Ella, a little schoolgirl of the sixties

by Eva March Tappan

When it was time for her to go home, the Doctor gave her a real fossil, a piece of rose quartz, and a little deep red garnet. He walked home with her, and when he left her, he said:

“I am going away in the morning, but I shall send you before long a package of specimens marked with their names and where they were found. Maybe some day we shall have a great mineralogist whose name will be Ella. I take off my hat to the mineralogist of the future,” he said with a friendly smile.

Ella was the happiest little girl in town. “He took off his hat to me just as if I had been a grown lady,” she told her mother.

The Doctor kept his promise, and not long afterwards he sent her a package of fifty or sixty minerals, all marked as he had said they would be. Ella wrote him a little letter, in her funny handwriting that looked as if it had been out in an earthquake, and told him how pleased she was to have them, and how much she liked to look them over. One thing puzzled her, however. The good Doctor must have forgotten for a moment what a little girl she was, for he had put into the package a pamphlet that he had written for some learned society about the cacao tree. It was a thick pamphlet in the finest of print and with the lines very close together.

“I can’t tell him that I am glad to have this to read,” said Ella in dismay, “for I’m not. What shall I do?”

“It was kind in him to send it to you,” her mother replied, “and you can thank him for his kindness. That will be perfectly honest. You need not tell him that you will enjoy reading it.”

Ella was having a good time, but when night came, she was often a little homesick for the grandmother and the “real New Hampshire,” and she did not grieve when she and her mother took the train for the mountains. She was very sorry to leave Ida, but the mother had promised her friend to stop on her way home. Ella had agreed to bring Ida some maple sugar; and the two little girls said good-bye without any tears. They exchanged parting gifts. Ella gave Ida “Minnie Warren,” her very best paper doll, and Ida gave Ella a little book with a story in it that she had written. It was tied with a bright red ribbon, and on the cover was written, “The Lost Child, A True Story Made up by Ida Lester.”

After an hour in the cars, Ella and her mother came to the most delightful part of the journey. The train stopped, then rushed on toward the north, leaving them standing beside a wharf that stretched out into a beautiful lake, blue as the sky and full of dainty little islands all rocks and trees and ferns. The lake seemed to have been dropped softly into a hollow among the mountains, for they were all around it, bending over it as if they loved it, Ella thought.

A shining white steamboat was coming into sight around an island. It did not blow any whistle, but floated up to the wharf as gracefully as a swan, making only the gentlest of ripples in the blue water. This was the “Lady of the Lake.” Ella thought the name had been given to the boat because it seemed so gentle and so ladylike.

They went on board, and as the steamboat made a wide curve away from the wharf and set out on her course across the blue water, roaming in and out among the islands, Ella joyfully watched for the peaks that she knew best in the ranges that circled around the old homestead. From one point on the steamer’s course Mt. Washington could be seen for a few minutes. Ella was looking for it eagerly when she saw a man with a harp coming up from the lower deck. A little girl followed him, and as he began to play, she sang in a sweet, clear voice.