Then Martha gave each of the children a drink of rich buttermilk from the churn, and they thanked her and went to the house, for it was nearly dinner-time. When they were not far from the kitchen-door they knew that Charlie was coming, there was such a terrible screaming.
“Oh, he’s hurt!” said Bessie, looking frightened; “he’s so little, you know.”
“Pooh!” said Nellie; “I guess he isn’t hurt; he always screams for nothing.”
It happened that Charlie was hurt this time—pretty badly hurt too, for a little boy. But it was some time before his mamma knew it, for, as Nellie said, he always screamed for nothing, and if Aunt Lou had run to him every time that he screamed she would not have been able to do much else.
This is the story he told his mamma between his sobs when he had found her: “Great wicked bumble-bee bited Charlie in his mouf!”
“Let me see the mouth,” said mamma.
Charlie roared afresh with pain, and showed his lip, badly swollen on the inside. He certainly had been stung, but mamma did not see how the bee could have got at him there. When she asked her little boy he hung his head and said that “Charlie bited a little bite out of a napple, and then the ugly bee bited his mouf;” and then his mamma knew that he had disobeyed her and gone into the orchard to eat the apples that had fallen on the ground.
Mamma made her little boy as comfortable as she could, and then she talked to him about his naughtiness until Charlie felt very sorry and promised not to disobey again.
IV.
It was a rainy day, and the children could not go out to play by the brook or in the fields. Bessie’s mamma said that she knew papa would like to get a letter from his little daughter, so the little daughter sat down to print one. This was all that Bessie could do in the way of writing, but she did it pretty well. This is what she wrote, with some help from mamma: