"Lend us a hand at the apples, too," said Aunt Cheerie.
"No, I can't tell stories and pare apples, too."
"Does you need your fingers to tell stories wid, like the dumbers that we heard talk without saying anything?"
Chicken Small had been to an exhibition of Professor Gillett's deaf and dumb pupils.
"Well, no," I said; "but you see, Chicken, I never could make my tongue and my fingers go at the same time."
"I should think you had never done much with your fingers, then," said Aunt Cheerie; "for I never knew your tongue to be still, except when you were asleep."
I felt a little anxious to change the subject, and so began the story at once.
"Little Sukey Gray——"
"What a funny name!" cried the Fairy.
Yes, and a funny girl was Sukey Gray. She had yellow hair that was tied up in an old-fashioned knot, behind, though she was only eleven years old; for you must know that Sukey lived in a part of the country where chignons and top-knots of the latest style were unknown. Now Sukey's way of doing up her hair in a great knot, behind, with an old-fashioned tuck comb, was not pretty. But Susan Gray lived in what was called the "White-Oak Flats;" a region sometimes called the "Hoop-Pole Country." It was not the most enlightened place in the world, for there was no school, except for a short time in winter, and the people were very superstitious, believing that if they carried a hoe through the house, or broke a looking-glass, somebody "would die before long," and thinking that a screech-owl's scream and the howling of a dog were warnings; and that potatoes must be planted in the "dark of the moon," because they grew underground, and corn in the "light of the moon," because it grew above ground; and that hogs must be killed in the increase of the moon, to keep the pork from frying away to gravy!