September 24.
I undertook to have Jim do some mowing in the neighborhood, there being difficulty in getting a mowing machine for hire. But yesterday when the field was about half cut the blade broke, and now I have to send off eighteen miles to get another and by the time I have done I will be on the wrong side as far as profit goes.
Sunday, September 25.
Goliah came to me in great distress, weeping and saying his hoop, which he hung on the fence, was gone. I told him some of his very rude companions, whom he occasionally brings into the yard, had taken it.
"No, no," he said. Some one had broken it up, and he thought it was Patty. I reproved him for supposing Patty would do such a thing, but later when he had gone out of the yard I asked Patty if she had troubled the hoop. She said, "No." I answered, "I am very glad to hear it, for I would have been very angry if you had destroyed Goliah's hoop; it is an innocent amusement and keeps him out of mischief."
She went out quietly, but I soon found the yard was in the greatest excitement. Goliah returned and found some other cherished possession gone, and he sat on the back step and cried and sobbed. I tried to quiet him, but in vain, and then to add to the tragic effect his nose began to bleed and his clean white shirt had great splotches of blood.
Goliah cried and sobbed.
There raged a tempest in a tea-pot this blessed day of rest. I could not stand it, and ordered Jim to put Ruth in the buckboard and gave the whole yard a holiday. I told Chloe I would not have any dinner, so she could go to visit her family. I was going out to St. Peter's-in-the-woods to take the clothes I had made to the children.