But Amanda ran away, laughing, and returned in a few minutes holding a giant rhubarb leaf over her head. “Does the green silk of my parasol look good with my hair?” she asked with an exaggerated air of grandeur.
“Go on, now,” Millie said, laughing, “and don’t spill that apple butter or you’ll get parasol.”
With a merry good-bye Amanda set off, the basket upon her arm, one hand grasping the red stem of the rhubarb parasol while the great green leaf flopped up and down upon her head in cool ministration.
Down the sunny road she trudged, spasmodically singing bits of gay songs, then again talking to herself. “This here is a dandy parasol. Cooler’n a real one and lots nicer’n a bonnet or a hat. Only I wish it was bigger, so my arms would be covered, for it’s hot out to-day.”
When she reached the little red brick country schoolhouse, half-way between her home and the Landis farm, she paused in the shade of a great oak that grew in the school-yard.
“Guess I’ll rest the apple butter a while in this shade,” she said to herself, “and pick a bouquet for my knight’s mom.” From the grassy roadside she gathered yellow and gold butter-and-eggs, blue spikes of false dragon’s head, and edged them with a lacy ruffle of wild carrot flowers.
“There, that’s grand!” she said as she held the bouquet at arm’s length and surveyed it carefully. “I’ll hold it out, just so, and I’ll say to Mrs. Landis, ‘Mother of my knight, I salute you!’ I know she’ll be surprised. Mebbe I might tell her just how brave her Martin is and how I made him a knight. She’ll be glad. It must be a satisfaction to have a boy a knight.” She smiled in happy anticipation of the wonderful message she was going to bring Mrs. Landis. Then she replaced the rhubarb parasol over her head, picked up the basket, and went down the country road to the Landis farm.
“It’s good Landis’s don’t live far from our place,” she thought. “My parasol’s wiltin’.”
Like the majority of houses in the Crow Hill section of country, the Landis house was set in a frame of green trees and old-fashioned flower gardens. It flaunted in the face of the passer-by an old-time front yard. The wide brick walk that led straight from the gate to the big front porch was edged on both sides with a row of bricks placed corners up. On either side of the walk were bushes, long since placed without the discriminating eye of a landscape gardener but holding in their very randomness a charm unrivaled by any precise planting. Mock-orange bushes and lilacs towered above the low deutzias, while masses of zinnias, petunias, four-o’clocks, and a score of other old-fashioned posies crowded against each other in the long beds that edged the walks and in the smaller round beds that were dotted here and there in the grass. Jaded motorists from the city drove their cars slowly past the glory of the Landis riot of blossoms.
As Amanda neared the place she looked ruefully at her knot of wild flowers. “She’s got so many pretty ones,” she thought. “But, ach, I guess she’ll like these here, too, long as they’re a present.”