“Do have some more cake and another cup of tea,” insisted the little hostess gayly. “And just think, Mother, a trip to the country for all of us for two whole weeks! Isn’t it grand? And there’ll be cows and chickens and green grass and flowers, and the rent paid all the while we’re gone! But most the wonderfulest part of it all”—Tilda’s eyes grew starry—“was how Fairy Godmother kept getting gladder ’n’ gladder all the time. And she said ‘thank you’ to me, Mother, and Fairy Godfather did, too, ’s if I’d done anything, when you know positive sure I never did one single thing ’cept lending Maggie.”
“I’m not so sure about that, dear.” And Mother patted the scraggly Dutch cut tenderly, smiling into Tilda’s questioning eyes.
ROBERT’S ADVENTURE
“Good-by, Robert,” called Mother, as she and Father drove off for the city one summer afternoon. “Don’t forget to fill the wood box, dear, and to feed the chickens.”
“Good-by,” answered the boy from the stone wall, without looking up.
Robert was discontented. He was tired of filling the wood box and feeding the chickens every day, and for only five cents a week. Five cents a week! Yes, that was all he had to spend for candy, marbles, and everything, while Timmie Marsh, who lived down the road, had a nickel about every day, and he never had to work at all.
Robert had been thinking and thinking what could be done about it, and at last he had made up his mind. He would go to Blakeville that very afternoon to old Nurse Tucker’s. He could walk four miles easily, and Nurse would be so glad to see him.
“Of course,” he said to himself, “I’ll write to Mother, so she’ll know I’m not drowned or anything. And I’ll tell her how Nurse gives me five cents for candy every day—’course she will—and how I don’t have to do any work, either. Then won’t Daddy come for me quick and say if I’ll only go back with him, I needn’t bring in the wood or feed the chickens or do anything unless I feel like it, and I can have all the money I want, besides!”
And now, as the buckboard vanished in the distance, Robert turned toward the house to carry out his plan. He could hear Mandy, the hired girl, singing at her work as he tiptoed cautiously in at the wood-shed door and up to his room.
After giving his hair one hasty stroke with the brush and putting on his Sunday shoes and stockings, he considered his toilet completed and was soon stealing out of the wood shed again, unobserved by Mandy.