of some of their swarming-places, where disease and vice are festering, and pull down every second house and turn it into a garden space, i believe they would do more for reform and salvation than all their separate institutions for dealing with misery after it is let grow, can ever effect." "o, why _can't_ they?" cried rose. "there is money enough, somewhere. why can't they do it, instead of letting the cities grow horrid, and then running away from it themselves, and buying acres and acres around their country places, for fear somebody should come too near, and the country should begin to grow horrid too?" "because the growing and the crowding and the striving of the city _make_ so much of the money, little wife! because to keep everybody fairly comfortable as the world goes along, there could not be so many separate piles laid up; it would have to be used more as it comes, and it could not come so fast. if nobody cared to be very rich, and all were willing to live simply and help one another, in little 'horseshoe neighborhoods,' there wouldn't be so much that looks like grand achievement in the world perhaps; but i think maybe the very angels might show themselves out of the unseen, and bring the glory of heaven into it!" kenneth's color came, and his eyes glowed, as he spoke these words that burst into eloquence with the intensity of his meaning; and rosamond's face was holy-pale, and her look large, as she listened; and they were silent for a minute or so, as the pony, of his own accord, trotted deliberately on. "but then, the beauty, and the leisure, and all that grows out of them to separate minds, and what the world gets through the refinement of it! you see the puzzle comes back. must we never, in this life, gather round us the utmost that the world is capable of furnishing? must we never, out of this big creation, have the piece to ourselves, each one as he would choose?" "i think the lord would show us a way out of that," said kenneth. "i think he would make his world turn out right, and all come to good and sufficient use, if we did not put it in a snarl. perhaps we can hardly guess what we might grow to all together,--'the whole body, fitly joined by that which every joint supplieth, increasing and building itself up in love.' and about the quietness, and the separateness,--we don't want to _live_ in that, rose; we only want it sometimes, to make us fitter to live. when the disciples began to talk about building tabernacles on the mountain of the vision, christ led them straight down among the multitude, where there was a devil to be cast out. it is the same thing in the old story of the creation. god worked six days, and rested one." "well," said rose, drawing a deep breath, "i am glad we have begun at the horseshoe! it was a great escape for me, kenneth. i am such a worldly girl in my heart. i should have liked so much to have everything elegant and artistic about me." "i think you do. i think you always will. not because of the worldliness in you, though; but the _other_-worldliness, the sense of real beauty and truth. and i am glad that we have begun at all! it was a greater escape for me. i was in danger of all sorts of hardness and unbelief. i had begun to despise and hate things, because they did not work rightly just around me. and then i fell in, just in time, with some real, true people; and then you came, with the 'little piece of your world,' and then i came here, and saw what your world was, and how you were making it, rose! how a little community of sweet and generous fellowship was crystallizing here among all sorts--outward sorts--of people; a little community of the kingdom; and how you and yours had done it." "o, kenneth! i was the worst little atom in the whole crystal! i only got into my place because everybody else did, and there was nothing else left for me to do." "you see i shall never believe that," said kenneth, quietly. "there is no flaw in the crystal. you were all polarized alike. and besides, can't i see daily just how your nature draws and points?" "well, never mind," said rose. "only some particles are natural magnets, i believe, and some get magnetized by contact. now that we have hit upon this metaphor, isn't it funny that our little social experiment should have taken the shape of a horseshoe?" "the most sociable, because the most magnetic, shape it could take. you will see the power it will develop. there's a great deal in merely taking form according to fundamental principles. witness the getting round a fireside. isn't that a horseshoe? and could half as much sympathy be evolved from a straight line?" "i believe in firesides," said rose. "and in women who can organize and inform them," said kenneth. "first, firesides; then neighborhoods; that is the way the world's life works out; and women have their hands at the heart of it. they can do so much more there than by making the laws! when the life is right, the laws will make themselves, or be no longer needed. they are such mere outside patchwork,--makeshifts till a better time!" "wrong living must make wrong laws, whoever does the voting," said rosamond, sagely. "false social standards make false commercial ones; inflated pretensions demand inflated currency; selfish, untrue domestic living eventuates in greedy speculations and business shams; and all in the intriguing for corrupt legislation, to help out partial interests. it isn't by multiplying the voting power, but by purifying it, that the end is to be reached." "that is so sententious, kenneth, that i shall have to take it home and ravel it out gradually in my mind in little shreds. in the mean while, dear, suppose we stop in the village, and get some little brown-ware cups for top-overs. you never ate any of my top-overs? well, when you do, you'll say that all the world ought to be brought up on top-overs." rosamond was very particular about her little brown-ware cups. they had to be real stone,--brown outside, and gray-blue in; and they must be of a special size and depth. when they were found, and done up in a long parcel, one within another, in stout paper, she carried it herself to the chaise, and would scarcely let kenneth hold it while she got in; after which, she laid it carefully across her lap, instead of putting it behind upon the cushion. 'you see they were rather dear; but they are the only kind worth while. those little yellow things would soak and crack, and never look comfortable in the kitchen-closet. i give you very fair warning, i shall always want the best of things but then i shall take very fierce and jealous care of them,--like this.' and she laid her little nicely-gloved hand across her homely parcel, guardingly. how nice it was to go buying little homely things together! again, it was as good and pleasant,--and meant ever so much more,--than if it had been ordering china with a monogram in dresden, or glass in prague, with a coat-of-arms engraved. when they drove up to the horseshoe, dakie thayne and ruth met them. they had been getting "spiritual ferns" and sumach leaves with dorris; "the dearest little tips," ruth said, "of scarlet and carbuncle, just like jets of fire." and now they would go back to tea, and eat up the brown cake? "real westover summum-bonum cake?" dakie wanted to know. "well, he couldn't stand against that. come, ruthie!" and ruthie came. "what do you think rosamond says?" said kenneth, at the tea-table, over the cake. "that everybody ought to live in a city or a village, or, at least, a horseshoe. she thinks nobody has a right to stick his elbows out, in this world. she's in a great hurry to be packed as closely as possible here." "i wish the houses were all finished, and our neighbors in; that is what i said," said rosamond. "i should like to begin to know about them, and feel settled; and to see flowers in their windows, and lights at night." "and you always hated so a 'little crowd!'" said ruth. "it isn't a crowd when they _don't_ crowd," said rosamond. "i can't bear little miserable jostles." "how good it will be to see rosamond here, at the head of her court; at the top of the horseshoe," said dakie thayne. "she will be quite the 'queen of the county.'" "don't!" said rosamond. "i've a very weak spot in my head. you can't tell the mischief you might do. no, i won't be queen!" "any more than you can help," said dakie. "she'll be rosa mundi, wherever she is," said ruth affectionately. "i think that is just grand of kenneth and rosamond," said dakie thayne, as he and ruth were walking home up west hill in the moonlight, afterward. "what do you think you and i ought to do, one of these days, ruthie? it sets me to considering. there are more horseshoes to make, i suppose, if the world is to jog on." "_you_ have a great deal to consider about," said ruth, thoughtfully. "it was quite easy for kenneth and rosamond to see what they ought to do. but you might make a great many horseshoes,--or something!" "what do you mean by that second person plural, eh? are you shirking your responsibilities, or are you addressing your imaginary boffinses? come, ruthie, i can't have that! say 'we,' and i'll face the responsibilities and talk it all out; but i won't have anything to do with 'you!'" "won't you?" said ruth, with piteous demureness. "how can i say 'we,' then?" "you little cat! how you can scratch!" "there are such great things to be done in the world dakie," ruth said seriously, when they had got over that with a laugh that lifted her nicely by the "we" question. "i can't help thinking of it." "o," said dakie, with significant satisfaction. "we're getting on better. well?" "do you know what hazel ripwinkley is doing? and what luclarion grapp has done? do you know how they are going among poor people, in dreadful places,--really living among them, luclarion is,--and finding out, and helping, and showing how? i thought of that to-night, when they talked about living in cities and villages. luclarion has gone away down to the very bottom of it. and somehow, one can't feel satisfied with only reaching half-way, when one knows--and might!" "do you mean, ruthie, that you and i might go and _live_ in such places? do you think i could take you there?" "i don't know, dakie," ruth answered, forgetting in her earnestness, to blush or hesitate for what he said;--"but i feel as if we ought to reach down, somehow,--_away_ down! because that, you see, is the _most_. and to do only a little, in an easy way, when we are made so strong to do; wouldn't it be a waste of power, and a missing of the meaning? isn't it the 'much' that is required of us, dakie?" they were under the tall hedge of the holabird "parcel of ground," on the westover slope, and close to the home gates. dakie thayne put his arm round ruth as she said that, and drew her to him. "we will go and be neighbors somewhere, ruthie. and we will make as big a horseshoe as we can." xxii. morning glories. and desire? do you think i have passed her over lightly in her troubles? or do you think i am making her out to have herself passed over them lightly? do you think it is hardly to be believed that she should have turned round from these shocks and pains that bore down so heavily and all at once upon her, and taken kindly to the living with old uncle titus and rachel froke in the greenley street house, and going down to luclarion grapp's to help wash little children's faces, and teach them how to have innocent good times? do you think there is little making up in all that for her, while rosamond kincaid is happy in her new home, and ruth and dakie thayne are looking out together over the world,--which can be nowhere wholly sad to them, since they are to go down into it together,--and planning how to make long arms with their wealth, to reach the largest neighborhood they can? in the first place, do you know how full the world is, all around you, of things that are missed by those who say nothing, but go on living somehow without them? do you know how large a part of life, even young life, is made of the days that have never been lived? do you guess how many girls, like desire, come near something that they think they might have had, and then see it drift by just beyond their reach, to fall easily into some other hand that seems hardly put out to grasp it? and do you see, or feel, or guess how life goes on, incompleteness and all, and things settle themselves one way, if not another, simply because the world does not stop, but keeps turning, and tossing off days and nights like time-bubbles just the same? do you ever imagine how different this winter's parties are from last, or this summer's visit or journey from those of the summer gone,--to many a maiden who has her wardrobe made up all the same, and takes her german or her music lessons, and goes in and out, and has her ticket to the symphony concerts, and is no different to look at, unless perhaps with a little of the first color-freshness gone out of her face,--while secretly it seems to her as if the sweet early symphony of her life were all played out, and had ended in a discord? we begin, most of us, much as we are to go on. real or mistaken, the experiences of eighteen initiate the lesson that those of two and three score after years are needed to unfold and complete. what is left of us is continually turning round, perforce, to take up with what is left of the world, and make the best of it. thus much for what does happen, for what we have to put up with, for the mere philosophy of endurance, and the possibility of things being endured. we do live out our years, and get and bear it all. and the scars do not show much outside; nay, even we ourselves can lay a finger on the place, after a little time, without a cringe. desire ledwith did what she had to do; there was a way made for her, and there was still life left. but there is a better reading of the riddle. there is never a "might-have-been" that touches with a sting, but reveals also to us an inner glimpse of the wide and beautiful "may be." it is all there; somebody else has it now while we wait; but the years of god are full of satisfying, each soul shall have its turn; it is his good _pleasure_ to give us the kingdom. there is so much room, there are such thronging possibilities, there is such endless hope! to feel this, one must feel, however dimly, the inner realm, out of which the shadows of this life come and pass, to interpret to us the laid up reality. "the real world is the inside world." desire ledwith blessed uncle oldways in her heart for giving her that word. it comforted her for her father. if his life here had been hard, toilsome, mistaken even; if it had never come to that it might have come to; if she, his own child, had somehow missed the reality of him here, and he of her,--was he not passed now into the within? might she not find him there; might they not silently and spiritually, without sign, but needing no sign, begin to understand each other now? was not the real family just beginning to be born into the real home? ah, that word _real_! how deep we have to go to find the root of it! it is fast by the throne of god; in the midst. hazel ripwinkley talked about "real folks." she sifted, and she found out instinctively the true livers, the genuine _neahburs_, nigh-dwellers; they who abide alongside in spirit, who shall find each other in the everlasting neighborhood, when the veil falls. but there, behind,--how little, in our petty outside vexations or gladnesses, we stop to think of or perceive it!--is the actual, even the present, inhabiting; there is the kingdom, the continuing city, the real heaven and earth in which we already live and labor, and build up our homes and lay up our treasure and the loving christ, and the living father, and the innumerable company of angels, and the unseen compassing about of friends gone in there, and they on this earth who truly belong to us inwardly, however we and they may be bodily separated,--are the real folks! what matters a little pain, outside? go _in_, and rest from it! there is where the joy is, that we read outwardly, spelling by parts imperfectly, in our own and others' mortal experience; there is the content of homes, the beauty of love, the delight of friendship,--not shut in to any one or two, but making the common air that all souls breathe. no one heart can be happy, that all hearts may not have a share of it. rosamond and kenneth, dakie and ruth, cannot live out obviously any sweetness of living, cannot sing any notes of the endless, beautiful score, that desire ledwith, and luclarion grapp, and rachel froke, and hapsie craydocke, and old miss arabel waite, do not just as truly get the blessed grace and understanding of; do not catch and feel the perfect and abounding harmony of. since why? no lip can sound more than its own few syllables of music; no life show more than its own few accidents and incidents and groupings; the vast melody, the rich, eternal satisfying, are behind; and the signs are for us all! you may not think this, or see it so, in your first tussle and set-to with the disappointing and eluding things that seem the real and only,--missing which you miss all. this chapter may be less to you--less _for_ you, perhaps--than for your elders; the story may have ended, as to that you care for, some pages back; but for all that, this is certain; and desire ledwith has begun to find it, for she is one of those true, grand spirits to whom personal loss or frustration are most painful as they seem to betoken something wrong or failed in the general scheme and justice. this terrible "why should it be?" once answered,--once able to say to themselves quietly, "it is all right; the beauty and the joy are there; the song is sung, though we are of the listeners; the miracle-play is played, though but a few take literal part, and many of us look on, with the play, like the song, moving through our souls only, or our souls moving in the vital sphere of it, where the stage is wide enough for all;"--once come to this, they have entered already into that which is behind, and nothing of all that goes forth thence into the earth to make its sunshine can be shut off from them forever. desire is learning to be glad, thinking of kenneth and rosamond, that this fair marriage should have been. it is so just and exactly best; rosamond's sweet graciousness is so precisely what kenneth's sterner way needed to have shine upon it; her finding and making of all manner of pleasantness will be so good against his sharp discernment of the wrong; they will so beautifully temper and sustain each other! desire is so generous, so glad of the truth, that she can stand aside, and let this better thing be, and say to herself that it _is_ better. is not this that she is growing to inwardly, more blessed than any marriage or giving in marriage? is it not a partaking of the heavenly marriage supper? "we two might have grumbled at the world until we grumbled at each other." she even said that, calmly and plainly, to herself. and then that manna was fed to her afresh of which she had been given first to eat so long a while ago; that thought of "the lamb in the midst of the throne" came back to her. of the tenderness deep within the almightiness that holds all earth and heaven and time and circumstance in its grasp. her little, young, ignorant human heart begins to rest in that great warmth and gentleness; begins to be glad to wait there for what shall arise out of it, moving the almightiness for her,--even on purpose for her,--in the by-and-by; she begins to be sure; of what, she knows not,--but of a great, blessed, beautiful something, that just because she is at all, shall be for her; that she shall have a part, somehow, even in the _showing_ of his good; that into the beautiful miracle-play she shall be called, and a new song be given her, also, to sing in the grand, long, perfect oratorio; she begins to pray quietly, that, "loving the lord, always above all things, she may obtain his promises, which exceed all that she can desire." and waiting, resting, believing, she begins also to work. this beginning is even as an ending and forehaving, to any human soul. i will tell you how she woke one morning; of a little poem that wrote itself along her chamber wall. it was a square, pleasant old room, with a window in an angle toward the east. a great, old-fashioned mirror hung opposite, between the windows that looked out north-westwardly; the morning and the evening light came in upon her. beside the solid, quaint old furnishings of a long past time, there were also around her the things she had been used to at home; her own little old rocking-chair, her desk and table, and her toilet and mantel ornaments and things of use. a pair of candle-branches with dropping lustres,--that she had marveled at and delighted in as a child, and had begged for herself when they fell into disuse in the drawing-room,--stood upon the chimney along which the first sun-rays glanced. just in those days of the year, they struck in so as to shine level through the clear prisms, and break into a hundred little rainbows. she opened her eyes, this fair october morning, and lay and looked at the little scattered glories. all around the room, on walls, curtains, ceiling,--falling like bright soft jewels upon table and floor, touching everything with a magic splendor,--were globes and shafts of colored light. softly blended from glowing red to tenderly fervid blue, they lay in various forms and fragments, as the beam refracted or the objects caught them. just on the edge of the deep, opposite window-frame, clung one vivid, separate flash of perfect azure, all alone, and farthest off of all. desire wondered, at first glance, how it should happen till she saw, against a closet-door ajar, a gibbous sphere of red and golden flame. yards apart the points were, and a shadow lay between; but the one sure sunbeam knew no distance, and there was no radiant line of the spectrum lost. desire remembered her old comparison of complementary colors: "to see blue, and to live red," she had said, complaining. but now she thought,--"foreshortening! in so many things, that is all,--if we could only see as the sun sees!" one bit of our living, by itself, all one deep, burning, bleeding color, maybe; but the globe is white,--the blue is somewhere. and, lo! a soft, still motion; a little of the flame-tint has dropped off; it has leaped to join itself to the blue; it gives itself over; and they are beautiful together,--they fulfill each other; yet, in the changing never a thread falls quite away into the dark. why, it is like love joining itself to love again! as god's sun climbs the horizon, his steadfast, gracious purpose, striking into earthly conditions, seems to break, and scatter, and divide. half our heart is here, half there; our need and ache are severed from their help and answer; the tender blue waits far off for the eager, asking red; yet just as surely as his light shines on, and our life moves under it, so surely, across whatever gulf, the beauty shall all be one again; so surely does it even now move all together, perfect and close always under his eye, who never sends a _half_ ray anywhere. * * * * * she read her little poem,--sent to her; she read it through. she rose up glad and strong; her room was full of glorious sunshine now; the broken bits of color were all taken up in one full pouring of the day. she went down with the light of it in her heart, and all about her. uncle oldways met her at the foot of the wide staircase. "good-day, child!" he said to her in his quaint fashion. "why it _is_ good day! your face shines." "you have given me a beautiful east window, uncle," said desire, "and the morning has come in!" and from the second step, where she still stood, she bent forward a little, put her hands softly upon his shoulders, and for the first time, kissed his cheek. 