‘Michael,’ said Mr. Hall seriously, ‘your mother would wish you and the others to go to school. She would want the girls to learn to cook and sew and keep house as she did. Do you think it is right for you to keep them from it? Come back with me to-day, all of you, and at the end of a week let the younger ones decide whether they will stay or not. That is only fair. Try it!’
Michael, who was beginning to see that perhaps he had no right to decide the question alone, put it to vote.
‘Let’s try it for a week,’ said Helen; and Katherine and Basil went wild with excitement.
After dinner they all climbed into the farm wagon, which was half filled with hay, and rolled away merrily behind the spanking grays. Toward evening they came to a white house at the end of an avenue of big trees, where people with kind eyes and kind voices were waiting for them; but the first thing that they saw as they drove in was a stork’s nest on the roof of the barn. Three angular little storks settled down for the night beneath their mother, while the father stork stood beside them, dark against the melting gold of sunset.
‘A stork’s nest,’ cried Katherine; ‘this will be a lucky place!’
‘That is not the only nest here,’ said the House Mother, ‘come and see the others.’
The first nest was a long, brown house full of big boys who were just sitting down to a supper of rice with peas, black bread, cocoa, and apples. Here Michael was to live.
The second nest was a square little house like something in a story book. Here Helen and Katherine were to live, with Basil. The floors were as smooth as silk. At the windows hung daffodil curtains, which made the rooms seem full of sunshine. There were little white beds, one for each child, with sheets such as these children had had when their mother was alive; and in the kitchen was a great stove, with a chimney-hood like the one in their old home.
Every one at the farm school was busy. Michael went out to the fields or to the barns with the other boys. Helen made beds and washed dishes. Katherine shelled peas. All passed a part of each day in the schoolroom. Even Basil learned to count the geese that were placed in his care. He knew that there were eight in all, so if there were only five in the path there must be three behind the hedge.
That week Michael watched the children closely. He knew that they were having better food than he could give them, and when he saw them starting gayly for the blackberry patch with their tin pails, or saw Helen in a clean pink apron watering the foxgloves and hollyhocks with a happy smile, he nodded wisely. In his own heart he longed to stay, for he had seen enough of the well-tilled acres on the river Bug to know that here he could learn to be a successful farmer.