It must have been the river that suggested to them to write a library of little story-books, the “Bearcamp Books,” as they called them, one for each rock; and as the bed of the Bearcamp is all rocks, this was without doubt the most tremendous literary undertaking of the century. The stories were carefully modeled upon the tales of the day, and were written, like those in Concord, in tiny booklets.
This is the way Ella described their publishing house to her uncle in the West:
How do you like being editor? Boy Cousin and I are publishing books (on a rather smaller scale than you, though). We make a little blankbook out of writing paper and then make up a story and write in it. I have written 8 or 9 books, little and big, besides a lot of other stories not in the book form. I love to write. I wish that when you write to me you would tell me all about your paper, and about the printing of it especially, as I never saw any one print. Boy Cousin can write poetry, but I can’t.
The first story that Ella contributed to the “Bearcamp Library” was called “Our Ragbag,” for this was in the days when people saved their rags and bought glass dishes with them, and it read as follows:
As the contents of our ragbag were to be sold, the rags were laid on a table in an unused room. Well, this is pleasant, to be in the light once more after being in this dark bag so many long weeks. “What shall we do” said a piece of cloth. “Let us each tell our story” said a piece of brocade, “I will begin—In a beautiful garden in the far off east, a no less beautiful girl used to walk—sometimes alone—but more frequently accompanied by her—enough of this stuff” said a white cotton rag “Let me tell a story, Once there grew in the south, a beautiful flower known as the cotton plant. I was that beautiful flower. Nonsense, just as though we would believe that story, said a little piece of blue & white muslin “let me tell mine Once there was a very rich lady came in her carriage to the shop where I was placed to be sold & without alighting from her carriage asked to see some rich silk & velvet goods, they were immediately carried to her & by mistake I was put in with them & the clerk did not perceive that I was there until he got to the carriage. He was just going to throw me into the store when the lady said “That is very pretty, I will take it” & so she carried me home with her then I was made into a splendid dress for one of—“Well, I say for one said a faded piece of calico, that we have heard enough about dress.” “The people are coming to pick us over, isn’t it too bad that we did not find out in the bag what a good time we might have had, each could then have told his story.”
CHAPTER VIII
RAINY DAYS AND SUNDAYS
Every day was full, but rainy days were fullest of all. Those were the times when the children made fiddles of cornstalks, popguns of elder, and candles of bayberry wax, using elder stems for moulds; the times when they played in the big unfinished garret where two or three barrels of beautifully lumpy maple sugar always stood. Boy Cousin’s mother had a loom and kept up the old custom of weaving one piece every year. The threads of the warp were all drawn into the harness and the piece was well begun when Ella came, and she thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to give the shuttle the skillful little push that sent it sliding across the threads. “Please mayn’t I try it only once?” she begged. “I’m almost sure I could make it go through just as you do”; and finally Boy Cousin’s good-natured mother let her try it. The shuttle must have been bewitched, for although Ella was certain that she started it in exactly the same way that it had been trained to go, it was willing to go anywhere and everywhere rather than to the one proper place. It fell down on the floor and slid away back under the loom.
But if Ella could not weave, she could fill quills. These quills were short pieces of the hollow elder stem with the pith pushed out. The thread of the woof was wound on them and they were slipped into the shuttle. To wind these, the “quilling wheel” was used. It was much like a spinning wheel, only smaller. The children took turns in using it, making believe that they were waging war with the fairy king of the elder bushes, and that the spools were prisoners whom they had taken and were binding with chains.
Rainy days were good times to try whatever new ways they had learned of “taking it off” in cat’s-cradle, good times to braid bulrushes. They learned how to make three-strand and seven-strand and how to sew the braid together and make quite respectable hats.
Painting was always in order. They manufactured a very good red paint from the juice of the elderberry; and when they wanted purple, they added a little soft soap. For other colors there was Ella’s paint-box to depend upon; for long before this she had had a new box to take the place of the one buried among the roses.