“How is the farm growing, Patty?” inquired Kenneth; “I thought I’d come down and mow the grass for you.”
“I wish you would,” said Patty. “It’s growing all over the place and threatens to choke the tulip bulbs before they sprout. But oh, Ken, you ought to see Adelaide’s palmery, or palmistry, or whatever it is. She has an old Venetian fountain that plays all the time, and goldfish swim in it, and the palms grow on its banks, and it’s perfectly lovely, and she made it all herself.”
“I always told you that the city girls were clever,” said Kenneth, smiling at Patty. “Still, a home-made fountain is really outside of my experience.”
“It wasn’t difficult,” said Adelaide; “I have a mechanical turn of mind, and the fountain was an easy matter. But what I’m puzzling over now is how to build a suspension bridge across the library table. Our library is so small and the table is so big and there are so many of us to sit around it that you can’t cross the room at all. And so I thought a suspension bridge would be both useful and ornamental.”
“I’m sure it would,” said Kenneth, “and as I expect to be a bridge-builder some day, I might help you draw your plans now; it will be good practise.”
“I wish you’d hurry up and get it built,” said Editha; “it will be useful for a great many purposes. I would stand on it sometimes and recite ‘I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight’; it would be so very appropriate.”
“I hope you’ll do it at midnight, and then the rest of us needn’t hear your recitation,” put in Adelaide.
Patty feared one of the sisterly squabbles, and hastened to interrupt it. “I would come over and stand on your bridge and recite ‘How Horatius Kept the Bridge.’ ”
“ ‘And I will stand at thy right hand and keep the bridge with thee,’ ” said Kenneth in exaggerated dramatic tones.
“Well, a bridge seems to be a household necessity,” said Clementine. “I don’t see how we’ve worried along without one as long as we have.”