“‘I have three hundred dollars in the bank,’ she said, proudly, ‘and my father’s going to leave it there till I’m twenty-one, and put in one hundred more every year. It will grow to be a lot of money when I’m a young lady. Then I’m going to buy wedding clothes with it.’
“This was entirely new talk to Jean and me. We had heard of banks, of course, but we had never really thought what they were. Cecilia’s words puzzled us, for awhile, although we did not ask her any questions further about it.
“The word ‘bank’ only meant to us a literal bank,—a sand-bank. Do you remember, children, those long sand-banks back of the shore, on the other side of grandpa’s orchard? They are just within his fence, you know. Well, we thought that Cecilia surely meant just such a place as that. After she was gone we talked the matter over very seriously. Cecilia’s money seemed like untold wealth to us, and of course we would have nothing like that to start with, but we decided that we would take what we had and put it in the bank.
“We opened our chamois bags to count our money. We used to put in them any pennies that remained of our weekly five cents, and extra bits that would come in our way. Putting this in the bank meant, to us, digging a hole in the sand-bank, and burying the money in it. Then in some strange way, which we didn’t at all understand, the money would ‘grow,’ as Cecilia said, and by-and-by we would have a great deal more. I think we thought of its growing as the roots of a tree grow. Do you remember, Jean, how grand we felt, emptying our chamois-skin bags, and counting our pennies?”
“Indeed, yes,” said auntie. “It was getting near the County Fair time, to which we were always taken, and for which we had been saving our pennies eagerly. There seemed such a lot of them.”
“How many and shining they looked!” went on mamma. “We took our bags, one day, and a little shovel, and started out. We did not tell grandma, because we thought that we would like to surprise her some day with a big pile of gold dollars, which, for some reason, we had made up our minds would be our crop. How earnest and sincere we were!”
“We certainly were,” said auntie, smiling. “I wish I could remember just how I thought that the money would ‘grow’ in the bank, but I am not sure whether I thought it would spring up like a plant, and we would pick the dollars, or whether we thought it would just spread in the ground. Mother often used to say to us, when we wanted something that was very absurd, ‘I’ll buy it for you when I can pick gold dollars off the rosebush.’ Perhaps that gave us the idea.”
Then mamma took up the story again.
“We travelled off with our money-bags, and when we got to the sand-banks, we selected a nice, smooth place, and dug a deep hole. Then we laid our chamois-skin bags carefully in. Oh, I believe we wrapped them in newspaper first, didn’t we? We covered them all up evenly, and stuck two sticks down to mark the place, and then, feeling very rich, we trotted home.
“For a week after this we made a trip down there every day, in great excitement, and every day we came slowly back, much disappointed that there were no signs of growth. Once we dug down and uncovered our bags, to see if they had struck roots yet, but we were much discouraged to find them only mouldy and damp, but still whole. Not a root had struck out.