Brothers and sisters

by Abbie Farwell Brown

Every week after that, when they had finished reading their two magazines, Kenneth and Rose rolled them up, each in brown stamped wrapper, and Rose wrote on hers in big letters, “The Misses Prout,” and Kenneth wrote on his “The Masters Prout,” and they sent them away down to the island in Maine. It wasn’t much trouble to do that. But my! you should have seen what pleasure it gave the little Prouts.

All the year round, in summer and in winter, too, the little Prouts lived with their father, Captain Prout, in a tiny cottage on the island, close beside the sea. It was a very nice place in the summer; for then, like Kenneth and Rose, they were happy all day long, playing out of doors, fishing and picking berries. But best of all, they enjoyed carrying the milk to the Thornton cottage on the cliff, two miles away. For then they sometimes had a peep at the wonderful things which the strangers had brought to the island, and at the two children playing at games which were so different from any ever before seen thereabout. The little Prouts used almost to quarrel over their turns to carry the milk.

But in the fall the summer people sailed away. Then the little Prouts went to school for a time, as they did in the spring; and that was pleasant, too. But in the winter there was no school, because of the cold and the deep snow, and the long road which the island children had to travel to the schoolhouse in the village. Also it was hard to get a teacher for these bitter winter months. The winters were lonely enough for the little Prouts. They seldom saw any other children, and there was not much for them to do except housework and patchwork and knitting, and helping father to mend nets and make lobster-pots for the next summer.

The little Prouts had few playthings. They hardly knew what playthings were. They had seen Kenneth’s express wagon and rocking-horse, and Rose’s beautiful dolls on the piazza of the cottage. They had almost dared to touch the wonderful things one early morning; but a terrible alarm had warned them away, so they knew that these marvelous and lovely things were not meant for children like themselves. They thought that the city people were a different kind of creature.

Tom and Mary and Susan knew how to read, but they had no books. On the island people did not read much, because there were no books. In some houses there was not even a Bible. There was no public library. There was no Sunday-school library, for there was not even a church on the island. In summer a minister came there to spend his vacation, and he preached every Sunday on the hill-top near the village. But in winter every one, even the minister, seemed to forget the island. The little Prouts were very ignorant, and they wondered if the Lord himself forgot the island in the dreary months of snow and cold.

“Of course He forgets,” said Tommy, when they were talking about it one day. “He lives in the city, and comes down here only in the summer, just as the city people do.”

“But He must remember us,” sighed little Polly. “The minister said He was our Father.”

“Pooh!” said Tommy scornfully. “He ain’t our Father, either! You know he ain’t. He is their Father in heaven. I heard them talking to Him, one day, on the hill.”

“But the minister said He was everybody’s Father, Tommy,” answered Mary wistfully.

“But how can He be?” argued Tommy. “He is the Father of Kenneth and Rose Thornton, and of people like them who live in the city. He can’t be our Father, too; for if He was, we should be the brothers and sisters of Kenneth and Rose. And you know we ain’t that.”