No woman was ever so pleased with a bargaincounter purchase. They hurried down cellar and Beejay attacked the nut first with a knife, then with a hatchet. The mischievous thing rolled away from the blows into corner after corner as if it was bewitched. Ella had just been learning the “Song of the Brook,” and she quoted,
“‘I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance
Among my skimming swallows’—
Say, Beejay, do you suppose we shall ever have any ‘swallows’? I should so like just one—of cocoanut milk.” Beejay attacked the puzzle more savagely than ever. The outer husk came off, and there lay the tiniest cocoanut that they had ever seen. It was no bigger than a child’s fist. Such was their great bargain. Such are the deceits of the world and the sellers of cocoanuts.
“Sold!” said Beejay; “but let’s never, never tell.”
“Indeed, we won’t,” declared Ella. “Cross my heart. We won’t have them all laughing at us. Mother said once cocoanuts were not good for me. Do you think one that size would make me very, very sick? Let’s eat it just as fast as we can and put the shell into the furnace, and no one will ever know.” No one ever did know, for the secret was faithfully kept.
There was no end to the things the playmates did. They discovered a place where clay could be found, an agreeable variety of clay, not so hard as the claystones of the Bearcamp River, and not so soft as to be sticky, but just right to cut into silk winders, hearts and rounds, and boys and girls, like those that came out of cookie pans, and dozens of other things. They followed the directions of “The Boy’s Own Book” and made a boomerang that would not make the return trip; a battledore that was continually coming to pieces; a shuttlecock that never would go straight up, but always off to the farthest corner of the room. They pored over the minerals that the learned Doctor had given to Ella, and they had eager searches for fossils in a non-fossiliferous country.
“The Boy’s Own Book” declared that glass would melt and that asbestus would not, although it looked like glass. A big brother told them of a ledge just outside of the city where they could find asbestus. They packed some lunch into a little willow basket—the one that Ella always filled with firecrackers and pinwheels a week before the Fourth of July, trying hard and with a vast expenditure of mental arithmetic to get as much noise and sparkle for her money as possible—and off they went to the ledge. They found the asbestus and brought some home and put it into the kitchen stove. It did not melt; but neither did the piece of glass that they laid beside it.
“Maybe it’s too thick,” Beejay suggested. “Let’s take some of the bird of paradise’s tail.”
The bird of paradise was a glass bird with a long tail of spun glass so bright and shining that it had not been thrown away when the bird broke into many pieces. This, too, they tried in the stove and also in the gas, but it would not melt. The children were disgusted.