THE ENCHANTED CASTLE
It was plain that the streets would not be cleared that day. If the girls were able to get to school by the following Monday they would be fortunate.
None of the four had missed a day since the schools had opened in September, and from Ruth down, they did not wish to be marked as absent on their reports. This blizzard that had seized Milton in its grasp, however, forced the Board of Education to announce in the Post that pupils of all grades would be excused until the streets were moderately passable.
"Poor people will suffer a good deal, I am afraid," Ruth said, on this very first forenoon of their being snowbound.
"Our folks on Meadow Street," agreed Agnes. "I hope Mrs. Kranz will be kind to them."
"But we oughtn't to expect Mrs. Kranz, or Joe Maroni, to give away their food and coal. Then they'd soon be poor, too," said the earnest Ruth. "I tell you what, Aggie!"
"Well—shoot!"
Ruth overlooked her sister's slang for once. "We should leave money with Mrs. Kranz to help our poor folk, when we can't get over there to see them so frequently."
"Goodness, Ruth!" grumbled Agnes. "We won't have any spending money left for ourselves if we get into this charity game any deeper."
"Aren't you ashamed?" cried Ruth.
Agnes only laughed. They both knew that Agnes did not mean all that she said.
Ruth was already attacking the loose, fluffy snow under the arbor, and Agnes seized a spade and followed her older sister. It did not take such a great effort to get to the end of the arbor; but beyond that a great mass of hard-packed snow confronted them. Ruth could barely see over it.
"Oh, dear me!" groaned Agnes. "We'll never be able to dig a path through that."
This looked to be true to the older girl, too; so she began thinking. But it was Dot, trying to peer around the bigger girls' elbows, who solved the problem.
"Oh, my! how nice it would be to have a ladder and climb up to the top of that snowbank," she cried. "Maybe we could go over to Mabel Creamer's, right over the fence and all, Tess!"
"Hurray!" shouted Agnes. "We can cut steps in the bank, Ruth. Dot has given us a good idea—hasn't she?"
"I believe she has," agreed the oldest Kenway.
Although the snow had floated down so softly at first (and was now coming in feathery particles) during the height of the storm, the wind had blown and it had been so cold that the drifts were packed hard.
Without much difficulty the girls made four steps up out of the mouth of the grape-arbor, to the surface of the drift. Then they tramped a path on top to the door of the henhouse.
By this same entrance they could get to the goat's quarters. The snow had drifted completely over the henhouse, but that only helped to keep the hens and Billy Bumps warm.
Later the girls tunneled through the great drift at the back porch, leaving a thick arch which remained for the rest of the week. So they got a path broken to the gate on Willow Street.
The snowman had disappeared to his shoulders. It continued to snow most of that day and the grape-arbor path became a perfect tunnel.
There was no school until Monday. Even then the streets were almost impassable for vehicles. The Highway Department of the town was removing the drifts in the roads and some of this excavated snow was dumped at the end of the Parade Ground, opposite the schools.
The boys hailed these piles of snow as being fine for fortifications, and snowball battles that first day waxed furious.
Then the leading spirits among the boys—including Neale O'Neil—put their heads together and the erection of the enchanted castle was begun. But more of that anon.
Tess had had plenty of time to write that composition on the "Father of His Country." Indeed, Miss Andrews should have had a collection of wonderfully good biographical papers handed in by her class on that Monday morning.
But Tess's was not all that might be desired as a sketch of George Washington's life, and the teacher told her so. Still, she did better with her subject than Sadie Goronofsky did with hers.
Sadie had been given Longfellow to write about, and Miss Andrews showed the composition to Agnes' teacher as an example of what could be done in the line of disseminating misinformation about the Dead and the Great. Miss Shipman allowed Agnes to read it.
"Longfellow was a grand man; he wrote both poems and poetry. He graduated at Bowdoin and afterward taught in the same school where he graduated. He didn't like teaching and decided to learn some other trade, so his school furnished him money to go to Europe and learn to be a poet. After that he wrote many beautiful rhymes for children. He wrote 'Billy, the Blacksmith,' and Hiwater, what I seen in a pitcher show."
"Well, Sadie maybe doesn't know much about poets," said Tess, reflectively, when she heard her older sisters laughing about the funny composition. "But she knows numbers, and can multiply and divide. But then, Maria Maroni can make change at her father's stand, and she told Miss Andrews of all the holidays, she liked most the Fourth of July, because that was when America was discovered. Of course that isn't so," concluded Tess.
"When was it discovered?" asked Ruth.
"Oh, I know! I know!" cried Dot, perilously balancing a spoonful of mush and milk on the way to her mouth, in midair. "It was in 1492 at Thanksgiving time, and the Pilgrim Fathers found it first. So they called it Plymouth Rock—and you've got some of their hens in your hen-yard, Ruthie."
"My goodness!" gasped Agnes, after she had laughed herself almost out of her chair over this. "These primary minds are like sieves, aren't they? All the information goes through, while the mis-information sticks."
"Huh!" said Tess, vexed for the moment. "You needn't say anything, Aggie. You told us George Washington was born in 1778 and teacher gave me a black mark on that."
As that week progressed and the cold weather continued, a really wonderful structure was raised on the Parade Ground opposite the main door of the Milton High School. The boys called it the snow castle and a reporter for the Post wrote a piece about it even before it was finished.
Boys of all grades, from the primary up, had their "fingers in the pie"; for the very youngest could roll big snowballs on the smooth lawns of the Parade at noon when the sun was warm, and draw them to the site of the castle on their sleds after school was over for the day.
The bigger boys built up the walls, set in the round windows of ice, which were frozen each night in washtubs and brought carefully to the castle. The doorway was a huge arch, with a sheet of ice set in at the top like a fanlight over an old-fashioned front door. A flat roof was made of planks, with snow shoveled upon them and tramped down.
Several pillars of fence rails were set up inside to keep the roof from sagging; then the castle was swept out, the floor smoothed, and the girls were allowed to enter.
It was a fine, big snowhouse, all of forty feet long and half as wide. It was as large as a small moving picture place.
Somebody suggested having moving pictures in it—or a magic lantern show, but Joe Eldred, one of the bigger high school boys, whose father was superintendent of the Milton Electric Lighting Company, had a better idea than that.
On Thursday, when the castle was all finished, and the Post had spoken of it, Joe went to his father and begged some wire and rigging, and the boys chipped in to buy several sixty-watt lamps.
Joe Eldred was a young electrician himself, and Neale O'Neil aided him, for Neale seemed to know a lot about electric lighting. When his mates called him "the circus boy," Neale scowled and said nothing, but he was too good-natured and polite to refuse to help in any general plan for fun like this now under way.
Joe got a permit from Mr. Eldred and then they connected up the lamps they had strung inside the castle and at the entrance, with the city lighting cables.
At dusk that Thursday evening, the snowhouse suddenly burst into illumination. The sheets of clear ice made good windows. Christmas greens were festooned over the entrance, and around the walls within.
After supper the boys and girls gathered in and about the snow castle; somebody brought a talking machine from home and played some dance records. The older girls, and some of the boys, danced.
But the castle was not ornate enough to suit the builders. The next day they ran up a false-front with a tower at either side. These towers were partly walled with ice, too, and the boys illuminated them that night.
Saturday the boys were busier than ever, and they spread broadcast the announcement of a regular "ice-carnival" for that evening.
After the crowd had gone away on Friday night, a few of the boys remained and flooded the floor of the castle. This floor was now smoothly frozen, and the best skaters were invited to come Saturday night and "show off."
By evening, too, the battlements of the castle had been raised on all four sides. At each corner was a lighted tower, and in the middle of the roof a taller pinnacle had been raised with a red, white, and blue star, in colored electric bulbs, surmounting it.
Milton had never seen such an exhibition before, and a crowd turned out—many more people than could possibly get into the place at once. There was music, and the skating was attractive. Visitors were allowed in the castle, but they were obliged to keep moving, having to walk down one side of the castle, and up the other, so as to give those behind a chance to see everything.
The Corner House girls had thought the enchanted castle (for so it looked to be from their windows at home) a very delightful object. Ruth and Agnes went up after supper on Saturday evening, with their skates.
Both of them were good skaters and Neale chose Aggie to skate with him in the carnival. Joe Eldred was glad to get Ruth. Carrie and Lucy Poole were paired off with two of the big boys, and they were nowhere near as good skaters as Trix Severn.
Yet Trix was neglected. She had to go alone upon the ice, or skate with another girl. There was a reason for this neglect that Trix could not appreciate. Boys do not like to escort a girl who is always "knocking" some other girl. The boys declared Trix Severn "carried her hammer" wherever she went and they steered clear of her when they wanted to have a good time.
Every time Agnes and Neale O'Neil passed Trix Severn upon the ice, she was made almost ill with envy!