Mary Jane Down South

by Clara Ingram Judson

“How pretty!” exclaimed Mrs. Merrill, as she came close enough to see the playhouse the children had made.

“And this is the very tree I was telling you about,” said the guide who came with them; “this very branched tree is where Mrs. Stowe sat when doing much of her writing.”

“Isn’t it interesting,” said Mrs. Merrill to the girls, “to think you have made a playhouse in the very tree where Mrs. Stowe wrote parts of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’?”

“Yes, I ’spect it’s interesting,” said Mary Jane, “but I know it’s fun. And please, Mother, do we have to go yet? Can’t we build some more?”

“I’m afraid not, girlies,” said Mrs. Merrill regretfully, “because our hour is up and our boat should be coming around the bend of the river this very minute.”

But though they all went back at once to the dock, they had a long, long wait till the boat came. The sun began going down in the west and the girls got so very hungry they were only too glad to buy generous helpings of fruit from their new playmates. And finally when a boat did come to the dock it wasn’t the nice boat they had come down on at all! It was a small boat, oh, a very small boat, already so full of passengers that when the new folks got on at the Mandarin dock it was loaded almost to the water line.

“Never mind,” said Mr. Wilkins comfortingly; “it surely must be safe and anyway it’s only a short trip. Perhaps we can get seats at the back.” And there they settled themselves and waved good-by to their new friends as the boat steamed down stream toward the distant city.

For a while the girls were content to sit and eat their oranges and chat of the fun they had just had. But in the course of an hour, Mary Jane began to fidget and to ask for something to do.

“Nothing much to do on this boat but to sit still, Mary Jane,” said Mrs. Merrill. “It isn’t big enough for a little girl to walk around and see things—you’d be in folks’ way. Suppose you just sit still and look all around and see how much you can see. Maybe you’ll find something interesting to talk about that way.”

So Mary Jane sat still (all but wiggling her feet and she thought that didn’t count), and looked around the boat. She saw folks all around her who had been sight-seeing and who had armfuls of flowers and fruit they had brought from up the river. But in the front of the boat she saw six or eight men in earnest talk at the prow—something seemed to be exciting them very much. And then, queerest of all, up on the tiny half deck of the boat she saw a man and a woman taking turns at a strange looking pump sort of a thing that seemed not to work very smoothly as they tried to make it go back and forth. For a minute she watched them; then she turned to her mother and asked, “What is that thing, Mother? And what are they doing with it? What’s the matter?”