“Can you go to my uncle Hieronymous’s? We’re asked in a letter. The whole kit and bilin’ of us. Up in the woods. Right on a trout-stream. In a log cabin.” I broke it all up into short sentences like that, I was so anxious. After a while Mark got it all out of me so he understood it, then he turned to his father.
“C-c-can I go, father?” he asked.
Mr. Tidd, though he’d got to be rich, was just as mild and sort of dazed-like and forgetful as ever—and helpless! You wouldn’t believe how helpless he was.
“Way off into the woods?” says he. “Fishin’ and sich like? Um-hum. ’S far’s I’m concerned, Mark, there hain’t a single objection, but, Mark, I calc’late you better see your ma. She sort of looks after the family more’n I do.... And if she lets you go, son, I’ll give you a new set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to take with you. You’ll enjoy readin’ it evenin’s.” With that he took out of his pocket a volume of old Gibbon and sat himself down on the back steps to read it. He was always reading that book and telling you things out of it. After I’d known him a year I most knew it by heart.
We went right up-stairs to where Mrs. Tidd was making her husband a shirt on the sewing-machine. She didn’t have to make him shirts, because they had money enough from the invention to buy half a dozen to a time if they wanted to. But Mrs. Tidd, she says there ain’t any use buying shirts for a dollar and a half when you can make them twice as good for fifty cents and a little work. That was her all over.
Mark called to her from the door. “Ma,” he said, “can I go—”
She didn’t let him get any further than that, but just says sharp-like over her shoulder: “There’s a fresh berry-pie on the second shelf. Can’t you see I’m so busy I dun’no’ where to turn?”
“But, ma,” he says again, “I d-d-d-don’t want pie. I want to g-go—”
“No,” says she, “you can’t.” Just like that, without finding out where he wanted to go or anything; but that didn’t scare us a mite, for we knew her pretty well, I can tell you. In a second she turned around and wrinkled her forehead at us. “Where you want to go?” she rapped out.
Mark started in to tell her, but he stuttered so I had to do it myself. I explained all about it in a jiffy. She thought a minute.