“Won’t it be glorious to have a whole day off?” glowed Harry.
“Will it? Well, I guess maybe,” rejoined Teddy, his small face animated with the prospect of the coming holiday. “What are you going to do?”
“Oh, my mother and I are going to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner and then I’m going to take her to The Pickford, that new motion picture house we pass every day. Oh, yes, we are going to church in the morning. Mother says everyone ought to go to church on Thanksgiving Day, even if one never goes any other time, to give thanks for one’s blessings.”
“I never go to church,” stated Teddy, cheerfully unashamed. “My mother used to take me, but I behaved so bad she quit. I go to Sunday School, but not every Sunday.”
“What did you ever do in church that was so very terrible?” asked Harry, smiling.
“Oh, a lot of things. Once I sang a whole line of a hymn after everybody else got through singing, and I fell out of our pew into the aisle and made all the folks laugh. I tied two girls’ sashes together once in Sunday School. They sat right in front of me and the ends of their ribbons hung down. Maybe they weren’t wild when they started to go home in different directions. Once I lost my nickel for the collection plate, so I put a milk bottle check on the plate instead. It looked just like a quarter, but the man who passed the plate was pretty mad about it. He told my mother afterwards, and she said I’d better stay home, if I couldn’t behave better than that. So I stayed home. I guess that was the best place for me.”
“I always go to the church that Father used to go to with Mother. Sometimes I get tired before it’s out, but sometimes I hear really interesting things,” said Harry. He was still smiling over Teddy’s list of iniquities.
“I don’t mind the singing. It’s the sermons that make me sleepy. I love to sing.” Teddy’s eyes glowed. “I think it’s fine that we have one morning a week for singing. My mother can play the piano, and sing, too. Sometimes she lets me sing with her. I know a lot of songs.”
“I can’t sing very much,” confessed Harry, “but I love to hear singing.”
“I like that Miss Verne, who plays the piano for us at school. She’s so small and pretty. She looks like a little girl dressed up in a grown woman’s clothes. Did you hear Miss Leonard tell three of the boys last Monday that Miss Verne wanted them to sing for her after school?”