“Rock and Eleanor sent them to you,” she told the children as she handed each of them a little box.
Jerry had his open in a jiffy and gave a whistle of delight while Cassy fumbled nervously at the string which tied hers. But it was opened at last and disclosed a little nest holding three eggs, one of pink sugar, one of chocolate, and one “a real righty egg” dyed purple and with the name “Cassy” upon it. They had never had more than one egg apiece on Easter and this rich supply was something delightful.
“Oh, mother, mother, what makes them all so lovely to us?” Cassy cried. “I feel like singing. I’d like to be a canary bird.”
“Sho! I wouldn’t,” responded Jerry. “I’d rather be myself. I don’t want to be shut up in a cage and live on bird-seed.” He had just finished his sixth biscuit and it is not to be wondered at that he should consider bird-seed rather insufficient for his appetite. Hot biscuits were much more to his liking.
Cassy set off very proudly for Sunday-school, yet, curiously enough, the imaginative little soul felt a little regretful that her old carefully worn frock must stay at home, for Mrs. Dallas had brought it back with her the evening before. It seemed treating it with scorn, and before she went out she turned to the closet where it hung and touched it lovingly.
“You are a dear good frock,” she whispered, “and I love you. I am proud of my new one, but I don’t love it.” And then she left a crack of the closet door open that her old plaid frock might be in view of the white lily on the window-sill. She did not tell her mother of her feelings on this subject. There were many things which little Miss Oddity said and did which few persons would understand, and she was aware of it. Her world of fancy was a very different one from that in which most persons live.
She stood rapt and thoughtful before her lily till her brother should be ready. She was wondering if it would be right to allow Miss Morning-Glory to go to church with her, and then she decided that it would be better that she should remain at home to keep the lily company, for maybe the lily would be lonely in a strange place with no acquaintances but the pansies and the geranium. However, she thought Miss Morning-Glory might be permitted to walk to church with her, for she had on a new frock, too, this morning; it was of purple and green, and in her mind’s eye Cassy saw plainly the many floating ends of satin ribbon which ornamented this invisible companion’s Easter gown.
When she reached the Sunday-school and had taken her seat, she looked around to see if Rock and Eleanor were there, but they were not, though in church she caught sight of Eleanor’s “angel curls” in a pew near the front, and then she saw Mrs. Dallas, and by peeping around the big pillar near them she could get a glimpse of Rock, so she knew that the flowers that lifted their fair heads around the chancel were her flower friends. She thought she could distinguish them from the stranger ones, and she nodded gravely to them as she left the church.
In consequence of sitting on the other side of the church she had no opportunity of speaking to Eleanor unless she should wait outside, and this she asked to be allowed to do.
“I want to thank her,” she told her mother.