[CHAPTER XV]
“FRANCES”
“There were three ladies in a hall,—
With a heigh-ho and a lily gay:
There came a lord among them all,—
As the primrose spreads so sweetly.”
IT was hot, very hot, in Cherry Street. Miss Billy's garden bloomed as Paradise, but up and down the alley household garbage bubbled and boiled in the sun. The sweet peas on the fence were a marvellous cloud of pink, violet, crimson, purple and white. They rioted over the Hennesy pickets, and spread their fairy wings as if to descend on the other side;—but across the street Mr. Schultzsky's weeds flaunted in all the rank arrogance of a second crop.
Miss Billy was disheartened, but not defeated. "Of course I can't accomplish it all by myself," she thought, "and John Thomas is too tired at night to help and Theodore is working, too. But every child in the street that can handle a hoe shall be enlisted in the cause if I can accomplish it."
She went over to Mrs. Canary's to talk the matter over, and found Holly Belle in a kitchen that easily registered 110 degrees. Mrs. Canary was in bed with one of her "attacks," the twins, unwashed and sticky, were playing with a basket of potatoes on the floor: Ginevra, the little sister, was grumblingly washing the breakfast dishes, while Holly Belle, with signs of recent tears around her eyelashes, was binding up a badly burned arm.
"You see, there's bread-baking to-day," she said, as Miss Billy's deft fingers bound up the burn, "and maw's sick, and paw goes onto his beat at noon, and must have his dinner, and the twins are restless with the heat, and won't stay satisfied five minutes at a time with anything. The boys are off somewhere, and no good to anybody, and my own head aches so I can't hardly see. It aches all the time, now, anyway."
"I should think it would," said Miss Billy sympathetically. "Can't you let that fire go out? It's simply unbearable in here."