LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| "That will help you remember where your mouth is" | Frontispiece |
| facing page | |
| With no other object, except to get home | [58] |
| The blue ocean was the most wonderful thing of all | [96] |
| Instinctively she clasped it to her | [146] |
| The four of us who remained huddled very close around the fire | [164] |
| "Hello, all you animals!" she cried | [244] |
| The lone, accentuated figure of a boy violinist | [256] |
| "Is—a—pink—sash—exactly a—a—passion?" | [298] |
| "Oh, I wish I had a sister," fretted the boy | [364] |
THE SICK-A-BED LADY
HE Sick-A-Bed Lady lived in a huge old-fashioned mahogany bedstead, with solid silk sheets, and three great squashy silk pillows edged with fluffy ruffles. On a table beside the Sick-A-Bed Lady was a tiny little, shiny little bell that tinkled exactly like silver raindrops on a golden roof, and all around this Lady and this Bedstead and this Bell was a big, square, shadowy room with a smutty fireplace, four small paned windows, and a chintzy wall-paper showered profusely with high-handled baskets of lavender flowers over which strange green birds hovered languidly.
The Sick-A-Bed Lady, herself, was as old as twenty, but she did not look more than fifteen with her little wistful white face against the creamy pillows and her soft brown hair braided in two thick pigtails and tied with great pink bows behind each ear.
When the Sick-A-Bed Lady felt like sitting up high against her pillows, she could look out across the footboard through her opposite window. Now through that opposite window was a marvelous vista—an old-fashioned garden, millions of miles of ocean, and then—France! And when the wind was in just the right direction there was a perfectly wonderful smell to be smelled—part of it was Cinnamon Pink and part of it was Salt-Sea-Weed, but most of it, of course, was—France. There were days and days, too, when any one with sense could feel that the waves beat perkily against the shore with a very strong French accent, and that all one's French verbs, particularly "J'aime, Tu aimes, Il aime," were coming home to rest. What else was there to think about in bed but funny things like that?