“They’re good,” said Tom. “Mrs. Gadsby knows how to make doughnuts, if she has got a tongue in her head! Say, but I’d as soon have thought old Allen would send us doughnuts as the Gadsby.”
“Mr. Allen brought us a tongue this 226 morning,” Elliott remarked; “said his housekeeper boiled it; hoped it wasn’t too tough to eat. You couldn’t ‘git nothin’ good, these days!’”
“Enoch Allen?” demanded Henry; “the old fellow that lives at the foot of the hill? Go tell that to the marines!”
“I don’t know where he lives,” said Elliott, “but he certainly said his name was Enoch Allen.”
Bruce chuckled. “Mother Jess’s chickens have come home to roost, all right.”
“What did she ever do for Enoch Allen?” asked Tom.
“Oh, don’t you remember,” cried Gertrude, “the time his old dog died? Mother found the dog one day, dying in the woods. I was along and she sent me to call Mr. Allen, while she stayed with the dog. I was just a little girl and kind of scared, but Mother said Mr. Allen wasn’t anybody to be afraid of; he was just a lonely old man. I heard him tell 227 her it wasn’t every woman would have stayed with his dog. It was dead when he got there.”
But even with competent advisers within call and all the aids that came in the shape of “Mother Jess’s chickens,” and with the best family in the world all eagerness to be helpful and to “carry on” during Laura and Mother Jess’s absence, Elliott found that housekeeping wasn’t half so simple as it looked.
Life still had its moments and she was in the midst of one of the worst of them now. If you have ever stood in a kitchen where little gray kittens of dust rollicked under the chairs and all the dinner kettles and pans were piled on the table, unscraped and unwashed, and you saw ahead of you more things that you had planned to do than you could possibly get through before supper, and one girl was crying in the attic and another was crying in the china-closet, and your own heart was in your 228 boots, you know how Elliott Cameron felt at this minute. Everything had gone wrong, since the time she got up half an hour late in the morning; but the most wrong thing of all was the letter from Laura.
It had come just as they were finishing dinner, for the postman was late. Father Bob had cut it open, while every one looked eager and hopeful. Mother Jess had written the day before that the doctors thought Sidney was better; there had been a telegram to that effect, too. Father Bob read Laura’s letter quite through before he opened his lips. It wasn’t a long letter. Then he said: “The boy’s not so well, to-day.—Bruce, we must finish the ensilage. Come out as soon as you’re through, boys. Tom, I want you to get in the tomatoes before night. We’re due for a freeze, unless signs fail.” Not another word about Sidney. And he went right out of the room.