The Girls of Hillcrest Farm

CONTENTS
CHAPTERPAGE
I.Everything at Once![1]
II.Aunt Jane Proposes[10]
III.The Doctor Disposes[24]
IV.The Pilgrimage[37]
V.Lucas Pritchett[51]
VI.Neighbors[61]
VII.Hillcrest[73]
VIII.The Whisper in the Dark[85]
IX.Morning at Hillcrest[96]
X.The Venture[109]
XI.At the Schoolhouse[126]
XII.The Green-Eyed Monster[134]
XIII.Lyddy Doesn’t Want It[144]
XIV.The Colesworths[161]
XV.Another Boarder[171]
XVI.The Ball Keeps Rolling[184]
XVII.The Runaway Grandmother[192]
XVIII.The Queer Boarder[199]
XIX.Widow Harrison’s Troubles[208]
XX.The Temperance Club Again[216]
XXI.Caught[224]
XXII.The Hidden Treasure[236]
XXIII.The Vendue[248]
XXIV.Professor Spink’s Bottles[258]
XXV.In the Old Doctor’s Office[269]
XXVI.A Blow-up[276]
XXVII.They Lose a Boarder[283]
XXVIII.The Secret Revealed[289]
XXIX.An Automobile Race[298]
XXX.The Hillcrest Company, Limited[303]

THE GIRLS OF HILLCREST FARM

CHAPTER I
EVERYTHING AT ONCE!

Whenever she heard the siren of the ladder-truck, as it swung out of its station on the neighboring street, Lydia Bray ran to the single window of the flat that looked out on Trimble Avenue.

They were four flights up. There were twenty-three other families in this “double-decker.” A fire in the house was the oldest Bray girl’s nightmare by night and haunting spectre by day.

Lydia just couldn’t get used to these quarters, and they had been here now three months. The old, quiet home on the edge of town had been so different. To it she had returned from college so short a time ago to see her mother die and find their affairs in a state of chaos.

For her father was one of those men who leave everything to the capable management of their wives. Euphemia, or “’Phemie,” was only a schoolgirl, then, in her junior year at high school; “Lyddy” was a sophomore at Littleburg when her mother died, and she had never gone back.