A Yankee Girl at Antietam

by Alice Turner Curtis

“Don’t you want to finish the ‘Circus,’ dear?” she suggested. “You’ll need a herd of camels, several elephants, beside lions and zebras.”

But Roxy shook her head. Not even her beloved “Circus,” on which she had worked several hours each day since her arrival at Grandma Miller’s, seemed to interest her. When she had given the man the basket of food she had not thought of the fact that it would be promptly missed, and that Dulcie would make such an outcry over it. But, as no special person was suspected of taking it, Roxy quickly decided that all was well. Dulcie would scold and wonder about her loss, and Grandma Miller would endeavor to find out who had really made off with the chicken, but no real harm had been done, so in a little while Roxy was quite ready to follow her mother’s suggestion and begin on the animals that were to be a part of the “paper circus”; and when Mrs. Delfield followed Mrs. Miller to the kitchen to find out what had really occurred Roxy was happily at work near one of the wide windows that looked across the green wheat field toward the distant mountains.

A broad low table, that Grandma Miller said was Roxy’s table, stood near this window. It had two deep wide drawers, and the straight-backed cushioned chair in front of it was exactly the right height and size for a little girl ten years old. Roxy could lean on her table and look out over the pleasant countryside, and see a distant bend of the slow-moving river.

She opened the upper drawer of the table and took out some squares of heavy brown paper, a pair of pointed scissors and a box of crayons; then Roxy ran across the room to a closet and opened the door and from one of the lower shelves she drew out a thick book and carried it to her table, opened it and turned the leaves carefully.

It was a wonderful book! On the very first page there was a picture of an amiable lion, with his family resting peacefully about him. On the next page were pictured a group of monkeys gathering cocoanuts, and further on were shown camels journeying across a desert; there were pictures of zebras, tigers, rhinoceros, and there were pages of wonderful birds with all their fine plumage.

Roxy turned to the page where a tall camel was pictured, and then taking one of the sheets of brown paper and a freshly sharpened pencil she began, very carefully, to draw the outlines of the strange animal. Its queer head, long legs and humped back were easy to copy, and with a little smile of satisfaction Roxy held up the drawing she had made, and then, scissors in hand, she cut carefully into the paper following her pencil marks until a paper camel lay on the table before her.

“There! Now I can cut out two or three more from this one!” she said aloud, and pulled open the lower drawer and placed the camel with a number of other animals cut from the brown paper. Later on Roxy planned to use all these paper figures in the “Paper Circus.”

It was Grandma Miller who had suggested, during a week of rainy days when Roxy and her mother had first arrived at the farm, that the little girl should begin it, and told her that when her mother was a small girl there was no game she enjoyed more. And Roxy’s mother had brought out the “Animal Book” and shown Roxy how to trace the pictures.

Grandma Miller had explained that the animals were only a part of the circus; there would be a clown, who wore strange garments, men who must be mounted on prancing horses, and all could be assembled in a procession.

Grandma Miller knew just how to make the figures stand upright with clever little braces of stiff paper pasted on their backs; and Roxy’s mother had suggested that Roxy could use her box of colored crayons to color the lion’s mane, the stripes on the zebras, and to mark the eyes of the monkeys.