“Jim, I want to tell you something. Mamma told me I must not ask you to come to the farm any more, and that I must not play with you much, and so I won’t do it. But I like you just the same, and I will give you an apple every day to say we are friends.”
Nelly was as good as her word. Every morning, at recess, she gave Jim a small red and yellow “lady-apple,” which she had rubbed hard to make it shine, and which was one of the two apples her father gave her when she went to school; and the “lady-apples” were all kept for her, because she said they were so good and so pretty—“just like my little girl,” Mr. Turner said.
And what do you suppose Jim did with his apples?
Eat them. No, not he!
Every time Nelly gave him an apple, he put it in his pocket and took it home. Then in the evening before going to bed, he made a hole in it—the apple, not in the bed—and strung it on a piece of twine which hung from a nail in the window-sash in his little room.
The poor apples got brown, and wrinkled, and dry, but they were very precious to Jim, but every one of them said to him, as plain as an apple can speak: “I like you just the same.”
And so the winter passed away quietly. Mrs. Martin became very fond of Jim; she said he was so smart and so handy about the house she didn’t know what she would do without him, and she didn’t think boys were any trouble at all.
But, alas, how little we know what may happen!
Spring had come, and house-cleaning had come with it. Mrs. Martin had a nice “best-room” which she never used except for half an hour on Sunday afternoons during the summer, and which was always as clean as clean can be. But in Spring, it had to be made cleaner, if possible; summer could not come till that was done.
So the carpet was taken up, shaken, and put down again, and as Jim had helped in the shaking, Mrs. Martin kindly invited him to come in, and admire the room.