“The boomerang wouldn’t boom,” declared Ella; “the battledore wouldn’t bat; the shuttlecock wouldn’t go one bit like either a shuttle or a cock; and now the glass won’t melt. Let’s just go on our own way and let the book alone. We can think of things enough to do. Let’s paint some autumn leaves. I’ll get my water colors and you get your crayons. You can use one and I’ll use the other, and we’ll see which will get done first.”
But a voice called, “Ella, I want you to go down street on an errand.”
It chanced that Beejay’s mother had also an errand at the same store; so the children went off together, swinging the little yellow basket between them.
When they came home, they were running breathlessly, and waving two handbills.
“It’s at two o’clock this afternoon,” cried one.
“And it’s only ten cents, and the man said it was almost always fifteen in other cities,” cried the other, “and that it was well worth twenty-five.”
“And it’s very educational, the man said it was.”
The two mothers were easily persuaded to let them go to the panorama. They came home jubilant. There were no movies then, but they had seen pictures of the city of Venice with a marvelous number of gondolas, the sinking of the Alabama, the firemen of New York, Dr. Kane’s vessel that tried to get to the North Pole, and finally “a beautiful fairy scene,” as Ella declared.
Surely, there was no need of help from “The Boy’s Own Book,” for on the way home the children had planned to manufacture a fleet of gondolas, and also an Alabama that, by the pulling of a string, would really sink. All this they would do without fail to-morrow; but “to-morrow” was another day, and when it arrived, a little girl with a hot red face, a sore throat, a headache and a backache was tossing about in bed. Ella had the measles.
Never did mind cure have a fairer trial. She did not have a knotted string and repeat over and over, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”; but she began at the very foundation, and when the red spots appeared, she declared: