Mary Jane didn’t stop to press any buzzer. She dashed over to the window nearest the alley and there, sure enough, was a great big moving van and it was piled up full of boxes and barrels and crates—all the things that Mary Jane had watched the packing of only such a few days before. Talk about fun! Moving was surely the best sport ever!
Mary Jane stayed at the window watching till the men brought the first load up. Then they announced that they were going for lunch and Mrs. Merrill said she and the girls had better eat while the men were away. So hastily putting on wraps, they went over to a small tea room only a few doors away, where they had a tasty little luncheon so quickly served that they easily got back to their flat before the moving men arrived again.
How that afternoon went, Mary Jane never quite remembered. It was one long succession of excitement and fun. The unpacking of boxes and crates, the piling up of rubbish, the finding of cherished belongings and putting them where they belonged in the new home, and the gradual change of the living room from a mess of boxes to a place that might some day really look like home, all seemed thrillingly interesting to a little girl who had never moved before.
But by half past four or thereabouts, even Mary Jane began to get a little tired.
“I’ll tell you something to do,” suggested Mrs. Merrill, when a pause in her own work gave her a chance to notice that Mary Jane was getting flushed and tired. “Here is a box of doll things I have just come across. Suppose you take them out into your own little balcony and sort them over. Put in this box (and she handed her a little box) all the things you must surely have upstairs; and leave in the big box all the things you will be willing to put in the store room. Now take your time, dear, and sit down while you work.”
Mary Jane was very glad for that advice. For even though moving men are wonderful to watch, and even though rubbish and boxes and barrels are all very fascinating, a person does get tired and sitting down isn’t at all a bad idea.
One of the men who was unpacking gave her her own little chair that he had just uncrated and so she sat down in state, in her own chair, on her own balcony and opened the box of doll things. But that’s every bit that got done to those doll things that day, every bit.
For at that very minute, who should come out of the house around the corner, the house with the back yard and garden and chickens and everything, but—yes, you must have guessed it—the same two girls that Alice and Mary Jane had seen on the Midway the day they arrived in Chicago. Think of that! Right under Mary Jane’s own balcony and, moreover, it was plain to see that they lived there.
“Now I guess we’ll get to know them,” whispered Mary Jane to herself happily. But of course, she didn’t say a thing out loud. She only sat very still and watched.
And as she watched, two boys came out on the back porch of the house around the corner and one of the boys called, “Say, Fran, did you feed the chickens?”