Half a dozen boys

by Anna Chapin Ray

However, it was a merry party that, one cloudy August morning, Mr. Carter escorted as far as Boston, and settled in the train for Albany, where they were to change to a sleeper. Rob, in a light summer suit, armed with a jointed fishing-pole and his tennis racket, his mother's compromise in the affair of the trunk, led the way into the car. Mr. Carter followed with a lunch basket of noble proportions, for experience had taught Bessie that boy appetites are unfailing, and, on Fred's account, she dared not depend on railway dining-rooms. Bess, with Fred, brought up the rear of the procession. Rob was bubbling over with fun and nonsense, so that Fred caught his spirit and answered jest with jest. As Mr. Carter left them, Bess turned and surveyed her charges with a feeling of almost maternal pride. Two more bonnie boys it would have been hard to find that day.

"I wonder if I look like their mother, or what people think I am," she thought, as she looked from the quiet boy at her side to the lively one opposite her. "I don't care very much— Oh, Rob, be careful," she exclaimed aloud, as that youth, in changing the position of his fishing-pole, recklessly battered the rear of the respectable black bonnet worn by an old woman in front of him.

Rob instantly turned to offer a meek apology, but it had no effect on the irate woman, who grasped her bonnet firmly with both hands, as she exclaimed,—

"Needn't knock a body's head off! Folks shouldn't take boys on the keers till they know how to behave!"

"I am very sorry, ma'am," ventured Rob again.

"So you'd ought to be!" was the snappish rejoinder. "I hope you are ashamed of yourself to go hitting a woman old enough to be your mother with your nuisancing contraptions!" Then, with a backward glance, she added, as if to herself, "That other one looks more as if he'd behave himself somehow. I guess I'll move round and set behind him."

And she gathered up her belongings and moved back, where the worthy soul lent an attentive ear to all their conversation, and watched Fred with curious eyes, while from time to time she scowled disapprovingly on Rob, who was quite subdued by his misadventure.

Of course, Rob wished to take a lunch before they were fairly outside of Boston, and, equally of course, he desired to patronize every trip of the newsboy, and the vender of prize packages of cough candy, each one of which was warranted to contain a rich jewel; but on these small points Bess was firm, and he abandoned himself to the alternate pleasures of gazing out at the car window at the miles of back doors, each filled with a family as much interested in the train as if it were some rare and curious object, and of inspecting his fellow-passengers, the usual assortment. Across from them was a young Japanese, who had intensified the effect of his swarthy skin by mounting a white felt hat. With him sat a man who was so drowsy that his head constantly dropped forward on the round silver knob that headed his cane, at the imminent risk of putting out his eyes. The force of the blow never failed to waken him, and he straightened himself up with a sheepishly defiant air, as if to refute any possible denial of his wakefulness. Behind him sat a spinster of sixty, with lank side curls and a fidgety manner of moving her satchel about. There was the usual number of commercial travellers—why have they appropriated the name?—who, with their silk hats carefully put away in the racks, and replaced by undignified skull-caps, took out their note-books and wrote up the record of their last sales; there was the usual Irish mamma with five small children, who walked the entire length of the car and planted herself in the little corner seat next the door, with her offspring about her, budget in hand, ready to leave the train at a moment's notice; and there were a few young women, each absorbed in her novel or magazine, whom Rob surveyed with disfavor, as not being as pretty as cousin Bess.

Leaning far forward, he was just describing some of these people for Fred's benefit, when a sudden voice behind them made all three of the party start. It was the woman whose bonnet Rob had hit.

"I want to know what's the matter with that 'ere boy," she demanded in no gentle tone, as she pointed at Fred. "Can't he see, or what on airth's the matter with him?"