"Why, I intended to make a cake for the new preacher's donation-party," answered Mrs. Perkins. "That's what the committee asked for—marble-cake and biscuits. Did you find anything, Jimmy?"
"No'm. They're all empty." The boy jumped down and went back to the patient old dog, which he now converted into a wheelbarrow and trundled around on its clumsy fore paws.
"What shall I do!" exclaimed Mrs. Perkins, in despair. "There's not a speck of spice or soda in the house."
This was before the days of baking-powder, and it was eight miles to the nearest town.
"I'll tell you," answered Maria, with her teeth chattering. "Let Abe saddle old Blaze and go up to Doctor Spinner's. He always keeps such things on hand, and we can send for some more quinine at the same time."
"And be about as likely to get soap and knitting-needles as anything else!" replied her mother, with a frown. "It's a pity a boy as old as Abe is can't be trusted to remember anything!"
"Let Jimmy go," suggested Maria. "It's only three miles, and he can easily get back by dinner-time."
"Yes," said Mrs. Perkins, "I don't know of any reason why he shouldn't be trusted with the horse, and he can be depended on to do the errand a sight better than Abe."
Jimmy's freckled face beamed with delight. He had expected to spend the morning hoeing in the garden. He had been waiting the last half-hour for his father to call him and set him at work; but it was not the prospect of escaping a disagreeable task or of cantering along the road on the old blaze-faced horse that pleased him most. It was the fact that his mother and Maria regarded him as more trustworthy than Abe, and Abe was nearly grown.
He had never before so completely appreciated his true worth nor felt such a sense of his own importance as when his mother entrusted him with the errand, and gave him a message for the doctor's wife. Maria's words of praise were still in his ears when he ran down the path, hitching up a broken suspender as he went.